She turned toward the corridor that led to the morning room and her writing desk. Three steps. Four. He watched her go—the straight spine, the pinned hair, the unhesitating stride of a woman who had identified a task and intended to complete it before the household finished breakfast.
“Rosamund.”
She stopped. Did not turn.
“You are right.” Two words. He gave them the weight they deserved—no qualification, no caveat, no strategic concession dressed as agreement. Simply the admission of a man who had been wrong about something that mattered and was not too proud to say so. “About all of it.”
She turned her head. Just enough for him to see the line of her jaw, the corner of her mouth, the single strand of hair that had escaped its pin and lay against the side of her neck.
“I know,” she said.
Then she was gone.
He remained there longer than dignity permitted. Then he climbed to his study, sat behind his desk, and pulled the household ledger toward him. He found Barrow’s entry. He noted the man’s address—a lodging house in Clerkenwell—and beside it, in a hand that was not quite steady, he wrote:Wife? Children? Enquire.
Then he set the pen down with a deep breath.
She had called him by his name. Not Your Grace. Not a title wielded like a shield.Tristan.Twice, in the space of a single argument, she had used the word as though it belonged to her.
He closed his eyes. The morning continued around him—servants moving, fires being laid, the whole industrious machinery of a house that did not pause for the private reckonings of the man who owned it.
From somewhere below, faintly, the sound of a writing desk being opened. A chair drawn back. The quiet, purposeful industry of a woman who had just finished telling the Duke of Rathbourne that he was wrong, and who was now, without ceremony or delay, doing the thing he had not thought to do.
He opened the ledger again. There was work to be done, and the woman down the corridor had made it clear—in terms that leftno room for comfortable evasion—that doing the right thing was not enough if you did it without thinking about who got hurt along the way.
She had done what never once occurred to him.
And he had absolutely no defence against that.
CHAPTER 16
“You are sitting in the wrong chair.”
Clara stood in the nursery doorway with her hands on her hips. She was addressing the Duke of Rathbourne as though he had committed an offence punishable by banishment.
Tristan looked up from the correspondence he had not been reading. He occupied the armchair near the window—the only adult-sized piece of furniture in the room—and wore the expression of a man who had wandered in by accident and intended to maintain the fiction indefinitely.
“I was not aware the chairs had assignments.”
“That one is for guests. Your chair is there.” She pointed to the miniature wooden seat beside the low table, where chipped porcelain cups stood in formation alongside three biscuits and a velvet rabbit propped upright as though it held a standing invitation.
Rosamund stopped in the corridor. She had come to collect Clara for their walk, and what she found instead rooted her to the floorboards.
“I do not believe I will fit,” Tristan said, with the measured diplomacy he reserved for Parliamentary committees.
“You have to fit. You are the king.”
“I was not informed of my appointment.”
“I am informing you now.”
Clara seized his hand and pulled. The effect was roughly equivalent to a sparrow attempting to relocate a cathedral, but Tristan rose and let himself be led.
The chair groaned beneath him. His knees rose nearly to his chest. The table struck him at the level of his lowest rib.
Clara placed a paper crown on his head.
It was constructed from newsprint and paste, decorated with watercolour renderings of flowers—or possibly turnips; the artistic intent was ambiguous—and it sat on his dark hair with the solemn absurdity of a tiara balanced on a warhorse.
