Page 13 of Restored

So he’d let the London house to tenants, arranging to stay in hotels for his occasional unavoidable trips to town. Curzon Street was a fashionable address—too fashionable for a man who had never had much interest in polite society to begin with and who had absolutely none after his wife’s death. The children loved being at home. They loved their horses and playing by the river and running wild. And they were safe there. Henry had hired the best governesses and tutors he could find to avoid sending any of them to school for those first few years after Caroline’s death.

How quickly the years had passed since then. One moment, his children had been small, and now—quite suddenly, it seemed—they were all grown. And here he was, back in the townhouse in Curzon Street.

Sighing again, Henry threw back his bedcovers and rose from his bed, rubbing wearily at the tense spot between his brows. It had been warm last night with the window closed, and he had been restless. But there was no point lying in bed all morning hoping to fall asleep again—that would certainly not happen.

Making his way to his dressing room, Henry shook his head over the swift passage of the years, wondering—as he occasionally did these days —whether he had built too much of his life around his children.

In some ways, he’d had no choice. They’d needed him badly after Caroline’s death. Some fathers might have withdrawn from their children, becoming an even more distant figure, but Henry had drawn closer. In truth, their demands had kept him going in those dark and difficult days. They had given him a reason to wake each morning and shaped each day with purpose. He had not wanted to be apart from them.

And later, after little Alice’s death, there had been years when he’d been too frightened to leave them alone. It was terrifying how quickly disaster could strike. He had taken one short trip to Salisbury—the first time he’d left the children since Caroline’s death—and when he returned three days later, his youngest child was in a high fever from which she had never awoken.

Henry poured the water from the ewer into the washing bowl, sluiced his face with it, then straightened, meeting his own gaze in the looking glass

The man facing him was familiar, but a little older than he expected.

Time had sped past at an unholy rate. For years, Henry had been the centre of his family—he still was, he supposed, but now his children were drifting away from that centre, leaving him feeling somewhat redundant.

George, his eldest, was soon to be five-and-twenty, a serious, quiet young man. A good man, Henry thought, but lately, a melancholy one, and for reasons he could not discover. George preferred to spend his time in Wiltshire. He was the most self-contained of Henry’s children and the one he worried most about. Marianne, his sunniest, easiest child, was three-and-twenty, happily married and pregnant with her first child. It was for her sake he was in London now. And Freddy, at two-and-twenty was… well, Henry wasn’t quite sure about Freddy. He appeared to be unwilling to have any kind of discussion about his future with the father he had once adored and chattered away to about everything under the sun.

Henry's children were, each of them, quite grown, and busy with their own lives. And of course, that was how it ought to be, only sometimes, he could not help but wish for those older, easier days when they had clamoured noisily for his attention.

Only one of his children would always be with him. Alice, who had passed away two years after her mother, at just five years old.

Some losses eased with time. These days, his grief over Caroline’s death was just a faint ache. But even now, fifteen years later, Alice’s loss had the power to overwhelm him.

As the years wore on, it felt like Henry was the only person who remembered her, his darling youngest girl. Guarding her memory had begun to feel like a sacred responsibility. One that both pained him and was, somehow, the pinnacle of everything he had ever been: Alice’s father.

Henry thought of her every day—that was something no one else knew, not really. He spoke to his other children of Alice from time to time, and they would humour him with kind words and memories of their little sister. But he knew they did not really understand how altered—howfundamentallyaltered—he had been by her death. That he had lost a part of himself that day that could never be made good.

Caroline would have understood, and while he was glad she had been spared that grief, sometimes it was hard to bear alone. To have no one who shared the depths of his sorrow, or missed Alice as he always would.

His sorrow would always be there, but he was fortunate to have joy in his life too. And if he was a little melancholy just now over the slowly growing distance between him and his children, perhaps those feelings were the impetus he needed to force himself out of his comfortable existence.

Like a fledging trembling on the edge of the nest.

Henry eyed the grey temples of the man in the looking glass.

A rather elderly fledging, in his case.

Sighing, he turned away and went to get dressed.

Marianne and Jeremy were in the breakfast room when he arrived downstairs.

Henry had made a wedding present of the townhouse to his daughter and her new husband prior to their marriage, and Marianne had promptly redecorated the place from top to bottom. The old breakfast room, which had been a rather dark and chilly room at the back of the house, had been turned into a music room, and the new breakfast room, which got the morning sun, was warm and cheerful.

“Good morning, Papa,” Marianne greeted him, smiling brightly.

“Good morning, darling,” Henry replied fondly, dropping a kiss on her dark head. He was taking the opportunity to enjoy as many of these affectionate moments as he could while he had her. Soon she would be gone—Marianne and Jeremy planned to leave London within the next two weeks for Jeremy’s estate in Kent, where the baby would be born. Indeed, since Henry had arrived in London two days ago, all Marianne seemed to talk about was how eager she was to go, and how busy and uncomfortable London was at this time of year.

Henry smiled at his son-in-law. “Good morning, Jeremy.”

“Morning,” Jeremy returned. “Did you sleep well?”

“Yes, thank you,” Henry lied, as he made his way to the sideboard, where he filled a plate before returning to the table where Marianne was pouring his tea. He watched as she added the precisely correct amount of milk and passed the cup and saucer to him.

She was the only one who ever got it just right. It was a thought that made him happy and sad at once.

He smiled brightly at her. “So,” he said. “Do you have any plans for the day?”