“I am just listing the things I want to see,” Joseph said with complete composure.
Harper looked at him for a long moment. Joseph looked back with the expression of a boy who had inherited his father’s ability to hold a position and had deployed it, and Harper felt the particular exhausted affection of a man who recognized his own qualities in someone else and found them considerably more difficult to deal with from the outside.
“We will visit,” Harper said. “When she is settled and married and the arrangements are in place, we will visit.”
“Promise?” Joseph said, and said it in the way he said things he was serious about, without any of the lightness that might have made it easier to answer loosely.
Harper looked at his son. At the clear, direct eyes and the straight back and the ten-year-old face that was so much older than ten in some ways and so exactly ten in others, and he thought about promises and what they cost and what they were worth and how he had made one six years ago at a bedside and kept it every day since.
“Yes,” he said. “I promise.”
Joseph nodded, once, in the small formal way he had when something had been agreed and ratified. Then he looked back at the path.
“Can we go faster now?” he said. “I want to try the longer stretch before we have to go back.”
“Yes,” Harper said.
Joseph urged his horse forward and Harper followed, and the park opened up ahead of them wide and empty and bright in the morning, and they rode without talking for a while, and Harper let the speed and the cold air and the sound of the horses do the work that the conversation had started, which was the particular work of sitting with something true that you had been not quite looking at directly and finding that, once looked at, it was not going to go back to where it had been before.
He thought about Sedgewick. About the quiet of it, the orderly rooms, the reliable routines, the life he had built there that worked and asked nothing unexpected of him.
He thought about the breakfast room at Wilmington, and the dogs on the settee, and Temperance with her book and her uneven hems and her way of saying things that landed somewhere real regardless of whether he was ready for them.
He thought about going back.
He thought about what going back would feel like now, which was a thing he had not let himself think about before this morning, and he found that thinking of it produced something he did not have a ready word for and was not going to name on horseback in a public park at seven in the morning.
He rode on. Joseph was ahead of him now, moving well, his back straight and his hands easy, and Harper watched his son ride and thought that Joseph was right about most of it, which was inconvenient, and that he had been right for longer than this morning, which was more inconvenient still.
The park was fully light now. The day had arrived and was getting on with itself, indifferent to the conclusions being reached on horseback within it, and Harper rode through it and kept his face composed and his thoughts where he could see them, which was the best he could manage for now.
It would have to be sufficient.
He was becoming less certain, as the weeks went on, that sufficient was going to be enough.
CHAPTER 18
“What are your thoughts on a picnic later this afternoon?”
Temperance looked at her mother from her book, and shot her a puzzled expression.
“What is the occasion?”
“There needs to be no occasion for joy,” Albina rolled her eyes. “I just think it could be a good idea for all of us to spend some time together. Like, well, a family.”
“You and I are the only family here,” Temperance replied. She could tell that her mother was trying to make a point, but could not put her finger on it quite yet.
“I would not repeat that in front of Joseph,” Albina warned. “I believe that he has warmed up to us quite well, and I do not mind considering him as a part of my family. Besides, I have alreadyinformed him about it and he seemed rather ecstatic about the idea. The weather is good, as well.”
“What about Harper? He has meetings on Saturday mornings,” Temperance said.
“Hehadmeetings on Saturday mornings,” Albina said. “I spoke to him yesterday evening and he has rearranged them.”
Temperance looked at her mother. “You spoke to Harper about rearranging his meetings? Or rather, he listened to you?”
“I suggested it,” Albina shrugged as it was nothing, “He agreed. You know, he is more amenable than he appears, when you catch him at the right moment.” She finally looked up at her daughter, who was looking back at her with a surprised expression.
“Go and put on something you don’t mind getting grass on,” she smirked. “And stop looking so surprised, please.”
