Temperance looked at him over the top of her book but did not say anything.
Instead, she thought of a woman alone in a room somewhere, with hands that had turned against themselves, and a husband who had kept his son away with the particular, painful care of a man trying to protect something he could not fix.
She thought,oh. That is what that is.
“My father doesn’t talk about her,” Joseph said. “I don’t think he was… well, I don’t think they were very happy together. But he keeps the good memories for me and tells me the good ones.”
Albina looked at the boy for a moment with the expression she wore when something had moved her and reached over to pat his head gently.
“He sounds,” she said, “like a man doing his best.”
Joseph looked at her. Something in his face relaxed, slightly, as though the sentence had settled something that had been unsettled for a while.
“Yes,” he said. “I think so.”
The afternoon went on around them, and Temperance returned to her book and read the same paragraph four times and retained none of it.
She was thinking about Harper, and about what she had taken for coldness and what she now suspected was something considerably more complicated than coldness, and about a boy who remembered his mother scratching her hands until they bled, and a father who had kept only the good ones for him.
She was thinking that people were, very often, not what they appeared to be at breakfast.
“So,” Nicholas said, pulling his horse alongside Harper’s as they came around the second bend, “how is domestic life?”
Nicholas Ashby, Earl of Heron, had known Harper for twelve years and had spent approximately eleven of them saying whatever came into his head in Harper’s presence and suffering no significant consequences, which had given him a confidence in the practice that was occasionally misplaced.
The park was quiet at this hour, which was the point. Harper had always preferred it before the fashionable crowd arrived. He had come there to ride with his friends, Edmund and Nicholas.
“Fine,” Harper said, knowing that it would be a difficult conversation to avoid.
“Fine,” Nicholas repeated with amused suspicion, “You have been living in a house with a woman who wore trousers to the Hargrove ball and her daughter who was raised by nuns, and your assessment isfine?”
“My assessment is fine,” Harper kept his response curt. The last thing that he wished to do was fuel the fire.
“Edmund,” Nicholas said, looking across Harper to where Edmund was riding on his other side, “he says fine.”
“I heard,” Edmund said, laughing.
“What do you make of that?”
“I make of it,” Edmund said, “that he is being Harper about it, which means something considerably more than fine has occurred. We are going to have to work for it.”
Harper looked straight ahead between his horse’s ears.
“There is nothing to work for. The household is settling and the estate matters are largely in order. It is fine.”
“And the women?” Nicholas said. “The dowager viscountess and the daughter. What are they like? Actually like, not diplomatically like. You have to share.”
“I agree,” Edmund prodded.
Harper was quiet for a moment. The path curved ahead of them, the grass on either side still wet from the previous night’s rain.
“The dowager,” he said finally, “is not what the papers make her.”
“No?”
“No, she is genuinely sharp, in a way she disguises very well. She says things that sound like nothing and mean a great deal, and she watches everything and gives the impression of watching nothing, and she is kind.”
“Kind?” Edmund raised an eyebrow.
