Rosamund did not turn from the window. Below, Clara had found something at the base of the tree—a folded piece of paper, tucked between the roots, its edges damp from the morning’s dew. She held it up and shrieked, and the sound carried through the glass like a bell struck in the open air.
“Parsons! Parsons, look! The fairy wrote back!”
Rosamund’s hand pressed against the windowpane. The glass was cool under her palm.
He had been out this morning. Before dawn. While the household slept and the garden was still dark, he had walked across that lawn and knelt beside that tree and left a letter in a fairy’s handwriting for a child who was not his—because she had asked, and because he could not bear to disappoint her, and because somewhere beneath the granite and the silence and the careful distances he maintained between himself and everything that might crack him open, the Duke of Rathbourne had a heart that wrote letters to fairies.
She had not known about this morning’s letter. He had not told her. He never told her.
Eleanor collected her pelisse and the Cowper at half past three. She paused on the front step and held Rosamund’s hands.
“Come to the concert on Friday. Lady Ashworth is hosting. The music will be mediocre and the company will be tolerable and it will do you good to be seen.”
“I will consider it.”
“You will come. I will collect you at seven.” Eleanor squeezed her fingers once, released them, and descended the steps. At the bottom, she turned. “Ask him about the fairy letters, Rosa. Not because you need proof. Because the man deserves to know that someone noticed.”
The door closed. The hall went quiet.
From the garden, distantly, Clara’s voice—high and bright and absolutely certain—reading the fairy’s letter aloud to Parsons with the unshakeable conviction of a child who had been taught, by a man who could not say what he felt, that the world contained hidden kindnesses worth searching for.
Rosamund stood in the hall and pressed her back against the closed door and understood, with a clarity that owed nothing to argument and everything to a folded piece of paper left beneath a tree before dawn, that whatever wall she had built between herself and Tristan Rathbourne was no longer a structure she was maintaining.
It was a structure she was standing on the wrong side of.
And the man on the other side—who wrote fairy letters and built towers for demolition and played her mother’s music badly in the dark—was not someone she wished to keep out.
He was someone she was terrified of letting in. Because letting him in meant trusting him. And trusting him meant believing that the hands that had destroyed her family were the same hands that knelt in a dark garden at dawn to make a little girl believe in magic.
She could not hold both truths at once.
But she was beginning to suspect she would have to.
CHAPTER 22
“You cannot possibly expect me to race you to that tree.”
Tristan stood on the gravel path with his hands clasped behind his back and one brow raised.. Clara had already bolted ahead, scattering a flock of pigeons into indignant flight across the Serpentine, and the spring afternoon lay open around them—absurdly, defiantly blue, the kind of London day that arrived without warning and departed before anyone thought to be grateful.
“I expect nothing,” he said. “I merely observed that Clara has issued a direct command, and you appear reluctant to comply.”
“Clara is six. She issues direct commands about everything, including the dietary preferences of imaginary rabbits.”
“The Earl of Carrots has very specific requirements. I would not dismiss them.”
Rosamund pressed her lips together against the laugh that was trying—with increasing impertinence—to escape. She would not give it to him. Not here, not in the open, not with three hundred people strolling the paths of Hyde Park and every one of them pretending not to watch the Duke and Duchess of Rathbourne navigate the minefield of public domesticity.
Clara had reached the birdbath and was conducting a negotiation with a pigeon that showed no interest in her terms. She turned back, hands on hips, wind-tossed and imperious.
“You are both too slow! Come here at once!”
“She has your temperament,” Tristan remarked.
“She has her own temperament. It was fully formed before she could walk.”
They followed her across the lawn—not arm in arm, because that would have constituted an intimacy neither had initiated, but close enough that Rosamund could feel the warmth of him through the spring air. Clara had found the ducks. She crouched at the water’s edge and began distributing crumbs from the biscuit she had smuggled from the nursery with the focused impartiality of a magistrate dispensing justice.
“One for you. One for you. Two for the small one—he is being pushed.”
