His mother was already leaning forward slightly, the way she did when she was managing anticipation. She had become rather practiced at managing it, this past year. Oliver and Megan had spent time in London but had retired to Saxton Castle for her confinement.
Oliver came out to meet them before the carriage had properly stopped, which Harry noted with approval. He was coatless in the October cold and appeared entirely unbothered by this, which was consistent with everything Harry knew of him.
“Your Grace.” Oliver handed his mother down with the formality the occasion called for and then shook Harry’s hand with the firmness of a man genuinely glad to see him. “He arrived three weeks ago. He is, in my considered opinion, the finest infant in England, and I am prepared to defend that assessment.”
“What a perfectly reasonable position,” Harry said.
“I thought so.”
His mother had already gone inside. Harry fell into step beside Oliver, and they followed through the great hall, which smelled of wood smoke and something warm from the kitchens, and up the staircase to the corridor the drawing room.
Oliver stopped him outside the door.
“She’s well,” Oliver said. Not conversationally. The way a man said something he’d been thinking about and needed to say properly. “She’s—” He paused, which was unusual enough that Harry paid attention. “She’s more herself than I’ve ever seen her. If that makes sense.”
“It does,” Harry said.
Oliver nodded. Opened the door.
His mother was already across the room, and Megan was sitting on the settee with a baby in her arms and the image was perfect. She sat with the particular self-possessed composure that Harry had come to understand was not the absence of feeling but rather what Megan looked like when she had so many feelings that she’d organized them all very neatly to avoid being overwhelmed by them. She was pale and had shadows under her eyes and she was smiling at their mother with an expression on her face that Harry had spent four years trying to imagine and had not quite managed to.
“Harry.” She held out her hand. “Come meet James David Sommerset.”
They’d named their son after James and his second name after Harry’s father. No wonder his mother was beaming.
He crossed the room and took it and looked down at his nephew, who was small and red-faced and ostentatiously certain of his own importance, and felt something settle in his chest that he hadn’t realized had been unsettled.
“He looks like Oliver,” Harry said.
“He has my nose,” Megan said.
“He has,” Harry agreed. “Oliver’s expression, though.”
“He’s only been in the world a short while and he already looks faintly disapproving of everything in it,” Oliver said from behind him, which was so accurate that Harry laughed.
His mother was holding James now, which she was doing with the absolute focused concentration of a woman who understood precisely what she was holding and was not going to allow herself to cry about it in company. Harry watched her face and thought,we got this, in the end.Whatever had been broken, whatever had been taken, they had gotten this.
He stayed for an hour, longer than he should have given how tired Megan looked. To her mother’s horror she refused to use awet nurse. His mother did not want to leave. Megan let her hold the baby until he woke and cried and required his mother, and then the Duchess kissed her daughter and her grandson and allowed herself to be extracted with only moderate difficulty.
“Harold will show you to your rooms. I’m glad you came.” And Oliver moved back to his wife’s side.
In the corridor, Harry paused and looked back through the door he’d left half-open.
Oliver was sitting on the edge of the settee. Megan had the baby at her breast and was talking, quiet and low, and Oliver had his head bent toward her in the attitude of a man who is listening to something he cannot hear enough of. His hand was on her back, very still. He was not performing anything for an audience. There was no audience. He simply looked at her the way the sun looked at the ground, with the uncomplicated certainty of something that was not going to stop.
Harry pulled the door quietly shut.
He had promised Douglas he would go to Longmere Hall in the morning.
* * *
Cavendish’s propertysat at the end of a lane that had seen better maintenance, behind walls that were high enough to be functional and not quite high enough to be extraordinary. Harry rode rather than taking the carriage because he wanted to be able to leave quickly if the circumstances recommended it, and because men who arrived on horseback and alone were less remarkable than men who arrived in a ducal equipage with footmen.
He had Douglas’s information. He had the address of Arabella Langton. He had, which he would not have admitted to Douglas because Douglas would have argued with him about it,the instinct of a man who had spent the last year watching what captivity looked like from a close distance and had developed a reliable sense for the shape of it.
The butler who admitted him was the kind of butler who asked too many questions. Harry gave his name and title and watched the man recalibrate with the particular speed of a man whose calculations were primarily about status and was shown into a drawing room that was cold and over-furnished and felt somehow like a waiting room rather than a space where anyone lived. He had at least achieved more than Douglas. He’d gained entry.
Ralph Cavendish appeared after ten minutes. He was perhaps fifty, compact, with the eyes of a man who assessed everything he looked at for what it was worth and appeared currently uncertain of what to make of a duke on his threshold. He was pleasant, measured, entirely cooperative, and Harry disliked him immediately and completely in a way he’d learned to trust.
