She lifted her chin and walked forward.
Clara held Eleanor’s hand, her rag doll wedged under her opposite arm. She had been instructed, in gentle but emphatic terms, to remain quiet and still during the ceremony—instructions Clara appeared to regard as advisory rather thanbinding. She surveyed the chapel with open curiosity: the stained glass, the candles, the clergyman’s vestments. Then her attention fixed on Tristan as though she had identified the most interesting object in any room and intended to investigate.
“Eleanor,” Rosamund whispered, “please hold her —”
Alas, it was too late.
Clara released Eleanor’s hand and crossed the aisle with the unhesitating only a child could have. She stopped directly before the Duke of Rathbourne, tilted her head back to look up at him and regarded him with a frankness that would have made diplomats weep.
“You’re very tall,” she announced clearly.
Tristan looked down. Whatever composure he had built for this morning cracked ever so slightly, as a smile pulled at the corners of his lips.
“I am,” he said.
“Are you cross?”
“No.”
“You look cross. Your face is doing this.” Clara pressed her lips together and drew her brows down in a scowl of such devastatingaccuracy that Eleanor made a strangled sound from the front pew. “See? That’s what you’re doing.”
Again, his lips twitched—as though he was doing his best to hide a smile that threatened to break open the granite of his face.
“I am not cross,” he repeated, kneeling down. “Are you not afraid of me?”
Clara’s face scrunched up in confusion.
“Why?”
“Most people are.”
There was a strange tone to his voice—as though it did not entirely please him to know that people were afraid of him.
Clara’s nose wrinkled. “You’re not frightening. You’re just big.” She reached up and tugged his cravat. “This is too tight. That’s why you look cross. My sister says when things are too tight they make you grumpy. She says that about her shoes.”
The silence in the chapel had taken on a quality that Rosamund could only describe asheld breath. The clergyman had frozen with his prayer book half-raised. Eleanor’s hand was pressed over her mouth. Adrian Beaumont, stationed near the altar as Tristan’s witness, wore an expression of such barely contained delight that he appeared to be shaking.
Tristan looked at Clara, and whatever he saw—the rumpled pinafore, the crooked stockings, the rag doll crushed against her chest —did something to the architecture of his face. The severity softened. The expression of a man standing at the edge of a country he had been told did not exist, discovering that it did, and that it was populated by a six-year-old girl with a crooked collar who had decided, without consulting anyone, that he was worth approaching.
“May I?” He reached toward the rag doll cautiously.
Clara considered. Then, with the gravity of a queen bestowing a favour, she held the doll out.
Tristan accepted it. He held the thing—wool and cotton and the desperate repairs of a woman who had nothing else to give—with a carefulness that seemed to cost him more than the gesture warranted. He straightened the doll’s arm where it had come unstitched at the shoulder, turned it right-side up, and handed it back.
“She has been well looked after,” he said.
Clara beamed. “Her name is Bess. She’s brave.”
“I can see that.”
“She protects me at night. From the bad things.”
Tristan’s hand, still half-extended, trembled slightly. He withdrew it and folded both hands on his bent knee with a precision that hid everything except the effort of hiding it.
“Then she is very good at her work,” he said quietly. “And I suspect she learned it from your sister.”
From the corner of the chapel, Rosamund watched. She had steeled herself for this morning the way one steels oneself for surgery—numbness first, endurance after, and a resolution not to look at the wound until it was safely dressed. She had rehearsed her composure. Had built it brick by brick during another sleepless night, mortaring every joint with the certainty that this was a transaction and nothing more.
