Page 129 of Duke of Sapphire

Me Family.

Henry set the drawing on the desk.

He looked at it.

He thought about Ian counting soldiers on the garden path with one careful finger. He thought about Charlotte on her knees in the snow trying to talk him down from a roof. He thought about lemon sponge in the margins of a list and raspberry jam between the layers and Ian laughing at the candles, that short, startled, completely unguarded laugh.

Before, he had not dared to name all he felt while having these experiences. He had called it arrangement and duty and practicality, and he had told Tristan nothing had changed, and he had told himself the same thing every morning, and he had been lying.

Somewhere between the carriage steps and the picnic by the stream and the nursery and the atlas under the elm tree, it had become real.

And he had let it fall apart.

He decides what is best for me without asking what I want.

Charlotte’s voice in his memory. Not speaking of Henry. Speaking of her father.

Henry pushed back from the desk.

He sat there for a moment with the drawing in front of him and that sentence sitting in his chest like a coal still burning, and he saw it—clearly, suddenly, the way you saw a thing when you had been standing too close to it for months.

He had done the same thing. Exactly the same. He had sat in the library and opened that conversation about what comes next, and when Charlotte had gone quiet, he had not asked. He had not said: I want you to stay. I want you here. I am asking, not assuming. He had let the silence answer for him, and the silence had answered wrong, and then he had been in Matlock when she left, and he had come home to a letter on his blotter, squared to the edges, written in the hand of someone trying very hard to be gracious about being let go.

He had decided what was best for her. He had decided she would be better off making her own choices elsewhere, and he had not once asked her what those choices were.

Her father had done that. Henry had done it too.

He picked up the drawing and looked at it one more time. The three figures under the tree. The enormous bird-hat. His own dark scribbles, Charlotte’s skirt, Ian’s gap-toothed smile.

Me Family.

He folded it, tucked it inside his coat, and stood.

He was across the hall in six strides.

“Gedge.”

The butler appeared from the direction of the kitchen passage.

“Your Grace.”

“I require the carriage,” Henry said. “Today. Within the hour.”

“Of course, Your Grace. Shall I⁠—”

“Surrey.” Henry pulled on his coat and held out his hand for his hat without slowing. “The Countess De Clare’s house. You have the direction. If you do not, find someone who does.”

“I have it,” Gedge said. He already had Henry’s hat in hand. He had, in Henry’s estimation, always had whatever was needed at exactly the right moment. It was one of his finest qualities.

“I do not know how long I shall be,” Henry said. He checked that the drawing was still in his breast pocket. It was. “Do not wait supper.”

“Very good, Your Grace.”

Henry nodded.

He stepped outside. The morning was bright, cold, and the carriage horses were already being walked from the stable block. Someone had wasted no time.

He stood on the steps and felt the drawing against his chest.