Page 95 of Duke of Sapphire

“He is here.”

Ian looked at the pony for another long moment. Then he turned around and looked at Henry with an expression that was entirely stripped of its usual guardedness. It was just joy, plain and open and almost too much to look at directly.

Ian ran forward and threw his arms around the gray neck, burying his face in the thick mane. “Tam,” Ian whispered, a fierce, happy disbelief breaking through his voice.

Henry looked at the ceiling and swallowed. He was fairly certain that he was struggling to maintain his composure. Experiencing intense emotion at Ian’s joy surprise him.

Charlotte touched his arm, and that nearly undid him. “I have never seen him this happy,” she murmured. “Thank you, Henry.”

He smiled at her. “You needn’t thank me.”

Charlotte smiled. Not the bright social smile. The other one, the private one. The one she kept, he had noticed, for moments when she thought he was doing something she found worth keeping.

He looked at Ian, who was now talking to Tam in a low, serious voice, telling him something about Drummond Hall that Henry could not quite hear.

Stepping closer and resting a reassuring hand on Ian’s shoulder, Henry asked, “Do you want to help me brush him down, or would you rather see how he feels from the saddle?”

Ian’s eyes grew wide. “Can I ride him now?”

“Certainly,” Henry replied. “Come here.”

Kneeling slightly, Henry cupped his hands to give the boy a step. Then he hoisted Ian securely onto Tam’s back while Charlotte watched with a soft, swelling smile from the doorway.

Ian grabbed the reins, sitting tall with an instantaneous flash of pride, while Henry kept a firm, grounding hand on the lead rope as they took their first slow loop around the stable yard.

After supper, Henry returned to the stables.

He had not intended to. He had been in the library with the post, and he had put the last letter down and found himself standing in the hallway without a clear account of how he had gotten there, and then he was at the stable door.

It was open an inch, and lamplight shone from inside.

Henry pushed it quietly.

Ian was there. He had dragged a small stool from the far wall and placed it beside Tam’s stall, and he was sitting on it with his arms folded on the top of the stall door and his chin on his arms, talking to her in a muffled voice that the stable swallowed entirely. The pony had his head over the door. He was listening or doing a very convincing impression of it.

Henry stood in the doorway.

He had known, in the abstract, that he was responsible for Ian. He had known about it since the solicitor’s letter and had organized his life accordingly. Henry had treated this responsibility as a duty with the same thoroughness he brought to all duties. He had told himself it was temporary.

Guardianship until Nathan and Eleanor were found. A practical arrangement. Something that would resolve itself.

Ian shifted on the stool and said something quiet to Tam, and he blew through his nose. Ian laughed—that short, surprised, completely unguarded laugh that was nothing like his usual composed self. and Henry stood in the doorway and understood, with the clarity of something arriving too late to be stopped, that he had been wrong.

Not about the duty. That was real. But about the rest of it. He had not meant to care this much.

He had, in fact, taken considerable pains not to.

And now he was standing in a stable doorway watching a seven-year-old boy talk to a gray pony in the lamplight, and the feeling behind his ribs was not duty, and it was not practicality, and it had nothing whatsoever to do with temporary arrangements.

He thought about Charlotte at the breakfast table with her list. Lemon sponge and the route through the garden and the atlas under the elm. He thought about the way Ian had looked when he found the soldiers, and the way he had counted them, and the way he had placed his finger on Scotland and then on England without saying what he was measuring.

What if this was not temporary?

The thought arrived whole and without warning, the way the difficult ones always did.

Henry stood in the doorway. Ian had not heard him. Tam had not looked up. The lamp threw warm light across the straw and the boy and the horse, and the night was quiet.

What if this is my future?