Thomas went very still.
Not the rigid stillness of his early days at Rovewood—when silence had been his shield—but the quieter, more deliberate stillness of a child deciding how he ought to feel.
“Already?” he asked.
“Their ship arrived sooner than expected.”
He glanced down at his painting. At the compass. At Captain on the sill.
“Do I have to go with them today?”
The question struck deep. Lorraine kept her voice even.
“No. Not today. They have come to meet you. To become acquainted. There will be time.”
“How much time?”
She did not know. That was the truth—and the uncertainty was its own particular torment.
“Enough,” she said. “I promise.”
Thomas set down his brush, picked up the compass, and squared his shoulders with a small, determined dignity that made her chest ache.
“Will you come with me?”
“I will take you to your room,” she said. “Jenny will help you make yourself presentable. I must go down first—but I will come back for you.”
“And His Grace?”
“He will be there.”
Thomas nodded once, slipped his hand into hers, and let her lead him from the schoolroom—toward his bedchamber, where Jenny would be waiting, and where the small, necessary rituals of preparation would stand between him and the strangers below.
***
The Hardings were not what Lorraine had expected.
She had imagined—feared—formidable strangers: stiff, imperious, the sort who regarded children as obligations and governesses as furniture. She had imagined cold handshakes, measured scrutiny, and the quiet, devastating competence of grandparents reclaiming what was rightfully theirs.
Instead, she found Margaret Harding weeping in the entrance hall.
The woman was perhaps sixty, silver-haired, her features marked by years beneath a harsher sun. She was small—shorter than Lorraine—with a face inclined equally to laughter and tears, and was presently attempting both at once. She stood beside her husband, a tall, spare, distinguished gentleman with kind eyes and an air of perpetual apology, and wept without restraint while Graves hovered with a handkerchief and Mrs Potter with tea.
Dominic stood some distance apart. Lorraine marked his position instinctively, the way a sailor marks a shifting wind.
“Forgive me,” Margaret said, pressing the handkerchief to her eyes. “Forgive me—I promised James I should not—but we have waited so long, and the journey was dreadful, and William—our William—”
Her voice broke upon her son’s name. James Harding placed an arm about her shoulders with the gentle certainty of a man well accustomed to the gesture.
“What my wife means to say,” he said, warmth carrying easily through the hall, “is that we are deeply grateful, Your Grace. For all you have done for Thomas. We know it cannot have been easy.”
“It was the least I could do,” Dominic replied. “William was my closest friend.”
Lorraine let out a quiet breath.The least I could dowas not warm, precisely—but neither was it cold. It acknowledged William. It acknowledged the bond between them. For a man who had spent years saying nothing at all, it was almost forthcoming.
But she noticed other things. The way he held himself apart, his hands clasped behind his back in unconscious military formality. The rigid line of his shoulders. The careful blankness settling over his features, like frost beginning to form upon glass—not yet opaque, but thickening with each passing moment.
He is bracing, she thought.He can see the ending, and he is beginning to build the walls that will allow him to endure it.
