Do not be dazzled,she told herself, watching Clara kneel beside the birdbath and peer into the water with the intensity of a naturalist discovering a new species.Silk curtains and garden paths do not erase what brought you here. This house was built on power, and power is what destroyed your family, and the man who wields it is the same man who?—
A voice cut through the garden air. Not loud, but carrying in the way that voices carried when they belonged to someone who did not need volume to command attention.
“—and you will reverse the adjustment to the laundry maids’ wages by this afternoon, or you will explain to me in detail why you believed it appropriate to reduce the income of women who work fourteen hours a day to save this household nine pounds per quarter.”
Rosamund’s head turned.
Through a gap in the hedge she could see the side terrace of the east wing. Tristan stood at the top of the stone steps, coatless, his shirtsleeves rolled to the elbows. Below him, arranged in a loose semicircle on the gravel, three men in dark coats clutched ledgers and registers with the desperate composure of soldiers who had just been informed that their commanding officer was displeased.
One of them—the eldest, grey-whiskered, with the particular posture of a man who had occupied a position of minor authority for long enough to believe it made him important—stepped forward.
“Your Grace, the reduction was a matter of simple economy. The steward’s report indicated that household expenditure had exceeded?—”
“The steward’s report indicated that expenditure on candles for the servants’ hall had increased by twelve shillings.” Tristan’s voice did not rise. It descended, which was considerably worse. “You chose to offset twelve shillings in candlewax by reducing the wages of six women who have served this house without complaint for a combined forty-three years. That is not economy, Fenton. That is arithmetic performed by a man who has confused cost with value.”
The grey-whiskered man’s complexion had undergone a journey from pink to white and was now threatening a return to pink by a different route.
“Your Grace, I assure you?—”
“You will assure me of nothing. You will restore the wages. You will send a written apology to each of the affected staff, which I will review before it is delivered. And you will submit a revised expenditure proposal that identifies savings in areas where the people being saved upon are not the ones who can least afford it.” Tristan’s gaze moved across the three men with the unhurried precision of a lighthouse beam.
“Gentlemen. This household does not profit from the labour of the vulnerable. If any of you find that principle incompatible with your continued employment, I will accept your resignation with relief. Are there questions?”
There were no questions.
The men departed. Their footsteps crunched on the gravel hastily.
Tristan remained on the terrace. He stood very still for a moment, his hands braced on the stone balustrade, his head slightly bowed. Then he straightened, rolled down his sleeves with mechanical precision, and turned toward the house.
He did not see her. The hedge concealed her bench entirely, and he disappeared through the terrace doors before his gaze swept the garden.
Rosamund sat very still.
The scene replayed behind her closed lids with the unwanted clarity of something that had been intended for no audience and had therefore revealed more than any performance could. She had seen powerful men exercise authority before. Her father had been gentle with it—too gentle, perhaps, which was why stronger men had found him useful and disposable. Edwin wielded it like a scalpel, precise and intimate and designed to wound. The solicitors and barristers who had circulated at the Gray’s Inn gathering had worn it like cologne—detectable, deliberate, applied for the benefit of anyone near enough to notice.
Tristan wielded it like a man who despised the necessity but would not delegate it to someone less careful. The fury had been real—she had heard it in the drop of his voice, in the particular stillness of his body, in the way his hands had gripped the balustrade with a force that whitened his knuckles. But the fury had not been for himself. It had been for six women whose names he apparently knew, whose years of service he had counted, and whose wages he considered a matter of sufficient importance to address before noon on a Tuesday.
There had been no audience. No wife to impress. No political ally to reassure. He had not known she was listening. This was simply what Tristan Rathbourne did when the people under his protection were treated unfairly—he corrected it with the same thoroughness he brought to legal filings and morning correspondence, and then he went inside and presumably continued with his day as though justice were a household chore to be ticked off the list between breakfast and luncheon.
This does not change anything,she told herself.A man can defend servants and destroy families. One does not cancel theother. He ruined your father. He broke your mother’s heart. He?—
“Rosa!”
Clara materialised at her knee, breathless and grass-stained, a dandelion clutched in each fist.
“I found flowers. Can I give one to the prince? He looked cross again at breakfast. Eleanor’s mother always said flowers make cross people happy.”
Rosamund lifted a brow. “The prince?”
Clara nodded eagerly. “He looks like the one in the fairytales you read me.” She tilted her head pensively. “Just angrier.”
Rosamund’s chest tightened. She took the dandelion Clara offered—a small, brave, improbable thing, already wilting in the child’s warm grip—and turned it between her fingers.
“Perhaps later, darling.”
“But he needs itnow. He was shouting at those men. I heard him from the fairy door.” Clara’s brow furrowed slightly. ‘. “He was not shouting in a mean way, though. He was shouting like you do when the landlord says unfair things. Cross because of wrong, not cross because of angry.”
The accuracy of the observation struck with a precision that a six-year-old had no right to possess.
