When the visit ended, Clara did not say goodbye from the carpet. She stood up, crossed the room, and tugged Edwin’s sleeve.
“You may come back,” she said. “But you must practise your drawbridge. It was not acceptable.”
Edwin bent and took her hand with the gravity of a man accepting a commission. “I shall dedicate myself to the task.”
Clara nodded, satisfied, and returned to her castle. Edwin straightened and met Rosamund’s eyes, and the expression he wore—grateful, humbled, carrying the residue of an hour spent on a carpet with a child who had judged him and found him provisionally adequate—was so precisely the expression a repentant uncle should wear that Rosamund could not find a single flaw in it.
That was what frightened her.
Tristan waited until the carriage wheels had faded before he spoke.
“She asked when he would come again.” His voice was flat. “On Tuesday. While you were answering a letter in the morning room. She came to me and asked when her uncle would visit next.”
Rosamund’s chest tightened. “She is a child. She does not understand?—”
“She understands enough to prefer his company to mine during the hours he is present. She built a castle with him today and did not ask me to join.” He paused. “I am not wounded by it. I am telling you what I see. He is creating attachment, Rosamund. Deliberately. Patiently. And when the attachment is strong enough, he will use it.”
“You cannot know?—”
“I know what he is.”
The same words he had spoken weeks ago about the parcel. The same flat certainty. The same refusal to show the evidence behind it.
“You could sit down,” she said, and the frustration broke through before she could temper it. “You could speak to himas though he were a guest rather than a prisoner under surveillance. Clara notices these things. She asked me yesterday why you stand by the fire like a soldier whenever her uncle comes.”
“Because I am a soldier whenever her uncle comes.”
“He has done nothing wrong.”
“He has done nothingyet.”
The wordyetsat between them. Rosamund wanted to pull it apart—to demand the evidence, to force the locked drawers of his silence open—but the set of his jaw told her what it always told her: the door was closed. He would open it when he chose. Not before.
On the fourth visit, Edwin made his request.
He had been exemplary. Three visits without incident, without overreach, without so much as a glance at Clara that lingered past the boundary of ordinary affection. He had deferred to Rosamund on every question, addressed Tristan with unfailing courtesy despite receiving nothing but granite in return, and conducted himself with the precise calibration of a man who understood that the ground he stood on was borrowed and could be reclaimed at any moment.
He waited until the tea had been poured and Clara was occupied with her fable book on the carpet before he spoke.
“I wondered,” he said, his voice carrying the gentle hesitance of a man broaching a subject he knew might be refused, “whether you might consider allowing Clara to spend an afternoon at my London rooms. I have prepared a small nursery—nothing elaborate, a few toys, some books. I thought she might enjoy the novelty, and it would give us a chance to know each other in a setting that feels less...” He gestured at the drawing room with a self-deprecating smile. “Less judicial.”
The request was warm. Reasonable. Delivered with such careful humility that refusing it felt needlessly cruel.
Rosamund opened her mouth.
“No.”
Tristan’s voice came from the hearth. One syllable. No anger. No elaboration. The flat, clean finality of a gate being shut.
Edwin’s head turned toward him. The smile remained, but something behind it shifted—a rearrangement so swift and so precisely controlled that Rosamund would have missed it entirely had she not been watching for exactly that.
“Your Grace,” Edwin said, and his voice held a patience that cost him nothing because it was manufactured rather than felt, “I understand your caution. I have given you little reason to trust me. But I ask you to consider?—”
“The answer is no.”
“—that a child’s relationship with her family should not be governed by?—”
“The answer,” Tristan said, and each word landed with the weight of a stone being placed on a scale, “is no. It was no before you asked. It will be no when you ask again. And if the repetition wearies you, Mr Vale, I invite you to consider that I find your presence in my home considerably more wearying, and have endured it with a patience I did not know I possessed.”
