“Who are you?” she asked, bluntly. Rosamund looked down to hide a smile. Clara had not yet learnt the ways of society. In a sense, it was a shame that she would, and so lose her childlike honesty.
“Lord Adrian Beaumont. I am your brother-in-law’s cousin, which makes me your cousin of sorts, though the mathematics are rather tortured.” He settled back into his chair and regarded her with mock gravity. “I am told you are exceedingly fierce.”
Clara’s chin lifted. “I am a dragon.”
“Are you.” Adrian did not blink. “Then I must ask—is it safe for an ordinary mortal to sit beside a dragon at breakfast, or does one require proof of courage first?”
Clara considered this with the seriousness the question deserved. “Proof,” she decided.
Adrian glanced about the table, lifted his butter knife, and presented it across his palm with the solemnity of a knight offering a sword for inspection. “I present my weapon. It has seen honourable service against scones, crumpets, and at least one very stubborn pat of butter. I trust it will satisfy.”
Clara took the knife, examined it, tested the edge with her thumb—a gesture she had almost certainly learned from watching Tristan handle correspondence—and handed it back.
“You may sit,” she said. “But if you are boring, I shall eat your toast.”
“A fair arrangement.” Adrian slid the toast rack toward her in what appeared to be a pre-emptive sacrifice. “Help yourself. I prefer to live dangerously.”
Rosamund stood in the doorway and felt a knot she had not realised was there loosen in her stomach, until it began to come undone. The house had been so careful these past days. Every interaction measured, every silence weighted, every room carrying the faint charge of two people navigating a space neither had chosen to share. Adrian Beaumont walked through it like a man who had never met a tension he couldn’t puncture, and the relief of his presence was so immediate that she nearly laughed.
She did not laugh. But she sat down, accepted coffee from the footman, and allowed herself to be drawn into a breakfast that felt, for the first time since her arrival, like something a family might do.
Adrian did not ask about the marriage. He did not enquire after her comfort, or her feelings, or the state of affairs between herself and the man whose house she now occupied. He asked about Clara’s drawings. He listened with genuine attention while Clara described the fairy door beneath the beech tree. He ate three slices of toast with marmalade, complimented Mrs Alcott’s coffee so extravagantly that the housekeeper’s ears went pink, and conducted himself with the particular grace of a man who understood that the best gift he could offer a woman in Rosamund’s position was the temporary absence of scrutiny.
Then, without transition, without the telltale pause that preceded difficult subjects, he began to talk about Tristan.
Not the duke. Not the man whose name appeared in broadsheets and Parliamentary records and the anxious correspondence of solicitors. The boy.
“He tried to train a barn cat once,” Adrian said, spreading butter with the unhurried precision of a man constructing a foundation. “At Rath Hall, the summer we were twelve. An orange beast called Sergeant—named, I believe, by the stable master, who considered all cats to be military appointments. Tristan decided the animal could be taught to fetch, because Tristan at twelve had not yet accepted that the universe contained things resistant to his instruction.”
Rosamund wrapped her hands around her cup. The coffee was hot and very good—absurdly good, in the way that everything in this house was absurdly good—and she held it like an anchor.
“He spent an entire afternoon in the stable yard throwing a leather ball for this cat. The cat sat on a fence post and watched him with the expression of a magistrate observing someone make a fool of themselves in court. Tristan threw. Sergeant stared. Tristan threw again. Sergeant cleaned his paw.” Adrian’s mouth twitched. “By evening, Tristan had not succeeded in teaching the cat anything, but the cat had taught Tristan a considerable amount about the limits of authority. He was furious. He did not speak to the animal for three days, which Sergeant bore with, I must say, remarkable composure.”
Clara giggled. Even Rosamund’s mouth curved, though she caught it before it could become something Adrian might catalogue.
“At thirteen, he argued with our Latin tutor—a man named Cresswell, who had the misfortune of being both pedantic and wrong. Tristan had found an error in Cresswell’s translation of Cicero and corrected it in front of the class. Cresswell insisted he was right. Tristan produced the original text, annotated the relevant passage in the margin, and slid it across the desk with a politeness so lethal that Cresswell resigned by letter that evening.” Adrian shook his head. “The Dowager Duchess was appalled. Tristan’s father thought it was the finest thing anyone in the family had done since Agincourt.”
Rosamund listened. She told herself she was simply being polite—that the stories were entertaining and the morning was pleasant and none of it constituted anything more than the idle reminiscence of a man who liked the sound of his own voice. But the stories were not idle. They were chosen. Small and specific and aimed precisely.
Adrian lifted his cup, drank, and set it down.
“He used to read to James every night.” The name arrived without fanfare, dropped into the conversation the way one drops a stone into water—quietly, with full knowledge of the ripples it would produce. “His younger brother. Even after James was old enough to read perfectly well on his own—fourteen, fifteen, tall enough to look Tristan in the eye—he would come to Tristan’s room after supper with a book under his arm and sit at the foot of the bed, and Tristan would read aloud until the boy fell asleep. Every night. Without fail.”
The breakfast room had gone very still. Clara was occupied with toast and paid the shift no mind, but Rosamund heard it—the careful way Adrian held the words.
“James used to say Tristan did different voices for the characters. Badly, of course—Tristan has many gifts, but theatrical range is not among them. But he tried. He did every villain as a sort of strangled growl and every heroine in a falsetto that made James laugh so hard he once fell off the bed.” Adrian paused. His gaze dropped to his cup and stayed there for a beat too long. “James told me that once. Years later. He said it was the thing he missed most, after Tristan inherited the title and there was suddenly no time for anything that was not duty.”
He stopped. The sentence closed with the finality of a door pulled.
“Well.” Adrian’s smile returned, though it sat differently on his face now—thinner, handled with care. “That was rather more sentimental than I intended. Clara, have you eaten all my toast?”
“Yes,” Clara said, without remorse.
“Outstanding. I shall tell my cook that I was outmanoeuvred by a dragon and could not be expected to defend my breakfast under such conditions.”
He steered the conversation toward the garden, toward Clara’s fairy door, toward a question about whether Mrs Alcott might be persuaded to produce scones. The moment passed. The name James sank beneath the surface of the morning and was not spoken again.
But Rosamund held it.
