“Nor I.” He closed the distance between them. “You are far from the house.”
“I needed air.” A faint smile touched her mouth. “The nursery had begun to feel… confined.”
“And Thomas?”
“Asleep. Jenny is with him.” She hesitated. “I hope I am not neglecting my duties. I simply could not bear to be inside any longer.”
“You are not.” The words came more sharply than he intended. He moderated his tone. “You have done more for him in a month than I managed in five. You are entitled to walk where you please.”
“You are generous, Your Grace.”
“I am not generous. I am accurate.” He glanced ahead along the path. “May I walk with you?”
A pause—brief, but not empty.
“I should like that,” she said.
They fell into step.
The woods received them in silence. Bare branches arched overhead, and the ground lay thick with fallen leaves. Their footsteps were softened by it.
For a time, they walked without speaking.
“I used to walk like this with my father,” Lorraine said at last. “Every Sunday, regardless of the weather.”
Dominic glanced at her. Her expression had grown thoughtful, touched with a hint of melancholy.
“Where would you go?”
“Everywhere.” A small smile. “He knew the land intimately—every path, every hollow. He would show me where foxes denned, where mushrooms grew, which plants were useful and which were best avoided.”
She adjusted her cloak as the wind shifted.
“I think it was his way of giving me something larger than what we had. We could not travel. There was no London season, no grand tour. But he made the world we had feel sufficient.”
“He sounds a remarkable man.”
“He was.” Her voice softened. “He was impractical, and given to dreams, and generous to a fault. He spent half our income on books and the other half on charitable causes my mother considered frivolous. But he loved us—my sister and me—with such complete devotion that I never once doubted I was wanted.”
Dominic thought of his own father—the cold silences, the perpetual disappointment, the sense of being measured against some impossible standard and always found lacking. He had never doubted that the old Duke wanted him, but only in the way one wanted an heir: as an instrument, a continuation, a vessel for the family name.
“You were fortunate,” he said quietly. “To have that certainty.”
“I know.” Lorraine turned to him, and there was understanding in her gaze—something deeper beneath it, something that made his chest tighten. “The loss does not fade, not entirely. But one learns to carry it.”
“Does one?”
“One must.” Her smile held, though it was touched with sadness. “The alternative is to be crushed by it. And I have no intention of allowing that.”
They walked on in silence. The path brought them to the edge of the woods, where the land opened into rolling moorland, dull with spent heather beneath a low autumn sky.
“I don’t know how to carry it,” Dominic heard himself say. The words came unbidden, drawn from somewhere deep and long-buried. “The weight of it. Some days I think I shall drown.”
Lorraine stopped. He did the same, turning to face her, and found her watching him closely.
“What weight?” she asked. “Spain? Your friend?”
“All of it. Spain, William, the men who died—the ones I could not save.” He gave a short, humourless breath. “Thomas, most of all. Every time I look at him, I see what I have failed. Who I have failed.”
