Rhys smiled as he read, imagining her composing this report with the same focused intensity she applied to everything. She would make a formidable estate manager someday, or perhaps a scholar, or perhaps something the world had not yet invented a name for.
Viola’s letter was shorter, consisting primarily of three drawings, one of the garden in autumn, with the dormant roses rendered in careful brown and grey: one of Thistle attempting to teach Brutus to navigate a small obstacle course she had constructed; and one of Mel reading by the fire, her profile captured with surprising accuracy for a six-year-old artist. Beneath the last drawing, Viola had written in careful letters;
“Miss Grace says hello. She misses you but won’t say so.”
Rhys studied the drawing of Mel before answering, tracing the familiar lines with his eyes. Viola had captured something essential about her: the stillness, the attention, the way she held a book as though it contained answers to questions she had been asking her whole life.
He set the drawing aside carefully, adding it to the small collection he was accumulating on his desk.
Thistle’s letter was exactly what he expected, a breathless account of her latest experiments, including a detailed description of a beetle she had discovered that she was convinced represented a new species. She had included a sketch of the beetle in question, labelled with Latin terminology that was creative if not entirely accurate. The letter concluded with a request that he bring her“more interesting bugs”from London, as the Cornish variety had become“insufficiently challenging.”
He laughed aloud at this, the sound escaping before he could contain it. Thistle’s particular brand of chaos had become one of the great joys of his life, a constant reminder that the world was far more interesting than he had allowed himself to believe during his years of rakish indifference.
Finally, he opened Mel’s letter.
It was brief, as her letters always were. Three sentences, written in the clean, practical handwriting he had come to recognise as distinctly hers.
The children are well. Anna has reorganised the library by subject rather than author; I have not yet decided whether thisrepresents improvement or merely change. Thistle ate a beetle yesterday to determine whether it was edible.
That was all, there was no sentiment, no declarations and no acknowledgment of the situation between them or the future they had agreed to build. Just three sentences of household news, delivered with the dry precision that characterised everything Mel did.
Rhys stared at the final sentence for a full minute.
Then he began to laugh.
It started as a chuckle, barely audible, but it grew rapidly into something less controlled. He laughed until tears streamed down his face, until his sides ached, until he had to grip the edge of the desk to keep himself upright. The image of Thistle, his wild and fearless daughter, consuming a beetle in the name of scientific inquiry, was so perfectly, absurdly right that he could not contain his response.
The door opened, and Jenkins appeared with an expression of carefully concealed alarm.
“Your Grace? Is everything quite all right?”
“Splendid, everything is perfectly all right.”
Rhys managed, wiping his eyes with his handkerchief.
“Everything is fine. Miss Grace has just informed me that my youngest daughter has expanded her scientific methods to include self-experimentation.”
“I… see.” Jenkins’s tone suggested that he did not, in fact, see, but was too professional to pursue the matter.
“Shall I bring tea, Your Grace?”
“Yes. Thank you. And Jenkins?” Rhys looked up, still struggling to contain his mirth.
“Cancel my dinner engagement with Lord Petersham. I find I have letters to write.”
“Very well, Your Grace.”
Jenkins withdrew, and Rhys reached for fresh paper with a sense of purpose that had been absent from his London correspondence for fifteen years.
He wrote to Anna first, approving her library reorganisation and adding three additional book recommendations to her list. He wrote to Viola, thanking her for the drawings and promising to display them prominently in his study. He wrote to Thistle, congratulating her on her scientific dedication while gently suggesting that future experiments might benefit from observational methods rather than gustatory ones.
And then he wrote to Mel.
This letter took longer as he had drafted it three times before settling on something that felt right: an acknowledgment of her report, a question about the children’s Latin progress, a mention of his upcoming parliamentary sessions, and a single line at the end that said what he could not quite bring himself to elaborate.
I miss you. All of you. But especially you.
It was not poetry. It was not the kind of romantic declaration that the scandal sheets would expect from London’s former rake. But it was honest, and he had learned, over the past months, that Mel valued honesty above eloquence.
