Page 49 of Duke of Sapphire

Tristan picked up his own glass. He took a single sip and set it back down. “I noticed something when you arrived earlier.”

Henry waited.

“Your gaze followed your wife from the carriage to the door.”

“I was ensuring she had managed the steps.”

“Lavinia was with her.”

“It had been a long journey.”

“Henry.”

“You are projecting,” Henry said.

“I am observing,” Tristan said. “There is, as you have noted, a difference.”

Henry looked at the fire.

“In my experience,” Tristan said, “men who are entirely indifferent to a woman do not track her movements across a drive with the attention you gave her between the carriage door and the front step.”

“I was being attentive to a guest.”

“She is your wife.”

“All the more reason.”

Tristan smiled. It was not a triumphant smile. It was something more patient and considerably more annoying.

They had had versions of this argument before. Henry knew exactly how it ended. It ended with him declining to concede a single point and Tristan being, after sufficient time had passed, entirely right.

He picked up the brandy.

“Tell me about Ian,” Tristan said. He uncrossed his ankle and leaned forward, and the expression on his face shifted into something more genuine. “Of course. Is he⁠—”

“He is managing,” Henry said. “Charlotte has been good for him.”

Tristan’s expression did not change. He simply looked at Henry and said nothing for a moment.

Henry gazed at the fire and wished, not for the first time, that his oldest friend was slightly less perceptive.

“Good,” Tristan said. “That is very good.”

He did not say anything else. He did not need to.

Lavinia poured tea the way she apparently did everything—without asking whether you wanted it, on the grounds that you clearly did.

“Sit,” she said, and gestured at the chair nearest the fire, which was large and soft and precisely right after three days in a carriage. Charlotte sat. A cup appeared in her hands.

“Now.” Lavinia settled across from her and tucked her feet up in a way that suggested she had no intention of standing on ceremony. “Tell me about the journey. All of it, not the version you give people you don’t know yet.”

Charlotte looked at her over the rim of her cup. “That is a great deal of faith to extend to someone you met an hour ago.”

“Twenty minutes,” Lavinia said. “And I have been told I am an excellent judge of character. Possibly by myself, but the observation stands.” She tilted her head. “Well?”

Charlotte told her. The journey, the coach stops, Ian on the stable roof. The broken soldiers. The woods at midnight. She included the parts that were strange and she included the parts she had not yet made sense of, because Lavinia was listening.

“Scotland suits you,” Lavinia said, when she had finished.