Page 8 of Goodbye, Earl (Ladies’ Revenge Club #4)

I t was a warm morning, cloudless and bright. Perhaps it was a good omen.

Claire arrived in the orchards behind the house first, wanting to find a quiet place to observe, obscured by the trees. This late in the spring, the trees still clung to their blooms, with pink and white petals like hummingbird feathers, floating through the air in tiny cyclones.

It did not smell half so sweet as she might have expected. The grass and soil were far more fragrant than the bounty of the trees this time of year. It would be months still before they had apples and pears, even in miniature, to scent the hill.

This was where Tommy’s dower house sat, just beyond the last line of trees. It was private enough without being a long walk to Crooked Nook proper, and of course it meant Tommy got first choice of the autumn’s harvest.

She was the one who’d had the little dining gazebo installed out here, amongst the fruits. It had been a good idea, though it was very small and not suited to groups of more than three or, with effort, four.

Claire wasn’t intending to join the breakfast, however. It would suit the Hightowers just fine this morning for the introductions that hovered on the horizon, just behind the sun.

She watched the servants arrive to clean and set the table. In the distance, she could see Tommy on the crest of the hill with her dog, Abra, at her heels. She could hear Abra’s yips, thin and distorted, on the breeze.

The dog, a little white terrier with brown spots, was in much higher spirits only a month postpartum than Claire remembered being in the same place. And Abra had given birth to four babies at once, rather than just one!

No one, dog nor human, noticed Claire in the trees. That was well.

Patricia arrived first, holding her finger in a novel like she expected to be kept waiting for a while.

She settled in while the servants were still flapping the tablecloth and arranging the empty plates and bowls, simply pulling a chair far enough away to not disturb them and returning to her story while she waited.

A few moments later, Oliver arrived with his governess, still rubbing sleep from his eyes.

Claire leaned against a tree, her heart softening at the way his hair stuck up at the back, a stubborn cowlick that water alone often failed to tame.

His face brightened once he’d spotted his grandmother, and he immediately increased his speed, tugging along his weary-looking governess behind him.

He did not, Claire noted with satisfaction, release the governess’s hand. That had been a hard-won lesson. She was pleased to see that, even without knowing his mama was nearby and watching, it had stuck.

She kept an ear turned toward the conversation while she watched the approach from the house. Patricia dismissed the governess and took Oliver onto her knee, indulging his questions about the book she was reading, with a few clear modifications about the propriety of its content.

Her legs did start to ache a bit. She bent her knees and tried to prop herself against a tree, which would have likely knocked the poor thing completely over if she’d committed to it. She shifted from foot to foot. She set her jaw and told herself to grin and bear it.

Then, flashing against the morning light like a polished brass button, Freddy appeared.

It still made her breath catch, no matter how firmly she cursed herself for it.

His own golden hair blew freely in the breeze, with nothing like a layer of water or the firm hand of a styling wand to hold it into order.

It bounced and swayed with his movements, feathering charmingly over his brow every time the wind ran its fingers through it.

She dug a fingernail into her thumb and told herself to stop it. Freddy’s beauty was irrelevant to the matters of order this morning.

Though she couldn’t help noticing a bit of hair sticking up at the crown of his head. A cowlick.

She frowned.

She watched him draw closer.

She held her breath.

Freddy had risen at dawn again. Perhaps it was becoming a habit, or perhaps he was living in such a constant state of panic that it would simply happen to him forevermore, every sunrise linked to a jolt from his sleep and a spike of anxiety in his chest.

He supposed he deserved that.

Today, he’d gotten to enjoy the agonizing several hours between waking and breakfast with only a short walk by the water outside of Crooked Nook while the sky was still in twilight. Then, he’d taken so much care dressing that one would think he was lovesick and meeting his sweetheart.

He supposed, in a way, that was true.

Son was a word he hadn’t let himself think for these last many years.

He’d think of him instead as the child or the boy or even just Oliver.

And when he did, he’d imagined a little boy who looked like Claire, with light brown ringlets glinting with hints of gold and copper and bronze under the candlelight, with her eyes like warm amber and the rosebud shape of her mouth.

Millie had told him, more than once, that Oliver had his own coloring, not Claire’s. It hadn’t changed his mental image, even when he’d tried to adjust his imaginings with the full force of intentional thought.

He could only imagine the boy as an extension of his mother. Surely nothing so pure would take Freddy’s visage rather than his wife’s. Surely not.

In the end, he’d spent so long putting on and taking off clothes, wondering which waistcoat, which trouser, which shirt said father, that the chime of the clock startled him. Even with a multi-hour preparation window, he was still running behind. Imagine that.

He pulled a comb through his hair, grimaced, and made haste toward the orchard, weaving his way through wedding guests who were meandering toward the breakfast room or otherwise congregated in feminine thickets, scheming amongst themselves.

One such thicket contained Millie and Ember alongside his mother’s terrifying spinster friends. Both murmured morning greetings and nodded at him as he passed in a way that made him suspect they already knew where he was off to.

He decided to cut diagonally over the green and perhaps send an apology note and a portion of dessert to the groundskeeper later.

He couldn’t see the man, but he could feel his glower all the same as he stomped over the neatly combed and cultivated lawn, almost as sharp as the glare of early-morning sunlight bouncing up over the dewdrops that still blanketed the wolds.

The gazebo was new, something Tommy had been planning just before he’d left for London that final, fateful Season.

He knew exactly where she intended to have it built, however, smack amongst the fruit trees at the bottom of the hill her house sat on.

He’d been there when they cut down some of the fruit trees to make room, after the harvest.

He tried not to break into a run, though it would have both gotten him where he was going a lot faster and possibly soothed some of the bouncing, roiling bits in his chest. Fathers are stoic, he reminded himself. Fathers are steady.

He was a father.

He had been avoiding that word too. It didn’t feel earned.

Finally, he could see them, or at least the impression of them, black like shadows from the wealth of low sunlight that threaded around their bodies from behind them.

He could see two maids moving around in silhouette and, on a chair slightly removed from the table, a woman with a child on her lap, possibly reading a book to him.

That was him.

That was Oliver.

That was his son.

He filled his lungs until they hurt, blinking against the sting of the light, and pushed forward, pushed ahead until the light came into focus, and he could see their colors, at first a little faded, and then, in sprinklings of seconds, more vibrant, shade by shade.

It could have been a window into the past, Freddy thought as his heart slammed twice into his ribs and then got stuck there. It could have been him, just shy of five years old, on Patricia Hightower’s lap.

The boy noticed his grandmother’s pause in her reading and looked up, first at her, and then across the short wooden floor of the gazebo, to Freddy. He had wide, pale blue eyes that blinked twice, his golden lashes looking stark white in the bright glare of the sun.

He didn’t smile or otherwise move. He just stared, much like Freddy himself was probably doing.

He was the most beautiful thing Freddy had ever seen in his short, cursed life. More beautiful than any person, any natural wonder, any rare bird, any feat of art or architecture.

The boy—his son —was perfect.

“Hello there,” Freddy said, a tentative smile on his face as he stepped into the shade of the gazebo. “I’m sorry to interrupt your story. You must be Oliver.”

“I am,” the little boy confirmed, though he glanced at his grandmother once more, just quickly, as though to ensure he actually was. When he looked back, he wrinkled his little brow a little, small hands fidgeting against each other, and he asked softly, “Are you my papa?”

Freddy closed the gap between them, kneeling at his mother’s feet so that he could be eye-to-eye with his little mirror image. “I am. I am your papa,” he said, swallowing down the crack in his voice, forcing his hands to still.

No matter how much he wanted to snatch the little man into his embrace or burst into tears, he could not. It would likely only scare the lad. His son.

He tried to remember how his own father behaved, how he had seemed like something akin to a god or a mythic hero to Freddy when he was a boy.

It was the oddest thing. In that moment, he could not remember anything about his own father, not his voice or his face or a single thing he’d ever said to Freddy at a tender age.

He shook his head, dispelling the thought. Frederick Octavius Hightower II was not here this morning. Freddy was.