“And you will apologize to Mrs. Peel for the state of the floor.”
“Yes, sir.”
Harper stepped to the side. Joseph moved past him toward the stairs without looking up, and he was almost past Temperance when she caught his eye. She gave him the smallest possible look, which he held her gaze for a fraction of a second.
Then he went up the stairs, and Temperance watched him go.
Harper had turned to face her fully now, and he had not moved from the spot.
“The books,” she said, because she had decided she was going to say it whether he welcomed it or not, “were knocked down by Biscuit. The footprints were Midge’s. I should have had them seen to earlier and I did not, and I will, and I’m sorry for that. But the running was, well.”
“The running,” Harper said, “was a grown woman chasing a child down a corridor in a house that is not a playground, conducting herself in a manner that I would not expect from someone of her age and position, and setting an example for my son that I would have thought she had more sense than to set.”
He stopped and looked at her with those dark blue eyes, and the control in them was absolute and also, she thought, somewhat expensive.
“You are not a child, Miss Hosmer. You should have known better.”
“I know perfectly well that I am not a child,” she said. Her voice was even. She was holding the even tone with both hands. “And I know perfectly well what I was doing. Your son stepped on my dress this afternoon and…”
“Joseph stepped on your dress?”
“He did. And instead of..” She stopped, as she had not intended to tell him the whole of it, but the telling of it had a momentum of its own once started. “Instead of a formal complaint about it, which I could have made, we ran around the corridor and made threats about green dye and it was entirely harmless and it made him laugh. He has a very good laugh. Did you know that? It comes out startled, like he isn’t expecting it. Like he doesn’t do it very often.”
Something moved across Harper’s face. It was there and gone so quickly she almost missed it.
“My son’s laugh,” he said, “is not the subject of this conversation.”
“Perhaps it ought to be.”
“Miss Hosmer.”
“He is ten years old.” She said, “And he should be running down corridors. or getting grass stains on his shoes and laughing at things that aren’t particularly funny and making a mess occasionally. That is what being ten is for. Before it is too late to do it.”
From outside came the distant sound of the garden in the evening, birds and wind and the uncomplicated sounds of the world going on regardless.
Harper walked toward her, and he did it slowly, and he stopped when there was considerably less distance between them than there had been before. He was tall, and she found herself very aware, all at once, of the way he was looking at her with that expression she was still learning to read.
“You have no right,” he said, quietly, “to tell me how to raise my son. You know nothing about what is required of him. Nothing about what it means to prepare a child for the life he will have.”
“I know what it is to be told how to behave every moment of every day,” she said, “from the time I was old enough to be toldanything. I know exactly what that does to a person. And I know that it does not improve with age.”
He was very close. She had not entirely registered how close until this moment.
Close enough that she was aware of him with a specificity that was difficult to account for and impossible to dismiss. The warmth of him and the compressed something beneath all that composure that she did not have a name for yet.
Her heart was doing something it had no business doing.
She was not afraid of him. That much she was certain of. She had been afraid of people before and this was nothing like that. This was something else entirely, and it was considerably more annoying.
“It is no wonder,” Harper said, “that you have not married.”
Everything in her went still.
“I beg your pardon?” she said.
“A woman who cannot conduct herself with appropriate….”
“Do not go there,” she snapped. “Not marrying was my choice. It has always been my choice and I do not require a husband tovalidate my existence or give my life some shape you find more legible.”
