“These are like your bird houses, but bigger.”
“And one must plan safe entry and exits, because little boys don’t generally fly. Bring your tea over here, Alice. I’m about to interrogate you.”
“So interrogate,” Alice challenged him as she took the bench opposite him at the table. “Be warned I’m not the tattling kind.”
“It’s only tattling if somebody has misbehaved. Are you happy here?”
Not the question she’d anticipated. “Happier than I thought I’d be. Overwhelmed too.”
“Overwhelmed?” Nick frowned at his sketch. “I’m not sure I can credit that such a thing is possible. They are good boys, Alice. How can you be overwhelmed to be teaching them their sums and declensions? Priscilla was overwhelming, with her wild imagination and careless heart.”
“Wild imagination?” Alice took a sip of her tea, aiming a pointed look at the sketch on the page. Nick had designed a two-story affair patterned to blend right into the surrounding foliage, complete with birds and a birdhouse secreted among the leaves and branches.
“Wild.” He used the eraser the better to shade the foliage, while the scents of cinnamon and clove filled the kitchen. “The stories that child concocts should be published.” He frowned at his sketch then paused to help himself to a sip of Alice’s tea. “You put cinnamon in this, and you’re dodging my question.”
“The boys are busy,” Alice said, “and you’re right. Academically, they are well within my abilities.”
“But?” Nick set his sketch aside and regarded Alice closely, all hint of teasing gone from his features.
“But I realize I am tromping around Tydings like a mountaineer, Nick. I used to go for days at Sutcliffe without leaving the walls of the manor. My hip hurt, true, but here, it seems the more I walk, the less it hurts.”
“This overwhelms you? And why didn’t you just tell us you stayed indoors because you hurt?”
Yes, why hadn’t she? “It doesn’t bother me much now. That’s a change, a big change. Miss Portman,” she said with some consternation, “does not enjoy the outdoors.”
Nick cocked his head. “But you do. You were positively beaming on that horse, Alice. You were enjoying the outdoors and being on horseback.”
“That overwhelms me too. Before this week, I’d gone twelve years without managing a horse, Nick. I’d avoided titled company, but ended up on the arm of an earl here in Ethan’s gardens, and we’re off to do the pretty with more of same on Wednesday. It makes my head swim, to tell the truth.”
“I’m a title.” Nick swiped more of her tea.
“You’re just you, for which I am grateful.”
“So are you overwhelmed with joy, or worries?”
“Both.” Alice peered at her almost-empty mug. “Then there is your brother.”
“Ah.”
What a man could do with one syllable. “He overwhelms me too.”
“It’s the family charm. We’re endowed with it in proportion to our size.”
“Abominable man.” Alice stalled by sipping the last of her tea. “Ethan is charming, and you should not mock him.”
Nick sobered. “I don’t mock him, and I don’t understand him either. He used to have charm to burn, Alice. I was convinced, growing up, he would have made a much better earl than I, and I used to pray he’d end up with the title, though it was a legal impossibility.”
“Why would he have made the better earl? You’re the heir.”
“Ethan is so much more of a man than I am. He’s not just smarter, he’s wiser. He’s not quite too big, whereas I have the dimensions of an ox. He never descended to chasing skirts out of immature resentment of life’s responsibilities. He managed to dust himself off after Papa’s wrongheaded foolishness, and he comprehends finances with an intuition I lack. He’s just… better. I am glad Leah did not meet him first.”
“Have you told him this?” Alice asked, wondering why women were considered less rational than men.
“He would just give me that cool, kind smile of his.” Nick scrubbed a hand over his face. “He’d tell me he hadn’t any idea what I was going on about, then change the subject. It unnerves me.”
“Why would that unnerve you?”
“Because the old Ethan, my brother Ethan, would have argued me right out of my positions, because they are not entirely logical—I comprehend that—and he would have done so without causing me to resent his superior reasoning. He took a first in mathematics, you know.”
“And his Latin is excellent. Where did he go to school before Cambridge?”
“Stoneham,” Nick replied. “Some dreary place up north. Lady Warne about tore a strip off Papa when she got wind of it. I gather it is not a congenial environment, as boarding schools go.”
Alice felt the tea in her belly abruptly curdle. “God above. Stoneham is not far from Blessings, Nick. It’s a horror.”
Nick’s hand went still, the eraser poised above the whimsical sketch. “A horror? What constitutes a horror, Alice? And don’t spare me the details.”
“Adequate academically, and probably not too harsh for the typical meek younger son, but for an earl’s disgraced bastard… Stoneham is one of the places boys go when they’re sent down from the better schools. There’s an assumption at such institutions that ‘boys being boys’ means many boys will be hurt, deprived of their meals, beaten, and worse.”
Nick looked heartsick, a disquieting thing on a man so large and generally sunny. “What you describe is bad enough. Ethan did nothing to deserve such a fate.”
“Some would call such a fate an opportunity. He got into Cambridge, and did well there.”
“What aren’t you telling me, Alice?” Nick met her gaze squarely, but Alice could see him steeling himself for her reply.
“My half brother Vim attended Stoneham at one point,” Alice said. “He came home with a broken arm after only a few weeks of the Michaelmas term. He got crosswise of some baron’s lordling and was attacked by a gang one night on the way to the privy. He lost the hearing in one ear for most of a year as well, and we weren’t sure he’d be able to see out of one eye.”
Nick stood, almost knocking the bench over. “At Stoneham?”
“At Stoneham. And from what Vim said, the proctors and deans regarded this as tolerable behavior between young men of unequal standing.”
“Because your brother was a bastard?”
“He wasn’t. He was my mother’s son from a prior marriage, wealthy, much loved, and very bright. His family was right at hand and outraged on his behalf.”
“Ethan was there for two years. He didn’t leave the premises even once.” Nick scrubbed a hand over his face again, and his gaze slewed around toward the door. His expression was tortured as he backed away from Alice. “I have to… You’ll excuse me.”
And then he was gone, leaving a sketch of such whimsy and grace on the table, Alice thought it worthy of framing and hanging on the schoolroom wall.
“You look a little tired,” Ethan remarked, pushing off the door jamb to Alice’s room and settling himself at her escritoire. The desk wasn’t far from the bed, but Alice was relieved he’d stopped there.
And… disappointed.
“I am tired. I sleep better here at Tydings than I did at Sutcliffe or Belmont Hall. I think it’s because the boys keep me moving, and not just about the house, but all over the grounds.”
“Does it bother your hip?”
“At first, yes. It ached, but now it seems stronger.” A good deal stronger. How had this happened in just a few weeks?
“Maybe the riding helps. Are you ready for tomorrow?”