Sophie reached over and pulled up a small chair so that it was facing her. ‘I have embroidery to work on. Do you sew, Lady Isobel?’
‘No.’
Silence fell. Sophie, who had faced down more daunting social situations in her time, placidly made a row of French knots and waited.
‘Why do you sew? Why not buy what you want?’
‘It is interesting to create exactly what I would like and satisfying when I have made it. This is a present for my mother, a cover for her wash stand.’
‘I don’t have a mother.’ And you are not going to be one, the fierce brown stare promised.
‘You have a father though. You could embroider his initials on a handkerchief, then he would think of you every time he looked at it.’ Sophie took a large plain square of fine linen from her bag where she had put it with just this in mind, smoothed it out on the seat beside her and picked up her embroidery again.
‘I don’t know anyone who does that. Nanny Jenkins knits.’
‘You know me.’ Sophie glanced over the dark head to where Cal was stretched out on the battered chaise longue, hands folded on his flat stomach, eyes closed. Beside him Mrs Jenkins placidly knitted something grey and lacy.
‘You don’t like me.’ Isobel scuffed one toe into the rug.
‘Why do you say that? I don’t know you.’
‘I was rude to you. Nanny Jenkins says people don’t like people who are rude to them.’
‘It makes it hard, I agree. But it helps if you know why someone is rude. You thought I was going to try and take your mama’s place and that your papa wouldn’t love you as much if he married me.’ Sophie outlined a rose with steady stitches, her eyes on the work.
‘How did you know that?’ When she looked up Isobel was staring, mouth open.
‘Because my mama married again after my father died, so I know how easy it is to worry and to feel jealous. But I got to know my new Step Papa and I love him very much now and Mama still loves me just as much as ever and now I have Step Papa as well. He can never take the place of my real papa, he’s a different sort of papa. I would be a different sort of mama for you.’
‘Oh.’ A lot of silent thinking went on while Sophie rethreaded her needle with deeper pink. ‘Must I call you Mama?’
‘Not if you do not want to. We could think of a name together.’
‘Will you show me how to make a handkerchief for Papa?’
‘Of course I will.’
Cal woke to the smell of chalk and lavender. He lay listening to the clicking sounds close to his ear and, further away, the murmur of feminine voices, one soft and low, one higher-pitched and threatening to escape from a whisper.
He was in the nursery, he realised, not troubling to open his eyes. He felt warm, relaxed and considerably better than he had when he had yielded to Mrs Jenkins’s urging to lie down and rest himself.
He wondered vaguely what magic Sophie had created to enchant Isobel and then let himself drift towards sleep again. Time enough to get up and flex his muscles as he rather suspected he was going to have to do if Ransome continued to make Sophie so uneasy. No-one was going to distress the woman he…
Sophie saw Cal stretch and begin to sit up and whisked the linen square with its shaky pencil outline of a letter C into her sewing bag. ‘Don’t tell Papa, then it will be a surprise present.’
‘You’ll come back, show me how to sew it? Please?’
‘Of course.’ She raised her voice from a whisper. ‘The warning gong has rung for luncheon, Your Grace.’
‘Have I been asleep and neglecting three ladies?’ Cal stood and scrubbed one hand over his face. ‘What a dreadful example in bad manners to show my daughter. I must go down and change, I came here direct from the fencing bout.’
‘We have entertained ourselves very well, but I would be glad of your escort to my room.’ Sophie made her farewells, laying a finger on her lips in warning to Isobel who was obviously bursting with her secret, and let Cal take her arm on the stairs. His colour was back to normal and only the dark shadows beneath his eyes betrayed that he had been wracked with pain and sickness for most of the night.
‘You are an enchantress,’ he said. ‘What did you do to tame the child?’
‘I remembered one of our grooms showing me how to handle a colt who was so wild that no-one could get a halter on him. Jim would sit on the fence, polishing some leather, paying the animal not the slightest attention. It became unbearably curious and came closer and closer until it was butting him with its nose for attention. Then he would put out a hand, still not looking at it, and pet it. Within a few days he could do anything with it.
‘Isobel worries that I will try and replace her mother and that you will love her less if you… if you have someone else in your life. I told her that I have a stepfather and understand. And now we have a secret to keep from you and she adores that.’