Clara dropped her head into her hands. “I—I don’t know, I really don’t, Kit! Why would he follow me? But yes, that’s what I thought. He kept his distance, but he just walked behind us, all the way home. Thankfully Peter didn’t notice.” And then, unbelievably, she began to cry.
Kit blinked, astonished. Clara had experienced more than her fair share of tribulations in her life, but this, he thought, was the first time he had seen her cry.
Belatedly, he realised that rather than stare at her, he should be comforting her. Carefully, he put his left arm around her and pulled her close. She fell against his chest and began to sob, while he stroked her hair, murmuring soothingly as she cried her heart out.
At length, she quieted, only small, irregular hiccoughs shaking her body. His shirt front was damp from her tears.
“Better?” Kit asked.
She nodded, raising her hands to wipe at her eyes. Slowly she straightened, moving away from him.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, looking anywhere but at Kit. “I don’t know what came over me. It was probably nothing. He never even spoke to me. I feel like a perfect fool now, burdening you with this nonsense. I probably just panicked and convinced myself.”
Kit gazed at her doubtfully as she rose to her feet, smoothing first her skirts, and then her hair. “I’m glad you told me,” he said carefully. “Even if it was nothing.”
She sent him a relieved smile, and he smiled back reassuringly. But inside, he felt uneasy. Clara was usually so unflappable. She was all phlegmatic common sense. Not at all the type of person to panic, not without good cause. To see her this distressed alarmed him.
And he could not help but wonder whether—despite her own protests to the contrary— her instincts had been entirely correct.
4
Henry
Henry woke to unfamiliar sounds.
He was used to his quiet suite of rooms at Avesbury House, in the depths of the Wiltshire countryside; used to waking up to quiet birdsong and gentle sunshine and not so much as a creak of the floorboards until he chose to ring for someone.
It was very different here, in the townhouse in London. It was a well-sized property, but compared to the sprawling country pile that was Avesbury House, the Curzon Street house was positively cramped. As well as Henry himself, his daughter Marianne and her husband Jeremy, and Freddy, his younger son, there was a hoard of servants, whose activities began shortly after dawn and appeared to involve walking up and down the stairs and corridors nearly continuously. Moreover, the clattering of horses and carriages from outside, accompanied by the voices of servants, tradesmen and delivery boys began absurdly early and did not let up till late into the evening. Henry liked to sleep with the window open at home at this time of year, but the noise of the city made that impossible, so that, when he woke up, he felt muggy-headed and altogether out of sorts, before he’d so much as thrown his bedcovers off.
Henry sighed and sat up, rubbing his hands over his face. He was turning into a curmudgeonly old man. Seven-and-forty and as set in his ways as a septuagenarian.
Difficult to believe he had once loved living in London so much that he hadn’t been able to imagine living happily in the country again. He had returned to Wiltshire with Caroline and the children eighteen years before, expecting to be tearing out his hair with boredom within a few months. Until then, he had been a fond but slightly distant father to his children, a role that seemed to have been decided for him and with which he had passively played along without ever questioning it. But over those months, as Caroline had gradually declined, he’d realised he would have to do his best to make good the hole her death would leave in their lives. He would have to be both father and mother to them.
Once Caroline had passed away, he hadn’t been able to bear the thought of London, with all the clamouring crowds and commotion. The children had been heartsore, and so had he. And, of course, by then he’d known he had no reason to return.
Christopher had never answered his final letter.
So he’d let the London house to tenants, arranging to stay in hotels for his occasional unavoidable trips to town. Curzon Street was a fashionable address—too fashionable for a man who had never had much interest in polite society to begin with and who had absolutely none after his wife’s death. The children loved being at home. They loved their horses and playing by the river and running wild. And they were safe there. Henry had hired the best governesses and tutors he could find to avoid sending any of them to school for those first few years after Caroline’s death.
How quickly the years had passed since then. One moment, his children had been small, and now—quite suddenly, it seemed—they were all grown. And here he was, back in the townhouse in Curzon Street.
Sighing again, Henry threw back his bedcovers and rose from his bed, rubbing wearily at the tense spot between his brows. It had been warm last night with the window closed, and he had been restless. But there was no point lying in bed all morning hoping to fall asleep again—that would certainly not happen.
Making his way to his dressing room, Henry shook his head over the swift passage of the years, wondering—as he occasionally did these days —whether he had built too much of his life around his children.
In some ways, he’d had no choice. They’d needed him badly after Caroline’s death. Some fathers might have withdrawn from their children, becoming an even more distant figure, but Henry had drawn closer. In truth, their demands had kept him going in those dark and difficult days. They had given him a reason to wake each morning and shaped each day with purpose. He had not wanted to be apart from them.
And later, after little Alice’s death, there had been years when he’d been too frightened to leave them alone. It was terrifying how quickly disaster could strike. He had taken one short trip to Salisbury—the first time he’d left the children since Caroline’s death—and when he returned three days later, his youngest child was in a high fever from which she had never awoken.
Henry poured the water from the ewer into the washing bowl, sluiced his face with it, then straightened, meeting his own gaze in the looking glass
The man facing him was familiar, but a little older than he expected.
Time had sped past at an unholy rate. For years, Henry had been the centre of his family—he still was, he supposed, but now his children were drifting away from that centre, leaving him feeling somewhat redundant.
George, his eldest, was soon to be five-and-twenty, a serious, quiet young man. A good man, Henry thought, but lately, a melancholy one, and for reasons he could not discover. George preferred to spend his time in Wiltshire. He was the most self-contained of Henry’s children and the one he worried most about. Marianne, his sunniest, easiest child, was three-and-twenty, happily married and pregnant with her first child. It was for her sake he was in London now. And Freddy, at two-and-twenty was… well, Henry wasn’t quite sure about Freddy. He appeared to be unwilling to have any kind of discussion about his future with the father he had once adored and chattered away to about everything under the sun.
Henry's children were, each of them, quite grown, and busy with their own lives. And of course, that was how it ought to be, only sometimes, he could not help but wish for those older, easier days when they had clamoured noisily for his attention.