Harper glanced at him.
“Yes,” he said, as though the word had surprised him slightly on its way out. “She is kind to her daughter, and to the staff, and to my son, and she doesn’t make a production of it.”
“Huh,” Nicholas said.
“She has had a difficult life. More difficult than I understood before I arrived. Her husband was not a good man, yet she came out the other side of it still generous with people,” he shook his head slightly. “I did not expect that.”
Nicholas was quiet for a moment, which was unusual enough that Harper glanced at him.
“What?” Harper said.
“Nothing,” Nicholas said. “I’m just noting that you said more words about the dowager viscountess than you have said about any subject in a while. It’s the most animated I’ve seen you in months.”
“I was simply answering your question,” Harper brushed it off, not wanting to make a big deal of it.
“And what about the daughter?”
“She is managing the situation with more grace than I deserve,” Harper said. “Given how I handled certain things in the early weeks. I was not… I did not approach things correctly at the beginning.”
“What did you do?” Edmund asked.
“I told her she had to marry.”
“On arrival?” Nicholas said.
“At breakfast the following morning.”
“Harper,” Edmund said. “You told a woman you had met twelve hours earlier that she had to marry?”
“I said I am aware,” Harper said, irked, “I handled it badly, but we have since reached a better understanding.”
“A better understanding,” Nicholas said, curious, “How much better?”
“We can be in a room together without….” Harper stopped. “She is not what I expected. She is considerably more… she is not what I expected,” he repeated again.
Nicholas looked at Edmund, and they shared a look.
“In a good way?”
“I haven’t decided it,” Harper replied. “But enough. I think I’ve spoken all I had to say.”
He brushed off the topic, but Temperance remained on his mind. He did not know what it was about her that made himreact so strongly to her. It was rather unusual, and he hadn’t even known her for long.
Best to not think about, he told himself.
They rode for another hour, and the teasing had subsided into something more comfortable. They talked about Nicholas’s estate in Wiltshire, which was having drainage problems, and then about Edmund’s wife, who was expecting their second child and was, according to Edmund. They talked about a bill before parliament that Harper had opinions about.
It was, Harper thought, on the way back, a good morning. They came off the park path and onto the street, heading back toward the area where they would separate and go their respective ways, and Nicholas pulled up outside a shop with a sign above the door that Harper glanced at and identified as a dressmaker’s.
“Eleanor’s gloves,” Nicholas said, by way of explanation, swinging down from his horse. “She asked me three times and I can’t go home without them.”
He handed his reins to Edmund without ceremony. “Two minutes.”
“You always say two minutes,” Edmund said.
“This time I mean it.” Nicholas pushed open the door and went inside.
Edmund and Harper waited on the street with the horses. In the meanwhile, Harper looked at the window.
