Page 68 of Brave New Earl (The Way to a Lord's Heart 1)

“Did you have a fish funeral?” Geoffrey asked.

“No. The servants just disposed of them.”

“I’d’ve had a funeral,” he declared. “Look!”

On the opposite side of the pond, a flash of color. In the next instant, a bird flew off with a tadpole in its beak.

“That’s a kingfisher,” Geoffrey said. “Tom told me.” He stood up to watch it disappear. “They’re kings because they’re the best of all the fishers.”

“Lovely,” said Miss Saunders.

She was lovely, Benjamin thought. He needed to speak to her, to hold her again. “Shall we walk?” he asked.

As he’d hoped, Geoffrey ran ahead of them. He found a sturdy stick and waved it about like a sword, beheading random bits of vegetation with great panache.

“You should get him a dog,” Miss Saunders said.

“You seem determined to populate my home with animals.”

She laughed. “It just seems natural that Geoffrey would have a dog. Look at him run and jump.”

“Did you have a dog? Along with your fish?”

“No.” She bit off the word.

Benjamin took the hint and didn’t ask further. “We had three when I was a boy,” he said instead. “Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.”

“What?”

He acknowledged the oddity of the names with a nod. “My mother found them as tiny puppies in a shed that had caught fire.”

“A fiery furnace?”

“Not quite so bad, but it made her think of the Biblical story. They were her dogs. Papa had no interest in pets. We ended up calling them Shad, Mesh, and Ben, of course.”

“Animals weren’t allowed in my home. Mama thought dogs dirty and noisy, cats sly and cold.”

The more Benjamin heard about her mother the less he liked her. “Parrots? Rabbits? Hedgehogs?”

As he’d hoped, she smiled. “I never heard her opinion of those.”

“Heigh-ho!” shouted Geoffrey. He’d leapt onto a large, flat rock at the side of the path and was fencing with an encroaching thistle.

The stone, and the trees behind it, sparked Benjamin’s memory. “Ah,” he said. He went to a certain spot in the thicket, pushed aside one large leafy branch, and then another. A narrow, twisting path, just barely visible in the leaf litter, was revealed.

“Hey!” shouted Geoffrey.

“What is it?” Jean asked.

“Come and see.”

His smile was so impish that Jean went, even though the opening was dark and close. Slivers of sunlight did filter down through the tangled branches.

Lord Furness bent his tall figure and stepped inside.

“Hey,” called Geoffrey again. He pushed past Jean and plunged into the thicket. The opening fit him much better than the adults.

The path bent around great clumps of roots. Jean had to duck under swathes of bramble. At one point she was so hunched over, she was nearly crawling. Her chest tightened in the constricted space.

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