“Clara, you have not been given permission?—”
“Mrs Alcott said I might have two after luncheon. It is after luncheon.”
“By twelve minutes.”
“After is after.” Clara prised the lid off the tin, selected the largest biscuit with surgical precision, and bit into it with the unhesitating confidence of a girl who had been promised that there would be more.
Eleanor watched. Rosamund watched Eleanor watch.
“She does not check,” Eleanor said quietly.
“Check?”
“The biscuit. She took it and turned away. She did not look back to see whether anyone would take it from her.” Eleanor’s gaze had not left Clara. “Watch her hands, Rosa.”
Rosamund watched. Clara’s fingers moved loosely around the biscuit, arranging crumbs on the saucer she had requisitioned from the tea tray, rearranging them into a pattern that appeared to satisfy some private aesthetic code. In the townhouse, Clara had held on to everything as though it could vanish at any moment—food, toys, Bess, the edges of Rosamund’s cloak. Her grip had been the grip of a child who had learnt that the world could not be trusted to leave things where she put them.
Here, she set a biscuit on the saucer and left it there. Walked to the window. Came back. The biscuit had not moved. She did not seem surprised.
“When did that start?” Eleanor asked.
“I do not know. I did not notice until now.”
“Children do not do that in houses where they feel unsafe.” Eleanor’s voice held no argument—only the flat, clear certainty of an observation that did not require agreement. “They do not run through corridors without looking over their shoulders. They do not shout for the attention of adults unless they believe the attention will come without cost.”
Clara, oblivious, had returned to the tin. “May I have one for Bess? She was very good during the curtsey.”
“Bess does not eat biscuits.”
“She eats them in her heart.”
Rosamund pressed her lips together. “One more. And then you must share with Eleanor, because she has come a very long way and has not been offered anything.”
“She can have the small one.” Clara placed a biscuit the size of a ha’penny on a saucer and carried it to Eleanor with the gravity of a duchess hosting a state dinner.
“You are too generous,” Eleanor said.
“I know.”
Tea arrived—Mrs Alcott brought it personally, which was unusual and telling. The housekeeper set the tray with quiet precision and withdrew, and from the corridor came the murmur of the household’s ongoing machinery—footsteps, a door closing, a low exchange between servants..
Clara had finished her biscuits and was now constructing a small village out of sugar cubes she had liberated from the tray. She built a wall around the sugar-cube house, knocked it down, rebuilt it taller. Knocked it down again. The destruction pleased her enormously.
“His Grace does this,” she announced. “He builds things and I knock them down. He says I have a gift for demolition.”
“Does he build often?” Eleanor asked, and the question was directed at Clara but aimed at Rosamund.
“Every day. After tea. He sits on the floor even though Mrs Alcott says the floor is for children and dogs, and he builds towers and I knock them down and he says—” Clara dropped her voice to a growl that bore a passing resemblance to a constipated bear. “‘That was a structurally significant wall, Miss Clara, and you have committed an act of war.’”
“And what do you say?”
“I say ‘good’ and I knock down another one.”
Eleanor bit her lip. Rosamund reached for her teacup and discovered her hand was not entirely steady.
“Is she happy?” Eleanor asked, and the question had shed its disguise now. “Truly?”
“She sleeps through the night.” The words came before Rosamund could weigh them, pulled to the surface by something stronger than caution. “She eats without watching the door. She runs—Eleanor, sherunsthrough this house as though it has always belonged to her. She told Mrs Alcott last week that this is her home. Not her house. Herhome. She has never used that word before. Not in four years.”
