“Small ones, really. He wanted to know where the sun went at night. He wanted to know….” He stopped himself for a moment, “He wanted to know if I would always be there.”
“He needed someone who could just be easy with him sometimes and I didn’t know how to do that. I knew how to keep him safe and how to educate him and how to make sure he had everything he needed, but the rest of it.” He stopped for a moment. “I think I made him too careful.”
“He will grow into his personality, surely.”
“He asked me last week if we could get a dog. At Sedgewick, when we go back.”
She looked at him. “And?”
“I said yes but the thing is, he has never just asked for something before, and he always justifies everything, always has some practical argument ready, and this time he just said he wanted one.” He shook his head slightly. “Six years and that was the first time.”
She didn’t say anything.
“You are good with him,” Harper said, after a moment. “I want you to know I recognize that. What I said before, about staying away from him, that was wrong and I knew it was wrong and I said it anyway, which is not something I am proud of.”
“Why did you say it then?” she asked.
He took a moment with the question, which she appreciated.
“Because you walked in and found him straightaway,” he said. “In a way I had been trying to for years. And instead of being glad about it I felt threatened by it, which is not something I would normally admit to anyone.”
“You are right quite often,” she said. “That is part of the problem. It makes you overconfident about the times you are not.”
He looked at her sideways. Something moved in his expression that was not quite a smile but was adjacent to one. “That is the most accurate criticism anyone has made of me in recent memory.”
“I have had a lot of time to observe,” she said.
“You have,” he agreed. And then, after a moment: “What mask am I wearing tonight?”
She looked at him. He was looking at the garden again, and the question had been asked in a tone she recognized, it was the one he used when he was asking something he actually wanted to know and was covering it with lightness to make it easier to ask.
She thought about it honestly.
“I think,” she said carefully, “that you are wearing the mask of a man who has decided that control is the same as care.”
He was quiet for a long moment.
“And you?” he said. “What is yours?”
“The same, probably,” she said. “In different ways.”
He turned to look at her, and she turned to look at him, and they were close enough that she was aware of him with a specificity she had stopped pretending to manage, and his eyes were very dark behind the mask, and the music behind them shifted into something slower.
Then Alethea appeared at her elbow, Oliver a step behind, and the moment dissolved back into the ordinary.
“There you both are,” Alethea said, “We have been looking for you everywhere.”
“We were talking,” Temperance said.
“I could see that,” Alethea said, and said nothing further, which was somehow worse than if she had said a great deal.
Oliver shook Harper’s hand and said something about the Countess’s garden being apparently remarkable in summer, and Harper responded in the level, composed way he had, andTemperance turned to Alethea and found her friend watching her with the quiet, perceptive expression that had always, since the nunnery, seen more than Temperance intended to show.
“Are you all right?” Alethea said, very quietly.
“Perfectly,” Temperance said.
Alethea looked at her for a moment. Then she looked at Harper, who was talking to Oliver now.
