Page 45 of Duke of Sapphire

“There are parks,” Charlotte said. “With excellent trees.”

Ian appeared to decide this balanced the drain. He went back to the top.

Henry turned back to the carriage, and the market town noise closed over the moment and carried it away.

Ian had been asleep for twenty minutes when Charlotte allowed herself to look at Henry properly.

He had not noticed. He had the document case open still; the letter held at an angle. Outside, the road had smoothed. The northern ruts were behind them, and the carriage moved with a steadier rhythm now, the springs quiet for the first time since morning.

Ian’s head was heavy against Charlotte’s arm. His breathing was slow and entirely committed, the way children breathed when they had worn themselves through completely, and one of his boots—she had no idea how—was resting on Henry’s knee.

Charlotte watched him read.

“Have you always done this?” she said.

Henry looked up. “Done what?”

“Traveled like this. Alone. With nothing but letters for company.”

He looked at her the way he looked at questions he considered self-evident. “Yes.”

“Every journey?”

“Every journey of any distance.”

She watched him for a moment. “Do you find it lonely?”

“I find it efficient,” he said.

Charlotte considered that. “I suspect those are not the same answer.”

He held her gaze for one beat. Then he looked back at the letter.

She waited. She had learned, in the past few days, that pressing Henry Kingswell on a thing he was not ready to address was roughly as productive as pressing a stone wall. The wall did not move. It simply absorbed the effort and stood there, entirely indifferent, and you were left with sore hands and the same wall.

So she did not press.

He read for perhaps another minute. Then, without particular fanfare, he closed the letter. He did not put it in the case. He held it loosely in one hand, his elbow against the carriage wall, and looked out the window instead.

The light was nearly gone. The fields beyond the glass were grey shapes, the hedgerows dark lines, the sky the color of cold ash above them. His jaw was set at the angle it got when something had landed that he had not decided what to do with yet.

His thumb moved once across the edge of the paper. Then he set it on the seat beside him.

Charlotte looked at the letter and at his hand. He had not dismissed the question. He had not deflected to logistics or offered her a subject change. He had simply gone somewhere with it that he was not yet willing to share, and the difference, she thought, was not small.

She was still thinking about that when he said, without looking away from the window, “Did you travel much? Before.”

“Not as I would have liked.”

“Where did you want to go?”

Charlotte considered this. Ian shifted against her arm, his face pressing closer to her shoulder, his other boot twitching once in whatever he was dreaming. “Italy,” she said. “And possibly Greece. I read a great deal about both, which I understand is not the same thing.”

“It is not.”

“Have you been?”

“To Italy. Not Greece.”