“She held it out to you four times,” Dominic said. “I counted.”
James considered this. He looked at the horse again. “I’ll keep it,” he said, in the way he resolved all matters, he had given sufficient thought. “But I’ll bring it when we go back.”
Dominic said nothing to that.
The footman opened the door and let down the step, and James climbed out with the horse held against his side. Mrs. Howell was at the top of the entrance steps; she took one look at him and said nothing about the horse and asked only whether he wanted supper now or in twenty minutes.
“Now,” James said, and went inside.
James had eaten and gone up directly, the horse on the table beside his plate, until Miss Hartley collected it and tucked it into his jacket pocket, and they went upstairs together. The house stilled around nine, and now Dominic sat at the study desk with the accounts open and the candle burned to its lower third.
The door opened, breaking his concentration.
Annabelle came in without knocking, which she had not done since the second week. She had changed; her hair half down where it had come loose from its pins. She didn’t sit, standing a little inside the door and looking at his desk, or at the wall behind it, and said nothing for long enough that he set his pen down.
Somehow, he had a feeling he wouldn’t like whatever it was she had come to say.
“Charlotte kept looking at you, you know,” she said. “This afternoon. When you came back to the drawing room.”
“She was looking at James.”
“Both of you.” She moved to the chair across the desk and sat. “From the moment you walked in. She tracked you to the fireplace and watched you the whole time.”
He said nothing.
Annabelle looked at her hands in her lap. “Elinor says she does that with people she feels settled near.” She looked up. “She doesn’t do it with everyone.”
The fire had gone low at his back, and the room had cooled at the edges, and the accounts sat open on the desk between them with their two neat figures.
“We could have children,” she said. “One day.”
Dominic set down his pen, already feeling a tiredness creeping into his bones. Of course, he should have known. After seeing her watching the children today, he knew she’d been…wishing for that. And yet…
“I have told you where I stand on that,” he said.
“You’ve stated a position. You have not explained it.” Her voice was even, the tone she used when she had already decided she would not be moved by whatever came next. “Not honestly.”
“I have been honest.”
“Dominic.” She took two steps forward. “I saw you today. The way you sat with James and Charlotte in that room. You are not a man without the capacity for fatherhood, and I am not going to pretend you are.”
He pushed back from the desk and stood. The room was too small with both of them standing, and he went to the window, which at least put some distance between them. The street below was quiet. A lamp three doors down, a passing carriage, the sounds of evening proceeding without interest.
“I barely manage with James,” he said, to the window. “And I mean that without sentiment. There are days I do not know what he needs, or how to reach him, or what to say when he shuts down and turns away from me. Annabelle, I am learning the most elementary possible version of this, and I do it badly more often than I do it well.”
“You do it,” she said. “That is not the same thing.”
“It is not good enough for a child of my own.”
“He is?—”
“James is in this house because there was no one else.” He turned around. “I am not proud of how plainly I can say that, but it is the truth. His parents died and I was the nearest relative and the alternative was unconscionable. I would not have chosenthis. I do not think I can be a good father to a child I chose, when I cannot reliably manage the one fate handed me. Do you understand?”
Her chin came up. “A good father tries. That is the whole of what it requires.”
“I am not good by nature.”
“That is not true.”
