Page 6 of Lord Hartwell’s Refuge

Across the table, Daphne leaned toward Seraphina and inquired, in a whisper loud enough to carry the length of the room, “Do you think the white muslin or the overlay of lace for the Christmas assembly?”

“The lace,” Seraphina said immediately. “Unquestionably the lace. White muslin is for debutantes.”

“She is a debutante,” Pearl pointed out with a raised eyebrow.

“Yes, but she needn’t look like one…” began the chatter.

The trio were her father’s starlings. Small, quick, and inclined to cluster together as they chirped about whatever matter captured their attention in the moment.

Tamsin glanced at Daphne, frowning down at her dress as she imagined the colors and fabrics. “You would look lovely in either,” she offered.

The family’s newest debutante brightened immediately. “Do you think so? Truly?”

“Truly. Though the lace would be a greater expense to have it by December. Bring me the designs tomorrow, and I will help you decide.”

“Oh, Tamsin, you are wonderful.” Daphne returned to her chatter with Seraphina, the compliment already absorbed and forgotten.

Charles had skipped the next two courses and requested the chocolate cake, which he ate with focused devotion, like a man fulfilling a sacred obligation. “Mrs. Godfrey has outdone herself,” he announced to the family. “I might need to marry her.”

“She is sixty years old,” Pearl chirped, as though this were the only hindrance to that idea.

“I have great respect for experience…”

Leopold was still clearly thinking about Augusta. Tamsin could tell by the way he was eating; in slow, mournful bites. She watched him for a moment, this eldest brother of hers, handsome and slightly burdened by his own importance, and felt the familiar complicated tenderness she had for all of them.

She saw so much good in him. His devotion to Miss Augusta Despencer, only child of a baronet, was what many would call romantic, even if it kept him from truly engaging with the rest of the family. He wasn’t a bad man. He simply occupied his own life very thoroughly.

The conversation turned, as it always did, back to December. The assembly. The gown. Whether Pearl’s hair would suit a certain style Seraphina had seen in a fashion plate. Charles offered an opinion that was immediately rejected, given it lacked all seriousness. Leopold finished his wine in morose silence and refilled his glass.

Tamsin thought, briefly, of the morning. Of Henry’s upturned face and the great dog leaning into his small hands. Of the still September air near the walls. The brief, uncomplicated pleasure of being somewhere that was not here, doing something that was not this.

She could mention it. I took Henry into the city this morning. We met Lord Hartwell’s dogs. Henry asked if lions were larger. I felt⁠—

“Tamsin,” Seraphina said, interrupting her thoughts, “do you think we ought to have new gloves made before Christmas, or will our current ones do?”

Tamsin looked at her sister’s hands, then Pearl’s, then Daphne’s. She calculated the cost with the automatic speed of long practice. It always seemed better to save a shilling than not.

“Your current ones will do perfectly well,” she said with a smile. “And we will have them cleaned.”

Seraphina accepted this. Pearl was already asking Daphne something about dancing slippers. The sacrifice went unnoticed.

Tamsin reached for her wine and let the thought of the morning go quietly. No one at the table would think it significant. It had been a small thing anyway. A child and two large dogs and a baron with composed dark eyes who would not remember her name by morning—if she’d bothered to give it. Which she hadn’t.

Charles pushed back his chair. “Magnificent cake,” he said, with obvious satisfaction and crumbs around his mouth. “I must be off. Bolton thinks he can beat me at piquet. He cannot, but I intend to let him believe it for at least three hands.”

“Do try to come home at a reasonable hour.” Tamsin bit her tongue immediately after saying it. She was not her siblings’ mother, as she was forced to remind herself on countless occasions every day.

“I make no such promises.” He kissed the top of her head as he passed, the casual warmth of it habitual.

She sat for a moment after he left, listening to her sisters chatter about December, watching Leopold pour a third glass of wine and stare at nothing, presumably the place where Augusta Despencer lived in his imagination. The chairs set aside for their parents were unoccupied.

Her father had called her his wren since her youth. Perhaps because she was quiet and went to great lengths to keep out of trouble, darting around, never settling, never gaining anyone’s attention. Now it suited her for other reasons. Plain. Quiet. Overlooked even by her family at times.

She loved them. Every one of them, completely and without reservation.

Although it would be nice, she reflected, if every once in a while someone asked her about her day.

Chapter Three