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“I don’t intend to lose sight of that, whatever else happens before this sordid business is finished.”

“Good.” Everett rose and clapped him on the shoulder. “Go home, then. Play with your niece and your entirely too-clever wife, and let Croft handle the ugly business for a while. If you wish, I can speak with him and report to you if there’s anything of import to share. You’ve earned a respite, Nathaniel.”

“I need this one,” Iris informed Laura with great seriousness, holding up a slim, dog-eared volume of fairy tales. “It has a story about a fox, and there’s a fox living in the hedge near the orchard. I want to know if it’s the same type.”

“Very well.” Laura nodded with a smile.

“You never know what you may need when traveling home,” Iris said, adding the book to a precarious stack teetering on the lid of her trunk. “I like to be prepared.”

“An admirable trait, my dear. I will leave you to it, then,” Laura said, just as Miss Borden entered. “Good luck, Miss Borden.”

“I will need it,” the governess said, moving toward Iris.

Laura began sorting through her own things in her room with rather more efficiency.

She found herself smiling at the sounds drifting through the open door. Miss Borden was gently trying to reduce the book pile to something the carriage could accommodate, and Iris was countering with her requisite, fierce, immovable logic.

Laura wondered if the six-year-old had ever lost an argument once she set her mind to win it.

Nathaniel found her there an hour later, her trunk half packed, sitting on the edge of the bed with a gown folded on her lap. She was turning it over in her hands.

“Regretting the Season already?” he asked, leaning against the doorframe with his arms crossed.

“Not quite regretting it, which is a miracle, I think.” She set the gown aside. “Only thinking how strange it is that I feel more myself packing to leave a grand townhouse for a drafty old castle. I live in a castle…”

“You surely do,” he said, a smile crossing his lips. “It is yours, wife.”

“I think I feel more at home in a castle for the first time in my life. I don’t think I understood, before you, that a place could simply feel like mine. That it didn’t have to be earned, not the way my father drilled into me…”

He crossed the room and sat beside her, the mattress dipping under his weight, and took her hand. “It is yours. Every room of it. I mean it, truly.”

“I know.” She leaned into him, resting her head against his shoulder. “I only like reminding myself of it sometimes. It still feels so new.”

They sat together like that for a while, listening to the muffled sounds of Iris’s negotiation with her governess, until Nathaniel spoke again.

“I’ve been thinking, since Croft’s letter this morning, about how much of this year I’ve spent looking backward. At Isabella. At Cumberlea. At every failure I’ve lodged against myself since she died.” His thumb moved slowly over Laura’s knuckles, in time with his heartbeat. “I don’t intend to stop, not until it’s finished. But I find I don’t want our life at Duskwell to remain shaped around that grief either. Not anymore. Not now that there’s so much else worth building there.”

Laura lifted her head to look at him. “What are you saying?”

“Only that I’ve been thinking about the tower,” he said, running a hand through his hair. “I haven’t decided anything yet. I only wanted you to know that it’s been on my mind more than usual since last night.”

“Why is that?” she asked.

“Watching Anna and Frederick with their whole future ahead of them, so happy and free, I found myself thinking that Isabella would have liked that sort of life for Iris. Would have liked seeing her grow up surrounded by that kind of joy, rather than a locked door and a house too afraid to speak her name freely.”

“Nathaniel.” Laura’s voice had gone soft with approval, and it gave him all the courage he needed. “Whatever you decide, about the tower or anything else, I am glad you’re thinking of it as something other than a wound to guard.”

He turned his head and pressed a slow kiss to her temple. “We’ll see about it once we’re home.”

“Home,” she agreed.

CHAPTER 24

They departed London the following morning, the townhouse shuttered up behind them.

The primroses and tulips Nathaniel had ordered for their arrival had been carefully transferred into pots to travel back to the castle behind them rather than be left to wither in an empty hall.

The gesture touched Laura deeply.