eat them.”
“We are not outnumbered, Mr. Harrison, and you outweigh him by a good twelve stone. We will dissuade him.”
Kit tugged on her skirts. “Can I have a scone now?”
“May I, and no, you may not. Mr. Harrison has some wonderful things to show you, but you must hold very still for a time too.”
“I can hold still.” The little boy stiffened up, like some pagan figure carved in stone, breath held, arms at his sides, teeth clenched.
“Very impressive,” Mr. Harrison said. He crossed to the table with William, and retrieved a sketch pad and box of colored chalks. “If I render your image thus, your parents will hound me from the shores of England. I will be lucky to earn my ale sketching caricatures at posting inns on the Continent.”
Kit looked up at Jenny. “What did he say?”
“He said he’ll do a better job taking your likeness if you’re comfortable and having fun.”
Mr. Harrison sent Jenny a look over William’s head. His mouth conveyed humor, while his eyes conveyed… trepidation? He jostled William higher on his hip. “I suppose it’s time we boarded our magic carpet?”
Never had a handsome prince sounded less enthusiastic about starting his enchanted voyage, and never had William been so content to remain in one place for so long.
“I’m coming too!” Kit caroled. He darted to the hearth rug and plopped down, landing by chance in the direct path of an early morning sunbeam. Jenny took a place beside him, though her skirts made boarding the carpet a somewhat undignified business.
“Shall I take William?” she asked.
“My first mate is content where he is,” Mr. Harrison said, lowering himself so his back was braced against the raised hearth. “Though he’s plotting the downfall of our expedition, lest you be fooled by his handsome visage.”
“What’s a visage?” Kit asked, crawling closer.
“I’ll show you what a visage is, if you’ll challenge your aunt at Patience.”
At Kit’s age, Patience was an exercise in flipping cards face up, making quite the fuss over any random matches. Nobody won, nobody lost, and nobody tried to keep track of where any cards might lie.
Jenny, however, kept track of Mr. Harrison. He sat against the hearthstone, legs splayed before him. William contentedly straddled one muscular thigh, while the sketch pad was propped on the other. Mr. Harrison’s left hand absently braced William against his body as the right moved the colored chalk across the page.
Both of them, man and boy, looked at ease. William was examining a red pastel, dashing it against Mr. Harrison’s dark wool trousers and leaving jots of red powder. Mr. Harrison was dashing his colors against the page in more fluid motions, though his expression bore the same concentration as William’s.
“Your turn, Aunt Jen.”
Jenny flipped over two cards, the queen of hearts and the queen of spades. “A match. Where shall we put their highnesses?”
“Give them to me!” Kit propped the queens face out against Mr. Harrison’s outstretched leg and soon had a family of royal spectators aligned there.
Mr. Harrison suggested that the twos might also enjoy the view from the gallery and could serve as footmen to the royal family. He offered this casually, an aside murmured between glances at Kit, glances at the page, and glances at Jenny.
When William started bouncing on Mr. Harrison’s thigh, Mr. Harrison passed the child another color and put the red aside. “Nobody stays with the monochrome studies for long, but five minutes must be a record,” he muttered to the child.
While Kit flipped over one card after another in search of a match, Jenny’s heart turned over in her chest. The sensation was physical, painful and sweet, also entirely the fault of the man casually holding one of her nephews and sketching the other.
She’d resigned herself to never having children, and her art, paltry and amateurish though it was, was some consolation. Watching Elijah Harrison casually tuck William closer and retrieve the blue pastel from its trajectory toward the child’s mouth, her resignation came into sharper focus.
The children she’d never have might have been Elijah Harrison’s, or belonged to somebody like him—a talented, handsome man, capable of whimsy and patience. A man willing to sit on the floor and see his trousers attacked by a ferocious, pastel-wielding infant, even as he kept that infant safe and content.
“I found a match, Aunt Jen!” Kit waved the six of clubs and the nine of clubs around. “They can be coachmen!”
It was on the tip of Jenny’s tongue to point out the child’s error. A six and a nine were not a match, not even if they were of the same suit.
“Let me see those.” Mr. Harrison set aside his sketch to pluck the cards from Kit’s hand. While Jenny watched, the artist launched into another little homily about reflections—symmetry by any other name—and Kit forgot all about playing the matching game with his aunt.
Jenny picked up the discarded sketch pad, slid the box of pastels closer, and began to sketch, while William enthusiastically drew green streaks on Mr. Harrison’s trousers.
The Earl of Westhaven steered his horse around a frozen mud puddle, while the Duke of Moreland’s bay gelding splashed right through, indifferent to the breaking ice or cold, muddy water. Westhaven, like his horse, was more of a Town fellow, while the duke longed for the countryside.
“Her Grace is growing restless, sir. I trust you are aware of this?”
Meddling adult children were a loving father’s cross to bear. The duke glanced over at the handsome fellow who was his son and heir. “How is your wife, Westhaven?”
Westhaven rode bareheaded, so His Grace could see his son’s expression take on the sweet, distracted air of a man contemplating the woman about whom he was head over ears. “Anna thrives. She is completely over the birth of our second son, and completely in love with the boy. He’s a quiet little fellow, but sturdy and very alert. Anna says he takes after me.”
“She’s in good health then?”
“As good health as a woman can be when she’s the sole sustenance of a growing boy. It helps that this is not our first. We’re no longer raw recruits to the ranks of parenting.”
With two children still in dresses, Westhaven could wax parental, as if he’d invented the occupation himself upon the birth of his firstborn.
“How many siblings do you have, Westhaven?”
“Seven extant, two deceased, an increasing variety of siblings by marriage. What has this to do with my mother’s discontent, Your Grace?”
Westhaven was a plodder, not given to leaps of intuition but incapable of missing a detail or failing to notice a pattern. When he took his seat in Parliament, England would be the better for it.
Though as a son, he could try the patience of a far more saintly papa than His Grace.
“I have raised ten children with Her Grace and been privileged to partner her in holy matrimony for more than three decades. Do you think I wouldn’t know if the woman were growing restless?”
Westhaven’s lips quirked up in a smile his lady likely found irresistible. As a young husband, His Grace had possessed such a smile, though ten children had rather dimmed its efficacy with their mother.
“I suppose not, sir. I could escort her to Morelands, if that would help.”
“You will do no such thing, Westhaven, nor will you intimate to my duchess that you’ll spirit her away from my side. You will caution your brothers and brothers-in-law not to make any such offer either.”
A rabbit nibbling on a patch of brown winter grass looked up as the horses ambled along the path. Nose twitching, the little beast seemed to weigh the pleasures of filling its belly against the danger of remaining in sight of humans. It snatched another few bites then loped away.
