Chapter One

 

 

“You cannot possibly mean to go to Yorkshire in October.”

Lorraine Weston folded another sensible grey dress into her battered trunk and did not look up at Mrs Whitmore, who stood in the doorway of the governess’s modest chamber with an expression that suggested Lorraine had announced plans to sail for the Arctic.

“I am afraid I do mean it, ma’am. The summons was quite urgent.”

“But the girls will miss you dreadfully. Arabella has only just mastered her French conjugations, and poor Cecily—”

“Will continue to improve under Miss Fletcher’s capable instruction.” Lorraine tucked her hairbrush beside her stockings with practised efficiency. Three years of moving between households had taught her to pack quickly and travel light. Sentiment, she had learned, weighed more than any trunk. “You were kind enough to engage her last month precisely for this eventuality.”

Mrs Whitmore’s mouth pursed. She was not a cruel woman—merely one who found change inconvenient, and departures something of a personal affront. “This Duke of Ravenswood. You have never met him?”

“No, ma’am.”

“And yet you race off to the moors at his beck and call?”

Lorraine permitted herself a small smile as she closed the trunk’s lid. “He offers triple the usual salary for a governess of my qualifications—for a temporary engagement of perhaps three months.” She met Mrs Whitmore’s eyes with the pleasant directness that had served her well in drawing rooms where she was neither quite servant nor quite guest. “I should be a fool to refuse.”

What she did not say: And I have been a fool quite enough for one lifetime.

Mrs Whitmore sniffed, but her resistance was already crumbling. Triple salary was the sort of argument that penetrated even the most steadfast maternal attachment to one’s children’s educational continuity. “Well. I suppose if it is only three months. You will write?”

“Of course.”

“And you will return to us when this mysterious duke has found a permanent solution for his ward?”

His ward. A child, the letter had said. A boy of six, recently orphaned, whose grandparents were delayed in India and could not retrieve him for several months. The Duke required someone capable of managing the child’s care and education in the interim. Someone who could begin immediately. Someone who would not ask too many questions about why he was offering so extraordinary a sum for so ordinary a position.

Lorraine had questions, naturally. She simply could not afford to ask them.

“If the position remains available,” she said carefully, “I should be glad to return.”

 

***

 

The coach that carried her north was not uncomfortable, though neither was it warm. October had arrived with a vengeance that year, the summer that never came giving way to an autumn that felt like penance. Lorraine wrapped her cloak more tightly about her and watched the countryside transform beyond the rain-streaked window—gentle southern hills flattening into the broad, bleak expanse of the Midlands, then rising again into something wilder. Starker. Yorkshire.

She had never travelled so far north. Her father had spoken of it sometimes, in that wistful way he possessed when describing places he would never afford to see.

Wild country, Lora. The sort that makes you feel your own smallness.

He had meant it as praise, she thought. Her father had always loved anything that reminded him of perspective.

Her father had been dead these three years, and Lorraine had learned a great deal about perspective since.

The coaching inn where she spent the night was clean but cheerless, the sort of establishment that catered to travellers passing through rather than those with any wish to linger. Lorraine ate her modest supper alone in a corner of the common room and tried not to think of the letter tucked inside her valise. Not the Duke’s summons—that was merely business.

The other letter.

The one she had received a fortnight earlier, forwarded through three households before finally reaching her.

Dear Sister, it had begun, in Lydia’s careful copperplate, and Lorraine had known at once that nothing good would follow those words. Lydia wrote only when she wanted something—or, more precisely, when her conscience had accumulated more guilt than it could comfortably ignore.

I hope this finds you well. Arthur and I are lately returned from Bath, where the waters did wonders for his constitution…

Two pages of meaningless pleasantries before arriving at the point:

I have enclosed a small token of our appreciation for your continued discretion in family matters. Pray do not hesitate to write if you find yourself in need.

The “small token” had been ten pounds.

Conscience money, Lorraine thought of it. Lydia sent it twice a year, always anonymously, always through solicitors, as though their shared surname might somehow combust if committed to paper too near the funds.

Lorraine had returned it, as she always did. The solicitor was likely quite weary of her by now.

I do not want your money, she had written in the privacy of her own thoughts—in words she would never send. I want you to say thank you. I want you to acknowledge what I did. I want you to remember that I had a life once—and prospects—and I burned them all so that you might keep yours.

But that was the thing about sacrifice, was it not? The moment one demanded recognition for it, it ceased to be noble and became merely transactional. And Lorraine Weston was many things—proud, stubborn, and occasionally too clever for her own good—but she refused to be pathetic.

She finished her supper, paid her bill, and retired to a narrow room with a window that faced north.

Toward Yorkshire.

Toward Rovewood Hall, and its mysterious, frozen duke, and the orphaned boy who needed someone to care for him.

Three months, she reminded herself. Do not grow attached.

She was very well practised in not growing attached. Practice, after all, made perfect.

 

***

 

The final approach to Rovewood Hall was everything the name suggested—and nothing it had prepared her for.

The carriage had set her down at a crossroads two miles from the estate—some confusion regarding the driver’s willingness to navigate the private road in gathering darkness—and Lorraine had been obliged to walk the remaining distance, her single trunk balanced upon a borrowed handcart. The lane wound through a wood of ancient oaks, their leaves thinned and ragged by the early cold, branches reaching toward a sky the colour of wet slate. Rooks circled overhead, their cries harsh in the stillness.

Wild country, her father’s voice whispered. Makes you feel your own smallness.

She felt small, certainly. Small, cold, and beginning to question the wisdom of answering urgent summonses from reclusive aristocrats.

And then the trees parted, and Rovewood Hall rose before her.

It was beautiful.

That was the first impression—the unavoidable, almost aggressive beauty of the place. Pale stone and Gothic windows, turrets and towers; a structure that seemed to have grown from the moorland itself rather than been built upon it. Ivy clung to the eastern wall in defiance of the season. Lamplight glowed behind a scattering of windows, warm against the grey October dusk.

It was also, Lorraine noted with the practised eye of a woman accustomed to assessing households at a glance, enormous—and plainly understaffed. The drive was not quite overgrown, but neither had it been recently raked. The topiaries flanking the entrance had grown shaggy with neglect. A house of this size ought to boast footmen at the door, a groom hurrying forward to receive arrivals, the quiet bustle of a well-ordered establishment.

Instead, there was only silence, the wind across the moors, and the distant cry of birds she could not name.

Lorraine squared her shoulders, left the handcart at the foot of the steps, and lifted the heavy iron knocker.

The sound echoed through what she imagined must be a vast entrance hall. She waited. The wind tugged at her cloak, and she thought she heard something—movement, perhaps, from somewhere above. She tilted her head.

There.

A small face at an upper window. Pale and solemn, framed by fair hair. A child’s face, watching her with an expression she recognised at once.

Waiting to see whether this one will stay.

Lorraine raised her hand in a small, reassuring wave.

The face vanished.

The door opened.

“Miss Weston?” The woman who stood before her was perhaps sixty, grey-haired and sharp-eyed, with the air of one who had been managing households since before Lorraine was born. Her expression held wariness, hope, and fatigue in equal measure. “We expected you yesterday.”

“The roads were difficult.” Lorraine stepped inside without waiting for a formal invitation—a small breach of etiquette, but she was cold, tired, and rather past caring for strict propriety. “The coaching schedule from York was much disrupted by the weather.”

“Yes, well.” The woman—housekeeper, Lorraine assumed—closed the door firmly against the wind and subjected her to a thorough inspection. Whatever she saw appeared to satisfy some internal measure, for her expression softened a degree. “I am Mrs Potter. We corresponded.”

“Indeed.” Lorraine set down her valise and cast her own swift survey of the entrance hall. Magnificent, as expected—vaulted ceilings, ancestral portraits, a staircase sweeping upward into shadow—but cold. The sort of cold that spoke of too few fires in too many rooms. Of a house that had forgotten how to be lived in. “The journey has been long, Mrs Potter, and I confess I should be glad to see my room—and perhaps take some tea. But first, I should like to meet my charge. The boy. Thomas, is it not?”

Something flickered across Mrs Potter’s face. “Master Thomas is in the nursery. He is… not inclined to take well to strangers, miss. Perhaps in the morning—”

“Children seldom take well to strangers upon first acquaintance,” Lorraine returned gently. “That is rather the purpose of subsequent meetings, is it not?” She softened the words with a smile. “I shall not overwhelm him. I wish only that he might see my face before he sleeps, so that when he wakes tomorrow, I shall not be entirely unfamiliar.”

Mrs Potter studied her for a long moment. Then, slowly, she inclined her head. “This way, miss.”

 

***

 

The nursery was at the top of the house, as nurseries so often were—tucked away where the noise of children might not intrude upon the important occupations of adults. Lorraine climbed three flights of stairs behind Mrs Potter’s candle, noting the portraits that lined the walls—stern-faced ancestors, every one—the suits of armour set into alcoves, and the general air of magnificent neglect.

“His Grace,” she said carefully, “is he in residence?”

“His Grace is always in residence.” Mrs Potter’s tone was studiously neutral. “He does not go to London. Does not go anywhere, in truth. Not since he returned from the war.”

The war. Lorraine stored this away. The Duke of Ravenswood had served, then. Many men had, in those long years of fighting Napoleon. Many had returned altered.

Some had not returned at all.

“The boy’s father,” she said. “He was a soldier as well?”

“Captain William Harding. Served under His Grace in Spain.” Mrs Potter paused with her hand upon a door. “Killed at Badajoz. The mother followed not long after—fever, they said, though I believe it was grief that truly carried her off. The boy was taken in by his mother’s family and remained with them for some years, until they too passed on. With his grandparents in India unable to come at once, he was sent here. Master Thomas came to us five months ago.” She looked at Lorraine with eyes that held too much understanding. “He does not speak much. Nor does he trust easily. Four governesses have come and gone since his arrival.”

“Four in five months?”

“His Grace is… particular. And the boy is difficult. And the house is—” She broke off. “Well. You shall see for yourself.”

She opened the door.

The nursery, at least, was warm—a fire crackling in the grate, lamps lit against the gathering dark. The walls were papered with cheerful scenes of rabbits and birds, oddly at variance with the sepulchral air of the rest of the house. Toys lined the shelves, fine and costly, yet seemingly untouched. And there, in the corner, seated very straight in a chair too large for him, was the boy from the window.

Thomas Harding was small for his six years, with the sort of stillness children acquired when they had learned that notice often led to pain. His hair was fair, his eyes brown, his little face as solemn as a judge’s. He watched Lorraine enter with an expression of careful blankness.

Oh, she thought, with a pang she resolutely suppressed. Oh, I know you.

“Master Thomas,” said Mrs Potter, “this is Miss Weston. She is to be your new governess.”

The boy said nothing. His hands, Lorraine observed, were folded in his lap with unnatural precision. A child should not sit so. A child should fidget.

Lorraine did not go to him. Instead, she lowered herself to the floor—an action that caused Mrs Potter to draw a sharp breath—and arranged her skirts about her as though it were the most natural thing in the world for a lady to sit upon a nursery carpet.

“Good evening, Thomas,” she said. “I have had a very long journey and am quite fatigued, so I shall not stay long tonight. I wished only to see your face before I sleep, so that tomorrow, when we meet properly, you will not be wondering who the strange woman in your nursery may be.”

The boy watched her. She returned the look, steady and unhurried.

“I am to be here for a little while,” she continued, her tone light and easy. “I cannot say precisely how long. But while I remain, I should very much like for us to be friends. Not the sort who are obliged to like one another—the real sort, who choose it.”

Still no reply. Yet something in his eyes—a flicker, swiftly suppressed—suggested he had heard her.

“You need not decide tonight,” she went on. “You may consider it. And tomorrow, if you determine that you would like to attempt friendship, we may take breakfast together, and you may tell me what you most enjoy. And if you decide you would rather not—” She gave a small shrug. “That is perfectly acceptable. I shall not take offence.”

She rose, brushing her skirts smooth, and found Mrs Potter observing her with an expression she could not quite interpret.

“Good night, Thomas,” she said from the doorway. “Sleep well.”

She was halfway down the corridor when she heard it—so soft she might almost have imagined it.

“Good night.”

 

***

 

Her room was small but clean, tucked into a corner of the floor below the nursery. A fire had been laid, and someone—Mrs Potter, no doubt—had ensured that hot water stood ready in a pitcher and fresh linens adorned the narrow bed.

Lorraine washed, changed into her nightgown, and sat for some moments upon the edge of the mattress, listening to the wind as it swept across the moors.

Temporary, she reminded herself. Three months. Perhaps less. The grandparents will arrive, the boy will depart, and you will go on to the next household, the next family, the next set of children who require you—until they do not.

She had made her peace with such a life. Or if not peace, then something approaching a truce. She possessed a skill, and it was valued; and if she would never have a home of her own, nor a family, nor a name unshadowed by scandal—well. That was the price of the choice she had made. The choice she would make again, if compelled, even knowing its cost.

Do not grow attached.

Yet she could still feel the weight of Thomas’s gaze. The studied blankness. The small, reluctant good night that had escaped him despite his evident determination to withhold it.

She shut the thought down.

She extinguished the candle and lay in the darkness of Rovewood Hall, listening to the wind, the silence, and the vast, hollow spaces of a house that had forgotten how to hold warmth.

Somewhere below, she thought she heard footsteps. Slow. Measured. Pacing.

The Duke of Ravenswood, perhaps. The man who went nowhere. The soldier who had returned from war only to shut himself within this beautiful, frozen tomb.

I shall meet him tomorrow, she thought. And then I shall understand.

She slept, and dreamed of nothing, and woke before dawn to the sound of a child crying somewhere above her in the dark.

 

 

 

Chapter Two

 

 

“You are pacing again, Your Grace.”

Dominic Vane, sixth Duke of Ravenswood, halted mid-stride and turned to find Graves standing in the doorway of his study, his expression one of studied neutrality—the surest sign that the butler was restraining comment. It was not yet six o’clock. The fire had burned low, and the whisky decanter upon the sideboard was appreciably emptier than it had been at midnight.

“I am not pacing,” Dominic said. “I am… considering.”

“Of course, Your Grace.” Graves’s tone suggested he knew precisely how much considering had taken place, and how much of it had consisted in wearing a path into the Turkish carpet. “The new governess has arrived. Mrs Potter settled her in the blue room last night.”

The new governess. Dominic’s jaw tightened before he could prevent it. The fifth in as many months—though, in fairness, two had departed of their own accord, citing the isolation, the gloom, and the child’s unsettling silences, while only two had been dismissed: one for incompetence, the other for asking too many questions about the war.

This one came with excellent references. A Mrs Whitmore had written effusively of Miss Weston’s skill with difficult children, her intelligence, her discretion. A treasure, the woman had called her. You shall not find better.

Dominic did not want a treasure. He wanted someone competent enough to keep the boy fed, educated, and out of his sight until the Hardings arrived to collect him. Was that so much to require?

“I shall see her at nine,” he said. “Here. Inform her.”

“Very good, Your Grace.” Graves paused. “Shall I have breakfast sent up, or will you—”

“I am not hungry.”

Another pause. Graves had served the Vane family for forty years and had known Dominic since he was a boy in short coats, terrorising nursery maids and trailing mud through the gallery. He had earned the right to certain liberties—though he seldom exercised them directly.

“Mrs Potter mentioned,” the butler said carefully, “that Miss Weston made a favourable impression upon Master Thomas last evening.”

Dominic’s hand, reaching for the whisky decanter, stilled. “Did she?”

“The boy spoke to her, apparently. Unprompted.”

Spoke. Thomas had not spoken unprompted to anyone in this household since his arrival. He answered when directly addressed—brief, colourless replies that revealed nothing—but he did not initiate. Did not volunteer. Did not, so far as Dominic could discern, exist as anything more than a small, silent ghost drifting through the upper floors of a house that had ghosts enough already.

“How fortunate,” Dominic heard himself say. “Perhaps this one will last longer than a fortnight.”

He poured the whisky. Graves withdrew. And Dominic stood alone in his study as the grey October dawn crept through the windows, watching the amber liquid catch the light and endeavouring very hard not to think of brown eyes in a small, solemn face.

William’s eyes.

He drank.

He had watched her arrive.

Not from courtesy, not from duty, but by the accident of standing at the study window at the precise moment the hired carriage failed to deliver her to his door. Dominic had seen the driver’s argument with the groom—arms flung, gestures sharp with refusal—and had watched, with the detached curiosity of a man for whom nothing had felt novel in years, as a small figure in a dark cloak emerged from the coach and set out on foot up the drive, a handcart bumping behind her.

She had walked the full two miles in the rain.

He should have sent someone. Graves should have sent someone. Instead, he had stood at his window watching a woman he had never met push a handcart through the October mud, and when she had at last passed out of his sightline—her hood drawn, her back unbent—he had turned away with a feeling he did not care to name.

He did not go to greet her. He did not attend the small commotion at the door, the murmured exchange with Mrs Potter, the careful footsteps up the servants’ stairs. He poured a second whisky, and then a third, and did not admit—even to himself—that he was listening.

At midnight, he gave up and went to bed.

The dream came in fragments.

He was walking the corridors of Rovewood—not the Rovewood he knew, which was cold and empty and smelled of damp stone, but some other version of it, lamp-lit and warm, the kind of house he dimly remembered from childhood. He was searching for something. He did not know what. The corridors unfolded with the dream’s peculiar logic, one opening into another, and at the end of each he glimpsed, always, the edge of a grey skirt vanishing around a corner.

He turned into a room he had never seen. A library, perhaps. Firelight. A woman stood before the hearth with her back to him.

“You were walking in the rain,” he said—or dreamed he said, his voice distant even to himself. “You should have let someone meet you.”

“I managed.” Her voice was warm and low, pitched for an intimacy he had not earned. “I always manage.”

Turn around, he thought. Let me see you.

She did not turn. But she spoke again, and her voice was nearer now, as though the room itself had brought her to him. “Your Grace.”

The word undid him. Not Your Grace as the servants said it—crisp, respectful, a barrier of rank—but Your Grace the way a woman says a man’s name when she has taken it apart and put it back together and made it belong to her.

His hand closed on her waist.

The dream compressed. He was not aware of deciding anything—was not aware of moving—but his palm was flat against the curve of her hip through the governess grey, and her back was against his chest, and she had tipped her head so that her hair—auburn, damp from rain, loosening from its pins—brushed against his jaw. She smelled of lavender and of something beneath it that was warmer, unfamiliar, and difficult to name.

He bent his head. His mouth found the line of her throat.

Stop, some distant part of him said, with the reflexive horror of four years of discipline. Stop. You don’t know her. You haven’t even—

The dream did not stop.

He was aware, in the way of dreams, of her dress giving way beneath his hands—not torn, not wrestled, simply yielding, as though the fabric itself had decided that he had waited long enough. Of her breath catching. Of her turning, at last, in the circle of his arms, so that her hands came up to rest against his chest—not pushing him back, not pulling him closer, simply there, trembling faintly, as though she too could not quite believe it and did not want it to end.

He never saw her face. The dream denied him that. He saw her mouth—only her mouth, reddened and parted—and then her hand rising to his jaw, her thumb tracing the scar on his eyebrow with a tenderness that cracked his chest open like a struck bell.

“You’re bleeding, Dominic.”

No one had called him Dominic in four years.

His whole body surged toward her—hips, hands, mouth—and the dream broke over him in a hot white wave, and he came awake with a shout caught in his throat, sheets tangled, his body aching and shamed and furiously alive.

For a long moment he could not move. The whisky in his blood. The sweat on his skin. The damp warmth he had not felt since before Spain—since before he had decided, deliberately and with full malice of forethought, that he did not deserve to feel it again.

A woman he had never met.

A woman he had not even seen, not properly—only the back of a cloak in the rain.

And his sleeping mind had already taken her apart and given her back to him as a benediction.

He sat up. Pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. The fire had burned to embers. The room was cold. Somewhere above him, a door closed softly, but Dominic did not register it; Dominic was registering only the hot pulse of something in his chest that he had thought long dead.

He rose. Stripped the damp sheet with furious efficiency and bundled it into the laundry basket, where Mrs Potter’s morning girl would find it and, Dominic devoutly hoped, draw no conclusions. He built up the fire with hands that were not entirely steady. Poured another whisky and did not drink it, merely held the glass as though the weight might anchor him.

She is a governess, he told himself. She is under your roof. She will leave within three months, like the rest. You will not—you will not—

He sat in the chair by the fire, wrapped in his dressing gown, and waited for morning.

When at last he slept again, it was not of auburn hair and firelight. It was Spain. The ravine. The war all over again.

The nightmare had been a bad one.

They were always bad, of course—no man dreamt of Badajoz and woke refreshed—but some nights were worse than others. Some nights he was back in the ravine, musket fire cracking through the darkness, men screaming, the smell of powder and blood thick in his throat. Some nights he made different choices, and the dream showed him what might have been: more men saved, or fewer, or none at all.

Last night, William had died in his arms again. But this time, when Dominic looked down, it was not William’s face he saw.

It was the boy’s.

He had woken gasping, drenched in sweat, and had not attempted sleep again. The whisky helped—it always helped, though he was not fool enough to suppose it led him anywhere good. It dulled the edges. Quieted the noise. Allowed him to function through another day of estate management and correspondence and carefully rationed interaction with a household that had long since ceased to expect warmth from its master.

Four years since Badajoz. Four years since he had stood in a Yorkshire church and received condolences for a father he had scarcely known, a title he had never desired, an inheritance that felt less like a gift than a sentence. In those same years, the boy had been safely settled with his mother’s family, and Dominic—new to his responsibilities and scarcely equal to them—had let that arrangement stand. Four years of building walls so high and so thick that nothing might breach them.

And then William’s son had arrived, and the walls had begun to crack—and Dominic had responded in the only manner he understood.

By building them higher.

 

***

 

At precisely nine o’clock, a knock sounded upon the study door.

Dominic was seated behind his desk—a deliberate choice, the broad expanse of oak serving equally as barrier and declaration of authority. He had dressed with care: dark coat, immaculate cravat, every inch the forbidding nobleman. If this Miss Weston were to remain in his household, she must understand from the outset that her employer was not a man who encouraged familiarity.

“Enter.”

The door opened, and the woman who stepped within was not what he had anticipated.

He had imagined someone older, perhaps—grey-haired and severe, as governesses were supposed to be. Or young and timid, easily cowed. Instead, she was neither—somewhere in her middle twenties, with hair the colour of autumn leaves, pinned up in a style that was neat but already losing its contest with a number of unruly curls. Her gown was grey, modest, and entirely suitable to her station.

Her eyes were not modest at all.

They travelled the room—the heavy curtains, the cold hearth, the whisky decanter Dominic had neglected to remove—and then settled upon him with an expression of frank assessment. Blue-green, those eyes. Changeable. The colour of the sea before a storm.

She did not flinch. She did not lower her gaze. She merely looked at him as though taking his measure, and had not yet determined what she made of it.

Something stirred, faint and unwelcome, in Dominic’s chest. He ignored it.

“Miss Weston.” He did not rise, nor gesture to the chair before his desk. “You are punctual.”

“Your Grace.” She dropped a curtsy—correct, neither too deep nor too shallow—and remained standing, her hands neatly folded before her. “I understand you wished to speak with me regarding the terms of my employment.”

“I wish to ensure that we understand one another.” He leaned back in his chair, studying her. “You are here to care for my ward. To educate him, to oversee his welfare, and to prepare him for his eventual departure to India with his grandparents. This is a temporary arrangement. The Hardings are expected within a few months. Do you comprehend?”

“Perfectly, Your Grace.”

“Very good.” He adjusted the papers upon his desk—meaningless correspondence, but it occupied his hands. “Mrs Potter will acquaint you with the household schedule. Meals are taken in the nursery. You may make use of the library when it is not otherwise engaged. Should you require anything for the boy’s education, submit a list to Graves, and it shall be procured.”

“Thank you.” She paused. “And the boy himself? What can you tell me of him?”

Dominic’s hands stilled upon the papers.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Thomas.” Her voice remained pleasant, yet there was something beneath it—a thread of steel beneath silk. “I should like to know more of him. His temperament. His interests. His particular needs.”

“The only need of his that need concern you, Miss Weston, is his education. I trust you are equal to it.”

“Indeed.” She inclined her head slightly, and one of those errant curls slipped free to brush her cheek. She made no attempt to correct it. “But I was thinking rather of personal details. What does he enjoy? What frightens him? What makes him laugh?”

The questions struck like blows. Dominic felt his jaw tighten, the familiar cold spreading through his chest. “I am afraid I cannot assist you with such trivialities, Miss Weston. The boy has been in my care but a few months, and my duties to the estate—”

“Five months.” Her tone did not change. Her eyes did. “He has been in your care for five months, Your Grace. Surely, in that time, you must have formed some impression of his character.”

Silence stretched between them. Dominic was dimly aware that he ought to be offended—that this woman, this governess, should question him so directly, in his own study, bordered upon impertinence.

He was not offended.

He was something worse.

He was exposed.

“Thomas is… quiet,” he said at last. The word sounded insufficient, even to his own ears. “He does not speak often. He is not troublesome. Beyond that, I—” He stopped. Swallowed. Began again. “Beyond that, I suggest you form your own conclusions, Miss Weston. It is, after all, what I pay you for.”

She regarded him for a long moment. He had the most uncomfortable sensation that she saw straight through him—through the title, through the walls, through four years of carefully constructed distance—to the ruin beneath.

“Very well,” she said quietly. “Then I shall.”

She ought to have taken her leave then. Any sensible governess would have curtsied and withdrawn to the nursery where she belonged. Instead, she remained where she was, those storm-sea eyes fixed steadily upon his face.

“May I ask one further question, Your Grace?”

No, he thought. Certainly not.

“You may ask,” he heard himself reply. “I do not promise to answer.”

“The boy’s father. Captain Harding.” Something shifted in her expression—compassion, perhaps, or curiosity. “Mrs Potter mentioned that he served under you. In Spain.”

The cold in Dominic’s chest hardened to ice. His hand rose of its own accord, touching the scar that cut across his left brow—shrapnel, Badajoz, the same night everything had ended.

“Mrs Potter,” he said evenly, “speaks beyond her place.”

“She speaks out of care. For this house and for all within it.” Miss Weston’s chin lifted a fraction. “For you as well, I should imagine.”

“Miss Weston.” His voice emerged harder than he intended—colder. “You are engaged to instruct a child. Not to examine the household, its history, or its master. I trust I make myself understood.”

Something altered in her expression. For an instant—no more—he thought he saw hurt flicker there. Then it vanished, replaced by a composed blankness he recognised at once, for he wore it himself.

“Perfectly, Your Grace.” She sank into another curtsy. “I shall not trespass further upon your time.”

She turned to go. Her hand had just reached the door when he spoke again, the words escaping him before he could recall them.

“He likes birds.”

She paused. Turned back.

“Thomas.” Dominic kept his gaze upon the desk, unable to meet her eyes. “I have observed him at the nursery window, watching the birds in the garden. He appears… interested in them. I do not know if that is of any use.”

A brief silence. Then, softly, “It is of use, Your Grace. Thank you.”

The door closed behind her.

Dominic remained motionless in the grey morning light, his hand still resting against the scar upon his brow, listening as her footsteps faded along the corridor.

She looked at me, he thought, as though she could see something.

He did not know whether that was alarming—or something else entirely.

He reached for the whisky. Then stopped, his fingers hovering above the decanter. Slowly, he withdrew his hand, folding both upon the desk and staring down at them—the scarred knuckles, the calluses that had never quite faded, the hands that had held William as he died and could not seem to hold William’s son at all.

He likes birds.

So small a thing. So insignificant a fragment of knowledge. And yet it was the only thing Dominic could say with certainty of the boy who had lived beneath his roof these five months. Who bore William’s eyes. Who sat in the nursery awaiting removal to grandparents he had never seen, in a country he had never known, because the man meant to protect him could not bear the sight of his face.

Somewhere above, footsteps sounded—light, purposeful. Miss Weston, ascending to the nursery.

Dominic closed his eyes and saw William’s face, slack in death, lips still moving around words he had not been able to hear above the gunfire:

Take care of him. Promise me. Promise.

He had promised. He had held his dying friend and sworn upon everything sacred that Thomas would be safe, would be cherished, would want for nothing.

And then he had come home and discovered that to keep such a promise required a capacity for feeling he had left buried somewhere in the Spanish mud.

She looked at me as though she could see something.

He opened his eyes. The study was cold, the fire long dead, the morning grey and unwelcoming.

But somewhere above, a woman with storm-sea eyes was walking into his nursery, armed with nothing more than the knowledge that a broken little boy liked birds.

It was, Dominic thought, more than he had ever given any of the others to work with.

It was more than he had ever given Thomas at all.

 

 

Chapter Three

 

 

“He has been bathed and dressed, miss. Jenny saw to it first thing.”

Mrs Potter stood at the nursery door with the air of a woman presenting a prize horse at auction—hopeful, anxious, and braced for disappointment. Behind her, framed by the cheerful paper that only served to heighten the room’s unnatural stillness, Thomas Harding sat at a small table, his hands folded and his spine as rigid as a soldier’s.

He had been scrubbed to within an inch of his life. His fair hair lay plastered neatly against his skull, still damp at the edges. His clothes—a miniature suit of navy wool, perfectly pressed—fit him precisely and revealed nothing. He looked, Lorraine thought with a pang, like a doll arranged for display. Like something meant to be observed, rather than touched.

“Thank you, Mrs Potter.” Lorraine kept her tone light and unhurried. “That will be all for now. I shall ring if we require anything.”

The housekeeper hesitated. Her gaze moved from Lorraine to Thomas and back again, and in that glance, Lorraine read volumes: Four governesses. Five months. Please let this one succeed.

“Of course, miss.” Mrs Potter withdrew, closing the door softly behind her.

Lorraine did not immediately approach the table. Instead, she took her time surveying the nursery—the shelves of untouched toys, the rocking horse gathering dust in the corner, the window seat overlooking grey skies and bare branches. A beautiful room. A room designed for childhood—for play, for noise, for laughter.

It felt like a mausoleum.

Thomas watched her watching. His brown eyes followed her movements with the wariness of a creature accustomed to sudden change. Lorraine recognised that look. She had worn it herself, in those bleak months after her father’s death, when every knock at the door might herald another creditor, another demand, another fragment of her former life stripped away.

You are waiting, she thought, for me to hurt you. Or leave you. You are not certain which will come first—only that one of them must.

She moved to the bookshelf and let her fingers trail along the spines. Primers and moral tales, for the most part—the sort of improving volumes selected by adults and endured by children. But there, half-hidden behind a particularly dreary treatise on deportment, she discovered something more promising: a slim book bound in green cloth, its pages softened with use.

Bewick’s A History of British Birds.

Lorraine drew it out and turned to face Thomas. He had not moved. Had not spoken. His hands remained folded, his posture perfect, his expression giving nothing away.

She did not go to him. Instead, she lowered herself to the carpet—just as she had done the previous evening—and arranged her skirts about her with the ease of long habit.

“I found this upon the shelf,” she said lightly, holding up the book. “It appears to have been much read. The pages are quite worn.”

Nothing. Not so much as a flicker.

“I confess I know very little of birds.” She opened the book at random—an engraving of a thrush, delicately rendered. “We had sparrows in London, of course. And pigeons. But I imagine the birds of Yorkshire must be rather different.” She glanced up at him. “I do not suppose you might enlighten me?”

For a long moment, she thought he would not answer. His jaw was set, his small hands clenched in his lap, every line of him resisting.

Do not, that small body seemed to say. Do not make me care. Do not make me trust you. You will only go, as the others did.

Then, so softly she almost missed it: “There are rooks.”

Lorraine’s heart tightened. She kept her expression unchanged—pleasant, attentive, wholly unsurprised, as though small boys spoke to strange governesses every day.

“Rooks,” she repeated. “I believe I heard them yesterday, as I walked up the drive. They made a dreadful noise.”

“They nest in the oaks.” His voice was rough, as though unused. “Beyond the garden. There is a whole—a whole colony.”

“A rookery?”

A faint nod. His gaze had shifted to the book in her hands, and there—only for an instant—she saw it: a spark of interest, quickly concealed. As though wanting anything had become dangerous, and he had learned to hide even that from himself.

Oh, my dear child, she thought. What has been done to you?

She turned the pages slowly, allowing him to see the illustrations. “I should very much like to see the rookery,” she said. “Perhaps, when the weather improves, you might show it to me? I should very likely lose my way on my own.”

Another pause. She could almost see the calculation—the weighing of risk against risk, of disappointment against the faint and frightening possibility of connection.

“Perhaps,” he said at last. “If it does not rain.”

It was not agreement. Not trust. But it was not refusal either. It was a door left slightly ajar, and Lorraine knew better than to force it open.

“That sounds quite perfect.” She closed the book and set it gently upon the carpet between them. “Now—there is to be schooling, I believe. Reading and writing and arithmetic, and all the rest. But I think that today we might simply… become acquainted. Would that suit you?”

Thomas looked at the book. Then at her. Then at the book again.

“The other governesses made me do sums,” he said. “On the first day.”

“Did they indeed?”

“And recite verses. And practise my penmanship.”

“How very diligent of them.” Lorraine tilted her head. “And did you like it?”

The question seemed to puzzle him. His brow drew together slightly—a faint crease that made him, for a fleeting instant, look like any other child confronted with an unfamiliar idea.

“Like it?” he repeated.

“Yes. Did it please you? Did it make you happy?”

The crease deepened. “I do not… I do not think governesses are meant to make you happy.”

The words struck her like stones. She thought of the Whitmore girls, who had wept when she left, who had pressed flowers into her hands and begged her to stay. She thought of her own childhood—of laughter, of warmth, of the quiet certainty of being loved.

Thomas had none of that. Thomas had strangers with slates and copybooks, and a guardian who could not bear to look at him, and a house filled with silence.

“Well,” she said, steadying her voice by force alone, “I am not like other governesses. I have a number of very peculiar ideas about education. For instance—” She leaned forward slightly. “I believe that children learn best when they are interested. And I believe that before we may learn together, we must first know one another. So today, instead of sums, I thought we might simply talk. You may tell me about the birds. And I shall tell you about… London, perhaps. Have you ever been?”

Thomas shook his head.

“It is very loud,” Lorraine said. “And very crowded. And it smells rather dreadful, if I am honest. But there is a park—Hyde Park—where one may see deer. Real deer, wandering about as though they own the place.”

“Deer?” A flicker of interest, swiftly masked. “In a city?”

“Indeed. The King keeps them, I believe. They are quite tame. Children feed them apples.”

Thomas was silent for a moment. Then, very softly: “I have never seen a deer.”

“Well,” she said gently, “perhaps one day you shall.”

She did not promise. She did not offer what she might not be able to give. But she saw something shift—a slight easing, the smallest loosening of those too-rigid shoulders.

It was a beginning.

 

***

 

They spent the morning together, not quite talking and not quite silent. Lorraine read aloud from the bird book, pausing now and then to allow Thomas to supply the details she pretended not to know. He told her about rooks—intelligent, sociable creatures, loyal to their colonies—and magpies, clever thieves with a fondness for anything that shone, and the kestrel he had once seen hovering above the moor.

“It stayed so still,” he said softly. “As though it were frozen in the sky.”

She asked questions. She listened. She did not press.

By the time Jenny arrived with the luncheon tray, Thomas had abandoned his chair for the carpet, sitting cross-legged opposite Lorraine with the book spread open between them. His hair had dried into something nearer its natural state—soft, slightly unruly, a far cry from the rigid neatness of the morning. He looked, Lorraine thought, almost like a real child.

“Well now,” Jenny said, her eyes widening at the sight. “Isn’t this cosy?”

Thomas stiffened at once, withdrawing into himself like a creature retreating to its shell. The light that had begun to kindle in his eyes flickered and dimmed.

Lorraine rose smoothly, brushing her skirts free of lint. “Thank you, Jenny. You may set the tray upon the table.”

Jenny complied, casting curious glances between them. She was young—nineteen, perhaps—with a round face and an eager air that suggested she found the household’s small dramas endlessly absorbing.

“Mrs Potter says to tell you luncheon is also laid in the small dining room, miss, if you would prefer—”

“I shall take my meals here, with Master Thomas.” Lorraine’s tone remained pleasant, but firm. “We are becoming acquainted.”

“Yes, miss.” Jenny bobbed a curtsy and withdrew, plainly bursting with news to carry belowstairs.

When she was gone, Lorraine turned back to Thomas. He had not left the carpet, but his shoulders had crept once more toward his ears, his hands returning to that unnatural stillness.

“Thomas,” she said gently, “would you care to take luncheon with me?”

He looked up at her. In his eyes she saw the same calculation—the wariness, the fear, the faint and stubborn hope he seemed determined to suppress.

“The other governesses ate in their rooms,” he said. “Or downstairs.”

“As I told you, I am not like other governesses.” She held out her hand. “Come. We shall eat together, and you may tell me more about the kestrel.”

A pause. A breath.

And then—quietly, cautiously—a small hand slipped into hers.

His fingers were cold. She held them with care, as though they were something fragile and easily broken, and led him to the table.

 

***

 

That afternoon, while Thomas rested, Lorraine sought out Mrs Potter.

She found the housekeeper in her sitting room—a small, comfortable chamber off the kitchen that served as the household’s centre of operations. Mrs Potter was reviewing accounts when Lorraine knocked, but she set them aside at once and indicated a chair.

“Tea, miss? You look as though you might benefit from it.”

“I should be most grateful, thank you.”

The tea was hot and strong, and Lorraine wrapped her hands about the cup with genuine appreciation. The nursery was warm enough, but the corridors of Rovewood Hall seemed to draw the heat from one’s bones.

“How did the morning go?” Mrs Potter asked. “I saw Jenny in quite a state.”

“Thomas and I are becoming acquainted.” Lorraine took a careful sip. “He is a remarkable child, Mrs Potter. Intelligent. Observant. And far too serious for his years.”

“Aye.” The housekeeper’s expression softened into something like grief. “He was not always so. When he first came… well. He cried at night, the first few evenings. A terrible sound. And then one morning, he simply… stopped. Went quiet. And has been so ever since.”

Lorraine thought of the boy’s carefully blank expression, his folded hands, the measured way he weighed every response. “He has learned that feeling is dangerous.”

“Smart lad.” Mrs Potter’s voice was heavy. “Feelings are not much rewarded in this house.”

The words lingered between them. Lorraine set down her cup.

“His Grace,” she said carefully. “Forgive me, but… has he always been thus?”

Mrs Potter was silent for some moments. Her gaze drifted to the window, where rain had begun to tap softly against the glass, and her expression altered—softening with memory.

“He was not always so,” she said at last. “Before the war, Master Dominic was… oh, you would scarce believe it to see him now. He laughed. He joked with the servants. When he was a boy, he used to bring me flowers from the garden—fistfuls of them, all crushed in his grip, proud as anything.” A faint, sad smile touched her lips. “He was the sun, miss. Lit every room he entered.”

Lorraine tried to reconcile this image with the cold, distant man she had met that morning, seated behind his desk like a figure carved from stone. She could not.

“And then he went to Spain.”

“Aye. Went away full of life. Came back… whatever he is now.” Mrs Potter shook her head. “Something happened there. Something bad. He will not speak of it, and we have learned not to ask. But he returned with those shadows in his eyes, and he has never been the same.”

“The scar,” Lorraine murmured, recalling how his hand had lifted to his brow. “Upon his eyebrow.”

“Shrapnel, they say. From the battle where Captain Harding fell.” Mrs Potter’s voice dropped. “Whatever occurred that night… it broke something in him. And then the Captain’s boy arrives, looking at him with the Captain’s very eyes…” She trailed off. “Well. You see how it is.”

Lorraine did see. She saw a man burdened by a guilt he would not name, turning away from the very child whose presence might have offered him some measure of redemption—because that same presence was also a living reminder of loss.

He is not cruel, she thought. He is not indifferent. He is afraid.

It did not excuse the neglect. It did not lessen Thomas’s loneliness. But it rendered the household intelligible in a new and painful way.

“He may yet be reached,” she said quietly. “I believe that.”

Mrs Potter regarded her with something like hope—and something like caution. “Take care, miss. Others have tried. Others have failed. And His Grace does not take kindly to those who prod at old wounds.”

“I am not here to mend His Grace.” Lorraine rose, setting aside her empty cup. “I am here for the boy.”

Yet even as she spoke, she knew it was not wholly true. The image would not leave her: a boy with crushed flowers in his hands, smiling as though he had captured the sun.

He was not always so.

Nor, she thought, had Thomas been. Nor had she.

Perhaps that was why she felt the pull of this place—this house, this strange, fractured household bound together by grief and silence. Perhaps that was why, as she climbed the stairs once more toward the nursery, she felt something dangerously like purpose stirring within her.

Do not grow attached, she reminded herself. Three months. Temporary.

But Thomas’s hand had been so cold. And his voice, when he spoke of the kestrel frozen in the sky, had held such fragile wonder.

And somewhere within these walls, a man who had once gathered flowers for the housekeeper walked alone with his ghosts.

This is dangerous, Lorraine thought. This is foolish. This is precisely the sort of situation you cannot afford.

She kept climbing anyway.

 

***

 

Sleep did not come easily.

Lorraine had expected exhaustion to claim her the moment her head touched the pillow—she had been cold, and long-traveled, and unsettled by too much new information—but her small blue room refused to deliver the oblivion she had earned. She lay under the counterpane in her plain cotton nightgown, the fire banked low, the wind murmuring against the window, and she thought, against every instinct of professional self-preservation, about the Duke of Ravenswood.

Not Thomas. Thomas she had already considered—had already begun to plan for, lesson by lesson, small mercy by small mercy. Thomas she knew how to hold.

It was his guardian who would not let her sleep.

She thought about the way he had sat behind his desk that morning—framed and rigid, performing ducal authority like a man reciting lines in a play he had forgotten the end of. She thought about his hand rising to his scarred brow when she had pressed him about Thomas’s temperament, the small unconscious tell of a man who believed himself unreadable and was entirely readable to anyone who had learned, as she had learned, to watch. She thought about the whisky decanter on the sideboard at nine in the morning.

She thought about his hands.

She had not meant to notice his hands. She had been attending, at the time, to the professional content of the interview—salary, duties, the boundaries of her authority over the boy—and she had schooled her gaze downward in the manner a governess was taught to school it. Downward had meant the desk. The desk had meant his hands.

Long fingers. Scarred in places—perhaps from the war, or something earlier. A boyhood injury, perhaps.

You are a fool, she told herself, staring at the dark ceiling. You are a twenty-six-year-old fool lying in your employer’s house cataloguing your employer’s hands. You have not done this since you were nineteen.

She turned onto her side. She closed her eyes with the firmness of a woman commanding a recalcitrant child to sleep.

The dream, when it finally came, disobeyed her as thoroughly as any child ever had.

She was in his library. She had not been in his library yet—had only passed its door, had only glimpsed, through the gap, leather spines and a carpet worn by the passage of generations—but in the dream the room was vivid and particular, firelit, smelling of woodsmoke and the faint dry perfume of old books. She was standing before the hearth. Someone was behind her.

She did not turn. The dream did not require her to turn. She knew, with the absolute knowing of dreams, who it was.

A hand came to rest at her waist.

The touch was slight. Through the layers of her dress and shift, she ought not to have felt anything at all—and yet she felt it everywhere, down the length of her spine, into the soles of her feet, up into her scalp. Her breath caught in a way her waking body had forbidden for years.

“Miss Weston.” His voice, low and scraped—not the cold ducal voice of the study but something underneath it, something she had suspected was there and had not let herself consider. “You should go back to your room.”

I know, she thought. She did not say it. Dream-Lorraine did not say anything sensible.

His other hand came up. It traced the column of her throat—the lightest brush, a fingertip only—and settled beneath her jaw to turn her face toward him. She turned. She saw grey eyes, storm-dark in the firelight, and the scar through his brow, and the mouth she had spent the interview trying not to look at directly.

His mouth came down on hers.

The dream abandoned narrative then. It gave her, instead, sensation—the unfamiliar pressure of another person’s body against the front of hers, the warmth of his hand sliding from her throat down the line of her bodice, the astonishing, indecent heat that pooled low in her belly and spread outward as though her body, denied for three years, had at last been given permission to remember what wanting felt like. She was pressed back against something—a wall, a bookshelf, his arms, she did not know—and his mouth was at her throat, and her dress was loosening in ways dresses did not loosen under a governess’s careful daytime control, and she was making a sound in her throat that she had never in her life made aloud.

He has not even called you Lorraine, some faint rational fragment protested.

“Lorraine,” he said, against her skin.

The dream broke her open.

She came apart with an intensity she had not known her body was capable of—had not known, perhaps, that any body was capable of—and she woke with a small shocked cry muffled against her own pillow, her nightgown twisted around her thighs, her heart racketing against her ribs as though she had been running.

For a long moment she lay perfectly still. The fire had gone to embers. The wind was still at the windows. The house slept around her, vast and indifferent.

She pressed both hands flat over her face.

“No,” she whispered, into her palms. “No. No. No.”

The protest was useless. Her body, flushed and throbbing and shamelessly warm, was not persuaded. Neither, if she were honest, was her mind. The dream had been vivid in a way dreams were not supposed to be—had felt less like invention than recognition, as though her sleeping self had seen something her waking self was too disciplined to name, and had shown it to her with the clinical thoroughness of a physician presenting a diagnosis.

She had known the man for a single morning.

She had exchanged perhaps fifty words with him, most of them professional.

And her body had already decided.

Lorraine sat up in the dark. She pulled the counterpane around her shoulders, drew her knees to her chest, and stared at the shuttered window with the dry-eyed horror of a woman who had spent three years building a fortress and now, distinctly, heard the first stone fall.

She did not sleep again that night. She sat in the narrow blue room until the grey light came in at the edges of the shutters, and she listened to the rain, and she composed a lecture for herself of such withering thoroughness that a less determined woman would have resigned by breakfast.

Lorraine did not resign. Lorraine had survived worse than her own body.

She would survive this too.

Probably.