Dominic cleared his throat, not knowing what to say, and they kept walking in silence. His head was already full to bursting with too many emotions he simply did not have the time to sort in that moment.
Ahead, Annabelle had her head bent toward James’s height and was listening to him describe something about the wheels on a tin monkey. James was speaking in the short, factual bursts he used when something had caught his interest more than it had put him on guard.
Annabelle caught him watching her twice.
The first time was at the glass marble stall, when she glanced up from explaining to James how light moved through the blue ones and found Dominic’s eyes already on her. He moved them toward the juggler at the path’s edge without altering his expression.
The second time was near the pamphlet stand, and this time the eye contact held for three seconds before he turned away toward Helena’s voice, and Annabelle looked back at the pamphlet she’d been holding and read nothing.
She set it down.
James had already moved. She registered the empty space at her left before she registered him at the far end of the row, twelve feet ahead and closing on a low table, moving with the purposeful momentum of a boy who had fixed on something and stopped checking whether the crowd was in his path. She reached out.
Dominic was there before she completed the movement. She did not see him come from her right, and then his arm was past hers, his hand closing on James’s collar at the table’s edge, and the back of his knuckles came against the inside of her wrist where her glove ended. The contact was less than an inch of skin, but it was warm, and it stayed, and he did not pull his arm back, and neither did she, while the fair went on all around them; the crowd pressing past at their backs, the keeper saying something to James, a child somewhere to the left laughing at the juggler.
Annabelle was close enough to him to feel the warmth at her shoulder, and could see from the corner of her eye the line of his jaw as he kept his eyes on James and not on her. So, she did not look at him either, both of them watching James, even as the press of his knuckles against her bare wrist sent sparks crackling up and down her spine.
James had both hands on the table. There was a small brass horse on it with a key at its flank, and when the keeper wound the key, the horse’s hind legs kicked through their arc. James watched it complete the sequence, then looked at the keeper.
“Again,” he said.
The keeper obliged and wound the key. The horse kicked.
“Again.”
That was when Dominic let his arm fall, and Annabelle drew hers back; and the moment settled into the noise of it and was gone.
“May I have that one?” James asked the keeper, pointing at the horse.
He left with it wrapped in paper and tucked under one arm.
Helena bought him a gingerbread swan from the next stall, and he ate it with the methodical concentration of a boy whose attention was elsewhere. He made observations as they walked: the structural weakness of a canvas stall-cover in a strong wind, the angle the rope walker above them would need to correct for his weight distribution, the number of children who had bought the same gingerbread shape without apparently consulting each other.
After an hour, he had stopped tracking the crowd’s edges and started walking through it.
By the south row, he was at Annabelle’s side without appearing to have put himself there, his sleeve brushing her arm when the path narrowed.
Lady Rosenhall was mid-debate with Helena about the ring-toss game, which she had now attempted, by Helena’s count, twice.
“The first time I was testing the weight,” Lady Rosenhall said.
“You said you were aiming at the far post.”
“I was assessing the trajectory.”
“You missed the far post both times.”
“I hit the second post both times. That was my intention.”
Helena looked at James. “She was aiming at the far post.”
James considered Lady Rosenhall, then the memory of the second post. “The far post is harder,” he said, with the gravity of a boy offering genuine technical counsel. “But you can correct the angle if you stand slightly left of center.”
Lady Rosenhall regarded him. “That is very sound advice, Lord James.”
“I know,” he said.
Helena started laughing. Lady Rosenhall pressed her lips together and looked ahead with great dignity.
