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“We shall,” Charles said, offering her his arm.

I followed them towards the greenhouse, far at the western side of the house where it would get the most sun; it was a massive, sprawling glass structure, larger than the sunroom where I had taken tea with James before.

It was a beautiful place, another gift to the Ashford’s mother from their father, but today beauty wasn’t enough to replace the sickening feeling that was growing inside me.

Envy was not something I dealt with often, but I was working through it now.

I knew that I was being a fool, but like a boy with affection for a girl who hardly noticed him, it was difficult to shake the desire for Arthur to notice me and not Rudolph.

I wondered desperately what they were talking about, and as we reached the greenhouse and Charles pulled a chair out for Ida, I did my best to put it out of my mind.

I sat across from her and she smiled at me, as pretty as could be. “I’m glad I finally got to meet you. Charles has been talking about you coming here for years now. I never really thought you’d actually come.”

“Oh, my understanding is Arthur wasn’t ready for me to come,” I said, shrugging one shoulder. “We’ve put that behind us now. Although I have to say my first few weeks at Ashford have proven more exciting than I anticipated.”

“That was like last summer for Rudy and myself,” Ida said, glancing at Charles as he settled into a seat before turning back to look at me. “What with the engagement being called off and everything.”

“The engagement?” I asked, my eyes going a little wider. “I’m afraid I hadn’t heard anything about that.”

“Arthur and I have been engaged since we were young,” Ida said. “We were always intending to carry out that marriage, but he called off the engagement last summer. It was quite the surprise.”

“He called off the engagement?”

“Yes.” Ida shrugged, and I got the feeling she wasn’t really all that torn up about losing the opportunity to marry Arthur.

I had to remind myself that marriages in this stratosphere of class weren’t made for love but rather for politics, and aside from the social hit Ida undoubtedly took, I can’t imagine she was truly upset.

“I suppose he realized he wasn’t interested in marriage at that point and didn’t want to lead me on further. ”

I considered that, slotting it into the known timeline that I had when it came to Arthur.

Really, I wasn’t meaning to plot out his entire life before I had come to Ashford Hall, but there was something deeper going on that I wanted to uncover.

I had always been overly curious, and I needed to know what had changed in Arthur to make him so guarded when Charles had previously described him as open, sociable, easy to read.

Or, well, I wanted to know. I wanted to know everything there was to know about him, and putting together the events leading up to this summer was the best way for me to do that. “Did you take that personally?”

Ida looked surprised by my question, tilting her head back for a moment.

“No,” she finally said. “Although we had been engaged for so long, I don’t think I ever really believed we would get married.

I always had romantic notions about marrying for love and I never loved Arthur, not the way I wanted to.

But I couldn’t call the engagement off, it wouldn’t have been proper.

I was… well, I was relieved when he finally called it off. I knew he didn’t love me, either.”

“If our mothers wanted us to love you as a wife, they shouldn’t have allowed us to play with you as children,” Charles said. “I’ve seen you eat far too much dirt to take you as a bride.”

Ida laughed, her face turning the barest pink as she looked at Charles again. “You believe your brother didn’t want to marry me because I ate too much dirt as a child? Because I distinctly remember a boy who—”

“No, don’t,” Charles said, laughing as well and leaning across the table as though to grab her hand, Ida leaning back to avoid him. “Don’t say it, you’ll make Tom think less of me!”

“A boy who used to eat grass because he said it tasted sweet in the summer!” Ida finished, and I couldn’t help but laugh, looking at Charles.

“You ate grass?” I asked, and Charles looked at me, shaking his head. “Ida says you ate grass.”

“I ate a little bit of grass,” he admitted, and at that moment Arthur and Rudolph entered the greenhouse, Rudolph hanging behind a little as they approached the table.

“Are we talking about when Charles ate grass because we ran out of cake?” Arthur asked, stepping out of the way as one of the maids appeared and set the table. “I still don’t understand why he did that.”

“I was five. I think it’s perfectly acceptable,” Charles said. “That was the same winter you nearly died from illness, Arthur, and I think it was the grass that saved me from suffering the same fate.”

“I highly doubt that,” Arthur said. “I don’t believe grass has any medicinal properties.”

I glanced at Rudolph, who had settled into a seat alongside his sister, and noticed that he was watching Arthur closely, as though unable to tear his eyes off the man.

I understood all too well the allure, but it made me wonder even more what they had talked about, Arthur seeming unaffected and Rudolph seeming more morose than he had been when we left them in the great hall.

Clearly they’d had some private conversation, and I was more convinced than ever that there was some hidden history there.

I highly doubted that anyone at the table had the suspicions I currently did, but I wanted to confirm what I thought I knew.

I couldn’t ask Ida or Charles, and asking Rudolph or Arthur straight out was impossible, but there was someone I could ask, someone who most likely knew the answer to the question and would tell me without making a fuss.

Felix had to know. It was unlikely for a manservant to not know every detail of his employer’s life, and I knew Felix well enough by this point to recognize that he would tell me if I asked him with the utmost sincerity.

In the back of my mind, I knew that it was an invasion of privacy, but I had to know.

That summer laid bare a deficit in my character that I had been unaware of before, a desire to uncover the truth even if it would harm another, and in the weeks to come I would begin to understand that when it came to Arthur Ashford, I could only give into my basest nature.