“There. Now you look proper.”
Rosamund laughed before she could catch it. Not the careful sound she had perfected for ballrooms—the real one, pulled from somewhere beneath her ribs, bright and graceless and wholly beyond her control.
Tristan’s head turned. The crown slid sideways. He did not fix it.
He looked at her the way a man looks at a sound he did not know he had been listening for.
She stepped into the room. “I see you have been conscripted.”
“Voluntarily enlisted.” The crown completed its descent to his left ear. He removed it with what remained of his dignity and set it beside the rabbit.
“You looked proper,” Clara said mournfully.
“I looked ridiculous.”
“That is what proper means when you are king. Rosamund, tell him.”
“I think a good king wears whatever crown his people give him.”
“A dangerous philosophy,” Tristan replied. But he put the crown back on.
* * *
The afternoons became a habit before she noticed it happening.
Clara’s routine was law—nursery games after luncheon, walks if the weather held, stories if it did not—and she enforced it with the will of a girl who had learnt early that routine was the scaffolding upon which safety stood. Rosamund understood this. She had built the same scaffolding herself.
What she had not anticipated was the Duke of Rathbourne’s discovery that half past two was an excellent time to review correspondence in the nursery’s vicinity.
The first day, he carried papers. They did not turn at any interval consistent with actual reading. The second day, he arrived without them. Clara welcomed him as though the presence of a duke in her nursery was no more remarkable than sunlight through the window.
“Three pennies,” Clara said, on the third afternoon, selling him invisible ribbons from an imaginary shop she had opened on the carpet.
“The ribbon is worth at least five.”
“Three. And I shall tell everyone your shop is horrid if you charge more.”
“You would resort to threats?”
“I would resort to facts.”
He sold the ribbon for three pennies. Rosamund bent over Clara’s pinafore and the mending she was pretending to concentrate on, and bit the inside of her cheek until the smile became manageable.
On the fifth afternoon, Clara demanded a story. Not from Rosamund. From Tristan. A dragon story. A brave dragon—one that did not eat people, because that was rude.
“Once,” Tristan began, with the careful deliberation of a man walking terrain he had never mapped, “there was a dragon who lived on a mountain.”
“What colour?”
“Grey.”
“Grey is boring.”
“Silver.”
“Better. What was his name?”
A pause. “Thornwick.”
