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“How was she going to do that?”

“By feeding him an entire basket of strawberries she’d stolen from the kitchen, because she’d read in one of her fairytales that enchanted creatures loved fruit above all things.”

“Wow.” Iris’s eyes widened. “Did it work?”

“It did not,” Nathaniel said, shaking his head. “What it did do was give Goliath a stomachache so severe that he refused to be ridden for a week. Our father was in such a temper about it that Isabella and I hid in the hayloft for the better part of one afternoon, convinced we’d be sent to the gallows.”

“You wouldn’t really have been sent to the gallows.”

“Try telling that to two children hiding in a hayloft, certain of their impending doom. We had a way of getting each other riled up, you see.” He smiled, and it reached all the way to his brown eyes. “She wasn’t even sorry, you know. Even after all that. She said it was worth it, because for one single afternoon, she’d truly believed Goliath might turn into a prince right there in the stables.”

Iris was laughing hard now, the tears forgotten, clutching Isabella’s portrait against her chest. “She sounds like she was very funny.”

“She was the funniest person I knew,” Nathaniel said. “Present company excluded, of course,” he added, glancing at Laura.

She swatted at his shoulder, laughing despite the tears in her eyes.

“Tell me another story,” Iris demanded. “Tell me about when you were both very little… before the strawberries.”

“There are not many stories as good as the strawberries, but I suppose I could try.” Nathaniel paused, thinking for a moment while tucking her hair behind her ear. “When Isabella was five, and I was eight, our mother took us to visit her sister in Bath. I cannot recall how, but Isabella became utterly convinced that our aunt’s house was haunted by the ghost of a duchess who’d died there a hundred years before.”

“Was it haunted?” Iris asked, and Laura realized she had never heard the girl’s voice quite so animated.

“It was not haunted. It was draughty, which is an entirely different thing, though try telling that to a five-year-old who has just heard a door creak in the middle of the night. She woke me at an unholy hour, certain the ghost was coming to steal her away, and refused to go back to sleep unless I stood guard at her door with an old dueling sword, which I had taken without permission from the study downstairs.”

“Did you actually have a sword in your hand?!” Iris exclaimed.

“I did. A perfectly real, perfectly sharp sword, wielded by a boy of eight who had no idea how to use it and very nearly chopped off his own toe.” Nathaniel shook his head. “I stood there for the better part of two hours, shivering in my nightshirt, absolutely resolved that no ghost, real or imagined, was getting past me to my sister. Eventually, our aunt found me there at dawn half-asleep on my feet, still gripping the sword, and Isabella curled up just behind the door.”

“Were you in trouble?”

“Big trouble. Father was informed the moment we returned home, and I was made to apologize to the butler for handling a blade so carelessly. From thence on, I became interested in fencing.” Nathaniel smiled.

“What about Mama?”

“Isabella never forgot it. She used to say that whatever else happened in her life, she always knew that her brother would stand between her and whatever frightened her, sword or no sword…” he trailed off. “Before I failed her,” he whispered.

The room went quiet for a moment, the old grief surfacing again beneath the warmth of the story and the morning they had shared.

Laura reached over to rest her hand on his knee.

“You didn’t fail her,” Iris said before pressing a kiss to his cheek. “You’re standing between me and things that frighten me. You’re doing it right now. I think she’d say you didn’t fail anybody.”

Nathaniel looked down at her for a moment, something bright in his eyes, and pressed a kiss to the top of her head.

“Thank you, Iris,” he rasped. “I needed to hear that more than you know. And from no one else but you.”

Iris nodded and quickly returned her attention to the trunk. She pulled out an embroidery hoop with a half-finished garden scene, the needle rusted where Isabella had left it mid-stitch.

Laura sat across from them amid the dust and the sunlight and the trunks, and thought: I have never in my life witnessed anything so devastatingly beautiful.

Outside, the afternoon light shifted, painting the small room in a rich gold. And for a little while, she thought of nothing beyond the sound of a little girl laughing in her uncle’s arms.

CHAPTER 20

“Absolutely not,” Laura said for the third time that day as her maid pinned the last curl into place. “Much as I will miss her, she cannot come, and that is final.”

Nathaniel leaned against her doorframe, his arms crossed over his wide chest. He looked too amused for a man about to be dragged to a dinner he didn’t want to attend either.