Page 50 of Duke of Sapphire

“Scotland was rather forced upon me.”

“Most things that suit us are.” Lavinia refilled her cup without being asked. “And Ian? Is he—better?”

“Better than he was. Still—” Charlotte stopped. “He knows something is wrong and he is managing it by deciding not to know it. That is the best way I can describe it.”

“Children are remarkable at that.”

“Adults also.”

Lavinia smiled. “Also.” She set down the teapot. “And how are you finding married life? You have had—what, five days of it?”

“Four.”

“Four days of it, then.”

Charlotte considered how to answer. “It is rather like learning the rules of a game while playing it,” she said. “You can see the board and the pieces, but the strategy is entirely unclear.”

“And your husband?”

“Keeps his moves guarded.”

Lavinia nodded once. She turned her cup between her hands, and Charlotte sensed that she was choosing between several things to say and selecting the most useful.

“I have watched Henry Kingswell across a great many dinners and social occasions,” Lavinia said. “For years. And I will tell you something that is not a comfort, so please do not receive it as one.” She met Charlotte’s eyes. “His actions are consistently well ahead of his words. Sometimes by days. Sometimes by considerably longer. He will not tell you what he is thinking. He will not tell you how he feels about a thing. But he will do things. Watch what he does.” She paused. “That is not a reassurance. It is simply how he is put together.”

Charlotte sat with that for a moment.

It was not a reassurance. It was more useful than a reassurance. It was a framework.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Do not thank me yet,” Lavinia said.

* * *

At dinner, Lavinia sat her stepdaughter Sophia beside Charlotte and Ian beside Henry. The meal was warm and abundant and entirely without the formality that might have made the evening stiff.

Sophia was sixteen and watched everything with careful eyes. She would ask Charlotte one question about Scotland and then listen to the answer with genuine attention, which Charlotte found immediately endearing.

Ian was on a cushion to Henry’s left, because the chair was too large and Henry had simply reached for a cushion from the sideboard without comment and placed it there. Ian had accepted this arrangement with dignity and was currently working through a second helping of roasted chicken.

“The wine,” Henry said to no one in particular, “is the clearest evidence I have yet encountered that Tristan’s cellar is managed by someone other than Tristan.”

Tristan laughed. “I will pass your gratitude along to my steward.”

“It was not gratitude. It was an observation about delegation.”

“A distinction I choose to ignore.” Tristan raised his glass.

Charlotte picked up her own. “It does rather suggest,” she said, without looking up from her plate, “that the quality of any enterprise improves when the person nominally in charge of it is kept at a remove.”

There was a beat of silence. Charlotte caught Henry staring at her, his expression momentarily stripped of its usual administrative severity, replaced by a raw, unguarded intensity that made her breath catch.

Tristan laughed again, but he did not look at Henry.

The conversation moved on. Sophia asked Ian about Scotland. Ian answered as though he considered himself an expert on the subject, which he was, and Sophia listened with the same careful attention she had given Charlotte. Lavinia asked Henry something about London timing that Charlotte did not entirely follow, and Henry answered it in three sentences, and the evening moved.

But Charlotte was assembling.