Page 54 of Duke of Sapphire

Ian was looking at his plate. His hands were in his lap. His chin was doing the thing she knew by now, the small, controlled shake that preceded the rest of it.

Henry noticed first.

He set down his fork. He did not look at Charlotte. He did not call anyone. He turned toward Ian and said, very quietly, “Tell me about Tam’s stable.”

Ian looked up. His eyes were wet.

“At Drummond Hall,” Henry said. “Describe it. The whole of it.”

A pause. Ian’s chin wobbled again. “Why?”

“Because I want to know what kind of stable I need to build here before Tam arrives.”

The corners of Ian’s turned downward. He swallowed once. “It needs a window on the north side,” he said, a little hoarsely. “He doesnae like too much sun in the mornin'. It makes him grumpy.”

“Noted,” Henry said. “What else?”

“The hay needs to be —Mrs. Wick says he’s been ruined for ordinary hay. Ye have to get the good kind.”

“I will speak to the groom.” Henry picked up his fork again, as though this was a perfectly ordinary dinner conversation. “What kind is considered the good kind?”

“I daenae ken,” Ian said. “I just ken it has to smell right. He buries his nose in it first.”

“I will have the groom investigate,” Henry said, with complete seriousness. “We cannot have Tam objecting to the hay.”

Ian picked up his own fork. He ate three bites. He did not cry again.

Charlotte looked at Henry.

He was already reading the wine label, turning the bottle to look at the back, apparently indifferent to the fact that he had just quietly prevented a small disaster with nothing but patience and a question about a pony’s stable. He did not look up.

She looked away. Her chest gave a tender little squeeze, but she quickly recomposed herself and refused to examine it.

After dinner, Henry said, “As the mistress of the house, you should become familiar with its layout.” He said it the way he said most things—as a statement, not a question. “Allow me to give you a tour of the estate.”

Ian was installed on a sofa in the small sitting room off the hall, a housemaid reading to him from a book of illustrated fables with more willingness than talent. He was already leaning against the armrest, heavy-eyed, the soldier tucked in his palm.

Charlotte followed Henry.

The house was large, and he showed it methodically—the library, two drawing rooms, a morning room she suspected had not been opened in some time, a long gallery hung with portraits that stared down at them with ancestral self-possession. He told her the rooms’ functions, which staff managed which floors, where the household accounts were kept. She asked questions. He answered them.

They came into the gallery, and he stopped near the center, gesturing toward a landscape on the far wall, something about the estate in the country. Charlotte was not entirely listening because they were, she had just realized, entirely alone. No housemaids visible. No footmen in the hallway. Just the portraits and the candlelight and her husband.

“You know,” Charlotte said, “most husbands, I am given to understand, spend at least some part of their first day in their marital home attending to their new bride.”

Henry turned to look at her.

“I am not criticizing,” she said. “I am merely observing. It is, I think, customary.”

“I was attending to the estate.”

“You were attending to the estate,” she agreed. “The dispatch from your solicitor. The letter to the shipping concern. The discussion with Mr. Gedge about the correspondence. All extremely important.” She clasped her hands behind her. “None of it involving your wife.”

Henry looked at her for a long moment. Then he smiled.

It was the real one. The rare one. The one that had appeared briefly in the Scottish garden and then retreated as though it had surprised him as much as anyone.

“There it is,” Charlotte said.