Annabelle could only stare at the child, this young boy who saw far more than she was wont to give him credit for. She had not thought that the child would notice the coldness between them, but she could not quite tell him why she and his uncle were at an impasse at the moment.
What would a six-year-old know of marriage marts and trying to find a husband? What would he understand in the fact that his uncle is the one who offered to help her, yet is the same one hindering her every attempt, confusing her every step of the way as he did?
“And you smiled,” James said, “but it was after. Did he…? He made you sad, didn’t he?”
She opened her mouth, and the words just poured out. “We… had a disagreement, that’s all,” she offered softly. “Grown people have those sometimes, even when they respect each other. It has nothing to do with these lessons, or with you, dear.”
James looked at his hands on his thighs, and moments passed.
“Will our lessons continue?” he said. “Even now?”
“Next week, and every week after that.”
He weighed this for the length of three slow breaths. Then he put his right hand back on the keys and played the Haydn opening, slowly, both hands finding their places.
Annabelle folded her hands in her lap and listened, heart breaking in her chest.
Dominic found James in the library, face down on the carpet with a book propped open and his chin resting on both hands. This was how he read when he did not want to be asked questions.
“Miss Hartley told me the lesson was difficult today,” Dominic said.
James turned a page without looking up. “I didn’t want to play.”
“Why not?”
A short pause. “Annabelle was sad.”
“Did she say that?”
“She said she wasn’t.” Another page turned. “But she had the sad face.”
Dominic looked at the ceiling. He had not been thinking about the terrace at Lord Arbuthnot’s for two days, with moderate success. He had not been examining why he had said what he’d said, or why he could not seem to let it alone now that he had.
The arrangement, James’s lessons, the boy’s steadier eating and sleeping and speaking, was the point of all of it. The arrangement was now operating badly because Dominic had pressed a score the length of two terraces when he had no standing to press it at all, and the consequence was a six-year-old lying on the carpet refusing to play Haydn.
He looked at the book James was reading. It was about steam-driven mechanical engines.
“There is a fair near Bloomsbury on Saturday,” he said.
James set the book flat on the carpet and looked up at him. He looked at him for four full seconds.
“With mechanical toys,” Dominic added.
He had heard this mentioned three times in the past ten days, at the breakfast table and once during an altogether unrelated conversation about carriage axles.
James looked at his book, then back at Dominic, and then said, with the directness of someone delivering a considered verdict: “You were mean to her.”
Dominic was simply frozen solid. What…?
“You should tell her you’re sorry,” James said, and picked his book back up.
And Dominic let out a soft scoff, unable to believe his ears, but also unable to deny the truth that had come out of his nephew’s mouth.
Lady Rosenhall stepped down from the carriage and paused.
“I have made a miscalculation,” she said.
“It is charming,” Helena said.
