Page 27 of Duke of Sapphire

He stopped at the fireplace and looked at the banked coals.

She could not go to London as Ian’s governess. That was simply the fact of it for she was the daughter of Lord Ashford. Her father had a search running through the inquiry offices. Redmont had three privately retained men working the post roads northward.

He could leave her in Scotland. That was the sensible answer. Leave her here with Mrs. Wick, allow the situation to stabilize, let the search grow cold. Scotland was remote. The ton did not and would not reach this far north.

But Ian might not accept a replacement. He was certain of that. He had arrived here and had all the evidence to confirm it.

Separating them now would cost the boy something Henry was not able to quantify and did not want to consider.

He was not sentimental. He was not given to overestimating the weight of a single afternoon. But he had watched his cousin’s son on that floor, and he knew what he had seen, and he was not in the business of pretending he had not seen it.

The last three tutors had lasted a fortnight.

He turned from the fire.

She was not trained. She had no formal qualification. She had read trade journals in a library and fixed soldiers with yarn and told a pirate story with a straight face, and none of that was governess training by any standard he had ever applied.

But Ian had chosen her. And that was something. Though Henry had little experience raising children, he understood how they know things about people that adults spend half their lives convincing themselves they do not.

Ian had chosen her in approximately two hours. Because she mended broken soldiers with the aid of a skein of brown yarn.

Henry stood at the desk.

The options arranged themselves in a neat column, which was how he thought about problems that had no satisfactory solution.

He could leave her in Scotland: safe, remote, and entirely removed from the boy she had promised to comfort.

He could bring her to London as a governess: efficient, immediately effective, and a disaster waiting to happen within a fortnight of their arrival.

He could send her somewhere else entirely to her aunt in Surrey, perhaps, though he had no confirmation that this was a viable arrangement, even though she had mentioned her auntie vaguely during their ride north.

He looked at the options.

Then he sat down and reached for the pen.

He wrote quickly. He did not agonize over the wording, because agonizing served no purpose when the argument was already made inside his own head and the words on the page were simply the delivery mechanism.

He folded the note before he could read it again. He sealed it.

He rang the bell.

The footman appeared in less than a minute. Young. Efficient. Henry had noted, approvingly, that this household’s staff moved well despite the chaos of recent weeks.

“Find Lady Charlotte,” Henry said. “Give her this.” He held out the note. “Do not disturb either Lady Charlotte or young Ian if the boy is asleep.”

The footman took it and went.

Henry turned back to the desk. He looked at the papers that had not been moved since supper. He thought about picking one up. He did not.

He sat in the chair that was not Nathan’s chair and stared at the low coals of the fire. He was aware, in the way one is aware of a tooth that has begun to ache, that the conclusion he had arrived at was perfectly logical.

And that logic, on this particular evening, was doing little to settle anything at all.

The book in Charlotte’s hands felt heavy and she perused the lines in it listlessly. Ian had been asleep for twenty minutes, slumped against Charlotte’s side with his hand still curled around one of the repaired soldiers, and she had been reading the same paragraph about the Spanish coast to the top of his head without taking in a single word.

She turned the page anyway. It seemed respectful.

The fire in the nursery grate was warm and steady, and the room had the particular quiet of a house settling into evening. Charlotte’s ankle had stopped aching. Ian’s breathing was slow and even.