“I have always thought myself rather more of a badger.”
“Badgers are grumpy. You smile too much to be a badger.” Clara turned the page. “His Grace is a badger. He is grumpy in the mornings until Mrs Alcott brings his coffee and then he is only a little bit grumpy.”
“Clara—” Rosamund began.
“It is true. He said so himself. He said he is not fit for human company before nine o’clock and that anyone who speaks to him before his coffee deserves whatever they get.”
From the hearth, Tristan’s expression did not change. But a muscle moved at the corner of his jaw in a way that might, under different circumstances, have been amusement.
Edwin settled into the chair nearest Rosamund and began to speak of her parents. He recalled a Christmas at the Hertfordshire estate—the whole family gathered, the house warm with cinnamon and pine, her father reading aloud from Goldsmith after supper while the fire burned low and the children fell asleep one by one on the carpet. He remembered her mother’s garden—the roses she had planted the year Clara was born, the way she used to cut lavender and leave bundles of it on every windowsill so the whole house carried the scent.
“She had the most extraordinary laugh,” Edwin said. “Your mother. Full and warm and completely without self-consciousness. Your father used to say it was the first thing he fell in love with.”
Rosamund’s fingers pressed into the arm of the settee. The memories he summoned were real. She could verify them by the ache they produced—specific, located, the kind of pain that only genuine recollection could reach.
“I remember the lavender,” she said quietly.
“Of course you do.” Edwin’s expression softened. “You used to pick it for her. She would pretend to scold you for cutting the stems too short, and then she would put them in a little vase beside your bed anyway.”
The silence that followed held the particular weight of a room in which grief had been opened and offered, and the person receiving it was not yet certain whether the offering was a gift or a trap.
Tristan’s coffee went cold on the side table. His gaze never left Edwin’s hands.
The visit lasted forty minutes. When Edwin rose to leave, he bowed to Rosamund with a formality that seemed, for the first time, unforced.
“Thank you. This has meant more than you can know.”
“You are welcome to return,” Rosamund said. “Under the same terms.”
“Of course.”
He was shown out. The drawing room settled.
“He mentioned my mother’s garden,” Rosamund said. “The roses she planted the year Clara was born. He could not have invented that.”
“He could have learnt it.” Tristan’s voice was measured. The voice he used for legal matters and Parliamentary committees. “From letters. From servants. From anyone who knew your family before the fall. The most effective lies are built on foundations of truth, Rosamund. A man who wishes to gain your trust does not invent memories. He borrows real ones and arranges them in flattering light.”
“Or he remembers them because they were real, and the grief he claims is also real, and the world is not divided as cleanly as you would like between villains and victims.”
A beat of silence. His jaw compressed.
“No,” he said quietly. “It is not.”
He left the room before she could determine whether the concession had cost him his argument or merely a battle within a longer war.
The second visit, four days later, Edwin brought violets.
Not an extravagant arrangement—a small posy wrapped in brown paper and tied with string, the kind of modest, thoughtful gift that cost little and communicated much. He presented them to Rosamund with both hands and said nothing about them, which was itself a kind of eloquence.
Clara was already on the carpet with the fable book open to the chapter about the fox and the raven, and she looked up only long enough to announce that the raven was stupid and the fox was a cheat and that ifshehad been the raven, she would have dropped a rock on the fox’s head instead of the cheese.
“A pragmatist,” Edwin said. “How refreshing.”
“His Grace says I have a talent for problem-solving that the legal profession would envy.”
“His Grace is not wrong.”
Edwin sat on the floor.
