“The beak is perfect. She is mistaken.”
A grin—wide, gap-toothed, radiant. “May I hang it in your study?”
“You may hang it wherever you please.”
Thomas slipped past him into the study with the quiet certainty of a child who had decided the room belonged, at least in part, to him. He surveyed the walls, selected a place beside the window—“So you can see the real ones and mine at the same time”—and looked back expectantly.
“We shall require a nail,” Dominic said. “And a hammer. Do you know where the toolroom is?”
“No.”
“Then I shall show you.”
They went together—the Duke and the boy—down the corridor and through the servants’ passage to the toolroom behind the kitchens, where they selected a nail and a small hammer and carried them back with the solemnity of soldiers bearing ammunition. Thomas held the painting against the wall while Dominic drove the nail—slightly crooked—and together they stepped back to inspect the result.
“There,” Thomas said, with satisfaction. “Now your study is not bare.”
Dominic looked at the garish, lopsided, entirely magnificent painting—and felt the ice crack.
Not shatter. Not melt. Simply—crack. A single fissure through the surface he had spent three days rebuilding, admitting a narrow shaft of light that fell directly upon the part of him that had been trying, very quietly, to die.
“No,” he said softly. “It is not.”
Thomas reached up and took his hand. The gesture was unthinking—the easy intimacy of a child who had, for the moment, forgotten caution—and the small, warm weight of those fingers against Dominic’s scarred ones sent a tremor through him.
“Miss Weston says you have been very busy,” Thomas said, in a tone that suggested he did not entirely credit the explanation but was willing to accept it. “She says important men have important things to think about.”
“She is being generous.”
“She also said—” Thomas hesitated. “She said that sometimes people need time to be quiet. Even people who love you. She said it does not mean they have stopped caring.”
She is managing me,Dominic thought.Through a seven-year-old.Conducting diplomacy by means of a child with a paintbrush—and succeeding.
“Miss Weston is very wise,” he said.
“She is.” Thomas squeezed his hand. “Are you finished being quiet now?”
The question was devastating in its simplicity. Notwill you stop, notplease stop, notI need you—only the calm, practical inquiry of a child accustomed to absence, asking whether this one had reached its end.
“Yes,” Dominic said. “I believe I am.”
***
He found her that evening in the library.
Not in her chair—she stood at the window, looking out into the darkened garden, her arms folded about herself in the posture he had come to recognise as armour.
She did not turn when he entered.
“The Hardings are coming,” he said. No preamble. She deserved none. “Mid-February.”
She was quiet for a moment. Then: “How long have you known?”
“Three days.”
“Three days.” A slight nod. Still not turning. “That explains the locked door.”
“Lorraine—”
