He fell into step beside her, and this time neither of them pretended it was a coincidence.
CHAPTER 6
Harper had been gone since before breakfast.
Temperance knew this because she had come downstairs at five minutes to nine, as she was not going to give him the satisfaction of being late twice, and found only Joseph at the table.
He had looked up when she entered, and there had been a brief, conspiratorial flicker of something between them before he returned to his Latin. That boy she had met earlier seemed like an entirely different person.
Though, she had respected this completely.
Harper, apparently, had meetings with the estate’s solicitors and then with the land steward. He had left instructions for the day and had departed before the house was fully awake.
The instructions had been read, set aside, and not consulted again.
The morning had gone well. The corridor incident had somehow loosened something between her and Joseph, and afterward he had appeared in the doorway of the sitting room where she was reading and stood there for a moment.
She had looked up and said, “The dogs are in the garden if you want to take them out.”
“I was simply passing.”
“The garden door is at the end of the corridor.”
He had gone to the garden. Ten minutes later, through the sitting room window, she had watched him throw a stick for Midge.
She had not expected to like him.
Joseph, that was. When she had found him in the garden that first night, covered in mud and holding her cat with the careful gravity of a child who had decided the cat was his responsibility now, she had not thought beyond returning Soot to the house and sorting out whomever this boy belonged to.
She had not anticipated the dress incident. She had not anticipated the running, or the threats about the green dye, or the moment when his composure had cracked entirely and hehad laughed with the startled, helpless quality of someone who had forgotten they were capable of it.
She had not anticipated caring about any of it.
Through the sitting room window, she watched him throw the stick again. Midge brought it back immediately, dropped it at his feet, and looked up at him with the focused intensity she brought to things she considered important. Joseph picked it up and threw it again, and this time he watched her go with something on his face that was entirely unguarded, the look of a child simply enjoying a thing without any scaffolding around it.
She turned back to her book.
She had been in enough institutional settings to recognize what Joseph was. Not spoiled, not unkind, not any of the things she might have expected from a duke’s son who had been raised to be a duke’s son. Just careful. The kind of careful that came from years of understanding, however unconsciously, that the wrong behavior had consequences and that it was safer to want things quietly and justify them practically.
She knew that kind of careful from the inside.
It was one of the things the nunnery had given her, along with the pleasant expression that gave nothing away and the ability to read a room before anyone in it had said a word. She had not chosen to develop these qualities. They had simply arrived, the way things arrived when survival required them.
She did not think Joseph had chosen his either.
Outside, Midge had abandoned the stick entirely and was now running circles around Joseph for no apparent reason, and Joseph was standing in the middle of it with his arms slightly out, turning to watch her, and he was laughing again.
It was a good laugh. She had noticed this about it the first time it appeared, the way it arrived without warning, nothing managed about it, just the genuine unguarded sound of a child finding something funny. She suspected it did not come out very often. She suspected, from various things she had observed over the past several days, that Joseph’s life at Sedgewick was a very orderly one, full of Latin primers and correspondence practice and the kind of careful daily structure that produced capable, composed young men and left very little room for running down corridors or laughing at dogs.
She thought about what it would mean to grow up like that. To be ten years old and already so practiced at being correct.
She knew, in her own way, exactly what it meant.
Midge had finally worn herself out and collapsed at Joseph’s feet, and he crouched down beside her and said something to her that Temperance could not hear through the glass, and whatever it was Midge’s tail moved in response, and Joseph looked pleased about this in the contained, careful way he looked pleased about things he did not want to appear too pleased about.
Temperance looked back at her book.
She turned a page she had not read and told herself that it was not her concern, that the boy had a father and a tutor and a perfectly adequate life, and that the specific quality of his laugh was not something she needed to think about.
