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Where was the housekeeper? Or Harriet? Someone to keep the boy entertained while Anthony was busy with his work.

“The tutor left sums for me,” William replied, as he pushed some of the beads across the abacus.

“Then why are you not in your room, doing them? Or the schoolroom?”

William shook his head. “Can’t. There is a pigeon on the sill. It’s too loud.”

“All you need to do is knock on the glass and the pigeon will fly off,” Anthony said, frustrated.

Between his son’s antics and Marina’s dazzling smile replaying in his mind, how was he supposed to get anything done today?

“It has a nest,” William replied. “I don’t want it to abandon its babies.”

“Well, you cannot stay there. You are disturbing my work.”

William peered up with his mother’s eyes. “You could help me. I’ll finish it quicker if you do.”

“I do not have time, William.”

It was not the first time that the boy had done something like this to try and gain his father’s attention, but Anthony did not know how to respond to such behavior. When he was a boy, he would not have dared to disturb his father for any reason. Children were supposed to wait to be summoned by the parent, not the other way around.

But I am supposed to be better than that, he reminded himself, taking a breath.

His grandmother had pleaded with him to be better than that.

“Please?” William said, his voice tipping toward a whine.

Anthony huffed out a sigh. “Leave your sums with me, and I shall get to them after I have finished my correspondence.”

“But then I haven’t done it myself,” the boy pointed out. “The tutor will know if it is in your writing, and I should learn how to do it.”

“That is what I pay the tutor to do: teach you.”

William shrugged. “I’m struggling to understand.”

Anthony leaned against the doorjamb and swept a hand through his hair, struck by a certain nostalgia. He, too, had struggled with arithmetic in his youth. Sometimes, in the winter, his knuckles still ached where they had been brutally caned by his own tutor when he could not get the right answers.

“Come in, then,” he relented gruffly, as he turned and stepped back into his study.

The boy jumped up, barely able to contain his excitement. Grabbing his abacus and his sheaf of papers, he hurried into the study he was not normally permitted to enter, and seated himself in the chair opposite his father’s.

There, he put his papers neatly to one side and set the abacus in front of him, before looking expectantly at his father.

“Let me see those.” Anthony picked up the top sheet and looked down the list of sums.

This is simple arithmetic. Surely, my son is not incapable of doing this?

“What are you struggling with, exactly?” he asked, suspicious.

He knew the boy had been bored since arriving in London a week ago. He complained of it at every opportunity, but usually he bothered his great-grandmother or the housekeeper with his complaints instead of his father.

“My brain is all foggy,” William replied. “When I look at the sums, everything… is blurry. I can’t concentrate.”

“But these are easy, William.” A note of disapproval edged into Anthony’s voice. “I do not believe that you cannot do these alone. You are not a dunce.”

William dipped his chin to his chest, and his cheeks looked rather red. A blush of embarrassment, no doubt, that he had bothered his father over some simple sums.

“I shall have to have a word with your tutor if you cannot do this,” Anthony said, putting the paper down.