“Master Thomas’s birthday, Your Grace?”
“Yes. I find I am… uncertain of the date.”
Uncertain. A magnificently inadequate word. He was not uncertain. He was ignorant—wholly, catastrophically ignorant of the most basic fact about the child who had lived beneath his roof these seven months. The child whose father had died in his arms. The child whose care he had sworn to assume.
He did not know when William’s son had been born. He did not know whether the boy preferred chocolate or lemon. He did not know—and this particular omission had struck him like a musket ball at three o’clock that morning, dragging him from a rare, untroubled sleep—whether Thomas had ever enjoyed a proper birthday at all.
Mrs Potter closed her ledger.
“The seventeenth of December, Your Grace.”
Eleven days.
Dominic felt something sink sharply within him. He had been so occupied—by the estate, by Thomas’s lessons, by the war that still lived within him, and most recently by the wholly distracting presence of Lorraine Weston—that the date had approached unseen.
Fitting. He had always been poor at recognising an ambush.
“Has anyone made arrangements?” he asked, though Mrs Potter’s expression already supplied the answer.
“Miss Weston mentioned it to me last week, Your Grace. She has been making quiet preparations.”
Of course she had.
Lorraine—who had been at Rovewood scarcely two months—had remembered what Dominic, who bore the charge of the boy’s care, had not even thought to ask.
The shame was sharp, clean, and deserved.
“What sort of preparations?”
“A modest celebration. A special meal. Decorations for the nursery. A cake, if Cook can contrive it.” Mrs Potter paused. “She did not wish to presume upon Your Grace’s involvement, but I believe she hoped—”
“She hoped I would not spoil it by resembling a block of ice.”
The faintest movement touched Mrs Potter’s mouth. “Those were not her precise words, Your Grace.”
“No. Hers would have been more gracious—and rather more pointed.” He exhaled. “I wish to be involved. Tell me what is required.”
“A gift, Your Grace. Something with meaning. Something that tells him he is seen.”
Something with meaning.
Dominic thought of the wooden horse—Captain—carried everywhere now, clutched like a small, steadfast promise. That had been a beginning.
This required more.
Something that said not merelyI see you, butyou belong here.
“Thank you, Mrs Potter,” he said, and left before she could observe the tightening of his throat.
***
He found Lorraine in the library after luncheon, curled in her chair—his chair, by rights, though long since claimed by quiet occupation—studying a sheet of paper covered in her neat, ink-stained hand.
She looked up as he entered, and the smile that crossed her face—swift, private, warming her eyes from within—struck him squarely in the chest.
“Your Grace.” Her tone was perfectly correct. Her eyes were not.
They moved over him with a familiarity that had nothing to do with rank.
