“I think you should tell them the truth about whatever you can tell them. Children are more resilient than most adults believe, but they are less tolerant of uncertainty. They can accept difficult realities if those realities are explained clearly. What they cannot accept is the feeling that they don’t know what’s happening or why.”
For a long moment, he simply looked at her. His expression was unreadable, but something had shifted behind his eyes. Something that might have been recognition. Or might have been the beginning of trust.
“You speak from experience.”
“I speak from observation and professional training.” Mel gathered her book and began walking toward the house.
“The children are waiting for you, Mr. Langford. They have been waiting all morning. I suggest you not keep them waiting any longer.”
She did not look back to see if he followed.
The second day of Mr. Langford’s visit, Mel observed from the schoolroom window as he taught Thistle to skip stones on the ornamental pond.
They were both terrible at it. The stones plopped into the water without ceremony, sending up small splashes that delighted Thistle and seemed to frustrate her father, who clearly remembered being better at this particular skill.
“You’re throwing too hard,” Thistle informed him, with the confidence of someone who had never successfully skipped a stone in her life.
“I am throwing exactly as hard as the physics of stone-skipping require.”
“Then the physics are wrong.”
“The physics cannot be wrong, simply because they are…physics.”
“Miss Grace says all scientific understanding is provisional and subject to revision based on new evidence.”
Mr. Langford paused, stone in hand, and looked toward the house. Mel stepped back from the window, though not quickly enough to avoid being seen.
“Miss Grace,” he called out, “Is perhaps too effective an educator.”
Mel did not respond. She simply returned to her desk, where Anna was practicing her French conjugations and Viola was sketching the view from the window with quiet concentration.
But she was slightly smiling.
On the third day, she watched from the doorway of the nursery as Mr. Langford read to the children before bed.
The book was Robinson Crusoe, Viola’s favourite, and Mr. Langford read it as though bedtime stories were the mostimportant thing he’d ever done. He even imitated the voices for each character.
Anna corrected his pronunciation twice. Once for a word he had genuinely mispronounced, and once for a word she simply thought should sound different. Mr. Langford accepted both corrections with the gravity they deserved and adjusted his reading accordingly.
Viola had climbed into his lap without asking, settling herself against his chest with the easy confidence of a child who knew she belonged there. Her eyes were half-closed, her body relaxed, her breathing slowing as the story carried her toward sleep. She did not hide from him the way she hid from most adults. She did not watch him from corners or communicate in whispers.
With him, she simply was.
And Thistle, sprawled on her bed with Brutus perched on her pillow, was vibrating with barely contained energy. She wanted to stay awake. Mel could see it in every line of her small body, the way she kept jerking herself back from the edge of sleep, the way her eyes would close and then snap open again with renewed determination.
She didn’t want him to leave. She didn’t want the story to end. She didn’t want the visit to be over, because when the visit was over, he would ride back to wherever he came from and they would be left to count the days until his return.
Three days a month, Mel thought.That’s all they get of him. Three days out of thirty.
It wasn’t enough and anyone could see it wasn’t enough. The children devoured his attention like starving beings presented with a feast, and when the feast ended, they would go back to their steady diet of governesses and housekeepers and the occasional letter from a man they clearly cherished.
Why? Why did he come only monthly? Why did he leave at all? He had money. He had resources. He could live at Hartfell if he chose, could be present every day instead of a handful of days each month.
Unless there was something else. Something that kept him away. Something that made these visits stolen time rather than ordinary life.
The benefactor story was thin. But there was another story beneath it, one Mel had not yet fully understood. A story that explained the secrecy, the elaborate arrangement, the cover story about orphaned nieces.
These were illegitimate children, carefully hidden children, who could not be acknowledged without consequences that Mr. Langford, whoever he truly was, had decided he could not face.
