“She was upset,” Joseph said again, “What did you do?”
Harper raised an eyebrow at Joseph, but the expression on his sons’ face did not flicker even once.
It was a rare sight. In all his years of raising him, Harper had scarcely ever seen him act this defiantly.
“You must watch your tone,” Harper reminded him. “I came to discuss the Caldwell dinner and the household accounts.”
Joseph appeared unimpressed by this. “Before that? She was fine before the ball but she was not fine after. I noticed. Mrs. Peel noticed too, as she made her favorite biscuits the day after and left them outside the library door.”
Harper looked at his son for a long moment. He did not know when his son had gotten so observant.
“It is not your concern,” Harper said. “Besides, I have already asked you to keep a distance from her. You should comply with that.”
“I have been trying, but it has not been easy.” Joseph admitted. There was something quite sincere in the confession that made it difficult for Harper to be angry in response to it. “She is not a bad influence, and she makes me laugh. I would say that she is good and you upset her.”
Harper looked at his son, and realized that he had never before had seen his son react like this about anything.
“You seemed to have formed an opinion of her rather quickly,” Harper noted.
“You have taught me the skill of discernment,” Joseph replied. “And in this case, you should trust mine. I... I find her… she does things that are not… she is unconventional, I suppose.”
It was some strange relief that Joseph was having a hard time defining Temperance.
So it wasn’t only Harper who had this problem.
“That was putting it rather mildly,” Harper replied.
“I know,” Joseph said. “I like it as it the only fun I’ve had in a very long time.”
At his confession, the room went very still. For some reason this knowledge sat in Harper’s chest as an unspecific weight that he could not locate precisely enough to address.
“I see,” he said.
He said it because it was the only thing he trusted himself to say without it becoming something he had not planned and was not ready for.
Joseph looked at him for a moment longer with those clear, direct eyes that had apparently inherited nothing from Harperin terms of their willingness to conceal what was behind them. Then he looked at the door Temperance had gone through, and something in his expression settled into the particular kind of resignation that was too old for a ten-year-old’s face.
“I know you’re going to tell me again to stay away from her,” Joseph said. “But I don’t think I will, I don’t want to.”
Harper looked at his son.
“Go and do your Latin,” he said.
Joseph held his gaze for one more moment. Then he nodded, once, in the small formal way he had, and walked out of the library. His footsteps went up the stairs and faded but Harper stood in the library alone.
The chair where Temperance had been sitting still held the slight impression of her. The book she had been reading was gone but the teacup was still there, on the small table by the window, and there was a folded piece of paper beside it that appeared to be a letter she had been in the middle of writing before he had come in and rearranged the entire character of the room.
He looked at these things.
He was, he had always been, very good at knowing what needed to be done. It was perhaps the quality he had most relied on across thirty-five years, which was the ability to assess a situation clearly, without the distortion of feeling, and identifythe correct course of action and pursue it. It had served him in the management of his estates, in the navigation of his title, in the single most difficult decision he had ever made, standing at a lakeside with his son in his arms and understanding with absolute clarity what had to happen next.
He looked at the chair and the teacup and the half-finished letter, and he found, with a discomfort he had no precedent for, that he did not know what needed to be done. That the correct course of action was not presenting itself with its usual obliging clarity. That something in the calculation had a variable he had not accounted for and could not, at present, seem to find the value of.
Joseph’s voice came back to him.The only fun I had. In a long time.
He picked up the ledger he had come in for, tucked it under his arm, and left the library.
He did not feel better for leaving. He had rather expected that he would, and he did not, and he filed this information away with the dissatisfied precision of a man who has been given an answer that does not fit he question and suspects the trouble is with the question.