Mrs. Vale went still.
Emmeline’s heartbeat changed. “He became frightened. Not merely uneasy, but frightened. I wondered whether he is afraid of the water. If he is, perhaps it might help to arrange swimming lessons at some point, gently, of course. Nothing forced. Only enough to make him feel less helpless near it.”
Mrs. Vale looked down at the folded linen. Her hands, so capable a moment ago, rested motionless against the cloth.
“Your Grace,” she said carefully, “I do not believe His Grace would approve.”
The answer landed coldly in Emmeline’s chest.
“Because of the river?” she asked.
The housekeeper hesitated, and in that hesitation, Emmeline felt a secret the whole house was keeping from her.
“Mrs. Vale,” she said more softly, “I am not asking out of mere curiosity.”
The older woman’s eyes lifted to hers, then drifted away again almost at once. Her fingers smoothed the same folded sheet twice, though it was already perfectly neat, and when she drew breath, it seemed to catch somewhere behind her ribs before she spoke.
“Her Grace once took him there,” Mrs. Vale said at last, voice low. “His mother.”
Emmeline’s throat tightened.
“It was not… a pleasant experience,” the housekeeper continued, dragging each word slowly. “The Duke does not wish it spoken of. It is best, perhaps, to let old grief lie where it has fallen.”
Emmeline thought of Aaron frozen by the sound of water, his eyes widening, his face gone pale in the green shadow of the trees. Grief had not lain down. It had stood before her, seven years old, silent with terror.
“I understand,” she said, but her fingers tightened against the seam of her skirt, and the words felt too neat for the unease pressing behind her ribs.
Mrs. Vale looked relieved and sorrowful all at once. “His Grace means to protect the boy.”
“I know,” Emmeline said.
And that was the worst of it. Rowan’s coldness was not entirely empty.
She could see the hard set of Rowan’s jaw whenever Aaron strayed too near anything dangerous, the sharpness of his voice when fear reached him before tenderness could, the way he turned his fear into an order.
And still, all she could think was that she wanted to take Aaron’s small hand in hers and place it in his father’s, then force Rowan to see that a child did not need another wall around him.
He needed a door.
The thought should have ended there. It should have remained with Aaron, where it belonged. Instead, it turned treacherously toward the memory of Rowan standing too close, his broad chest rising with restrained breath, his voice low enough that her skin seemed to remember hands he had not even placed on her yet.
She wanted to stand before him and demand the truth from his mouth. She wanted to put her hands against that unyielding chest and feel whether anything beneath it gave way.
Instead, she inclined her head and left the linen room with her composure intact.
She found Aaron in the rear garden an hour later, Biscuit asleep in a patch of sun beside his boot.
“There you are,” she said.
Aaron looked up. “Biscuit is tired.”
“So I see. Are you?”
He shook his head.
“Good.” Emmeline held out her hand. “Then perhaps it is time we find something braver than sitting beside a sleeping dog.”
Aaron’s eyes widened. “Braver?”
