Page 20 of Duke of Sapphire

Why did anyone bother if he was going to eventually climb down himself?

“Has he always been fond of climbing?” Henry strode toward the back of the manor with Mrs. Wick in tow.

“Nae especially, but after the news of his parents…”

The kitchen garden was walled on three sides, its beds cut back after the summer harvest, the stone paths between them damp with recent rain. Ian was sitting on the far wall with his back to the house, looking out at the moorland beyond. He had found a stick somewhere and was running its tip along the mortar between the stones.

He did not turn when Henry came through the gate.

Henry did not announce himself. He walked to the wall and stopped a few feet away, not crowding. Then he sat on the edge of a low planting border and waited.

After a moment, Ian looked sideways at him.

“I am your father’s cousin,” Henry said. He did not use his title this time. “On his father’s side. We grew up together, mostly. He was better at fishing than I was, which he never let me forget.”

Ian said nothing. He ran the stick along the mortar again.

“I came because I was worried,” Henry said. “That is all. I did not come to give orders or change things. I came because when someone you are fond of is in trouble, you go. That is generally how it works.”

Ian looked at the moorland. “I daenae need anyone to come.”

“I know you don’t think so.”

“Me mam and da are comin' back.” He said it plainly, without aggression, the way someone states a fact that has been questioned too many times. “Everyone keeps actin' like they’re nae, and they are. So ye can go back.”

“I am not going back to London.”

Ian glanced at him again. It was a very particular look for a six-year-old. Not hostile, exactly. Assessing. “Why nae?”

“Because I am not finished being worried yet.”

A pause. The stick stopped moving. Ian stared at the wall in front of him for a long moment, and Henry could see him deciding something—deciding whether Henry was the kind of person who would keep talking regardless, and whether it was worth answering, and whether any of this was going to be different from the last seven adults who had come through the kitchen garden with their careful expressions and their patient voices.

He slid off the wall.

The boy did not look at Henry, nor did he say another word. He simply tucked the stick under his arm, stepped down from the wall onto the path, and walked away toward the far gate. His boots were too muddy for someone who had been sitting still. Henry wondered how long he had been out here, and who had noticed.

The gate opened. It shut.

Henry stayed where he was.

He had no strategy for a child who would not be managed. Henry searched his mind for a proper course of action, but nothing occurred to him immediately. This was confounding, for he had never felt helpless before.

He did not like the feeling at all.

CHAPTER 7

“Ring for whatever you need,” Mrs. Wick said, patting the bell pull by the door with the brisk efficiency of a woman who had been ensuring other people’s comfort for thirty years and expected it to continue. “Supper will be laid at seven. If you’re hungry before then, I’ll have somethin' sent up.”

“Thank you,” Charlotte said. “You are very kind.”

Mrs. Wick gave her one more of those sharp, measuring looks—the sort that seemed to weigh a person and find them lighter than expected, but not uninteresting—and then she was gone, the door closing softly behind her.

Charlotte stood in the middle of the room for a moment.

Then she sat on the edge of the bed.

It was a good bed. A proper bed, wide and solid, with a wool coverlet and real pillows, not the thin inn-bed bolsters she had been sleeping against for the better part of a week. The fire in the grate had already been burning for some time. Someone had thought of putting a small jug of water on the washstand.