Chapter 7
“Careful with the cloth, Your Grace. Small circles. If you go too fast, he fusses. Gentle. There you are.”
Evander stood in the corridor outside the nursery with his back against the wall and his arms folded.
The door was open a hand’s width. Enough to hear. Enough to see.
Mary sat in the rocking chair with Tommy propped against her shoulder, her palm flat between his shoulder blades.
Mrs. Bridwell kneeled beside her, adjusting the angle of Mary’s arm.
Tommy’s face was scrunched and red, his mouth working, and then he burped with a violence that startled a laugh out of Mary.
“There it is,” Mrs. Bridwell said. “Like clockwork.”
“That cannot be normal.” Mary wiped Tommy’s chin with the cloth over her shoulder. “It sounded like a man in a public house.”
“All babies are indelicate, Your Grace. The trick is not to take it personally.”
Mary laughed again. It was a quiet sound, unguarded, and Evander realized he had never heard her laugh before.
He had heard her argue. He had heard her voice go sharp with anger and thin with hurt.
He had heard the controlled steadiness she wore like armor when she refused to let him see what his words had done.
But he had not heard this. Unguarded. Free. For a moment, nothing existed beyond the baby in her arms, the friend beside her, and the sound of it caught Evander off guard.
She shifted Tommy to the crook of her arm and looked down at him.
The afternoon light fell through the nursery window and caught the loose strands of hair at her temple.
She murmured something Evander could not hear, and Tommy’s fist closed around the lace at her collar, and Mary smiled with a tenderness that made Evander’s chest tighten in a way he did not welcome.
He pushed off the wall and walked away before she could turn and find him there.
“The nursery is well supplied, Your Grace. Her Grace asks if you might visit Lord Thomas this afternoon. He is awake more during the day now, and she thought you might enjoy seeing him alert.”
Mrs. Cahill stood in the study doorway with her hands clasped, delivering the morning report Evander had made part of her routine. Same question every day. Same forty feet of corridor he refused to walk himself to ask her himself.
“And?” Evander asked without looking up from the estate ledger.
“That was all, Your Grace.”
Evander turned a page. The Dorset tenants had paid half the overdue rent. The east wing roof could wait another month. The Bow Street runner’s second report was due tomorrow and would contain nothing like the first.
“Inform Her Grace that I have business this afternoon.”
“Of course, Your Grace.” Mrs. Cahill paused. “Shall I convey anything else?”
“No.”
The housekeeper curtsied and withdrew. Evander stared at the column of figures before him and saw none of them.
He could walk down the corridor. He could stand in the nursery doorway and look at Tommy’s face and let himself feel whatever pressed against his ribs every time he heard the baby cry or laugh or breathe.
He could sit in the chair beside the crib and hold his brother’s son and allow the child’s warmth to settle into his arms, and he could let Mary see him do it.
He could. He chose not to.
Because the nursery was not a room. It was a door. And on the other side of it waited everything Evander had spent fourteen years building walls against.
Attachment. Need. The particular love that made a man pour himself into a bottle when it was taken from him, the way his father had poured himself into brandy the day they buried his mother and never climbed back out.
Evander’s father had loved his wife. That was the part no one spoke of. The old Duke of Blackholm had not been a villain. He had been a man who loved too much and broke when that love was gone, and the breaking had lasted twelve years and destroyed everything it touched.
Evander would not break. He would not allow himself the kind of love that could break him. He would protect Tommy. He would provide for Mary. He would fulfill every obligation his name demanded. But he would do it from a distance, because distance was the only thing that had ever kept him whole.
He returned to the ledger. The numbers made sense. Numbers always did.
“Your Grace?”
Mrs. Bridwell’s voice came from somewhere far away. Evander blinked. He stood in the nursery doorway at half past eleven at night, and he did not remember walking here.
The nursemaid sat up in the rocking chair, blinking sleep from her eyes. The single candle on the side table had burned to a stub, its flame guttering. Tommy slept in the crib, his breathing slow and even.
Mary slept in the armchair beside him.
She had curled into the chair the way a child curls into a hiding place, her legs tucked beneath her, her head resting against the wing.
One hand hung over the arm of the chair, her fingers near the edge of the crib, as though she had fallen asleep reaching for the baby.
Her hair was unpinned, loose around her shoulders.
Her face in sleep was younger than it was in waking; the sharpness softened, the composure dissolved into something unguarded.
“How long has she been asleep?” Evander asked. He kept his voice low.
“An hour, perhaps. She wouldn’t leave, Your Grace. He was fussy after his ten o’clock feeding, and she settled him, and then she just…” Mrs. Bridwell gestured at the chair. “I didn’t have the heart to wake her.”
Evander crossed the room. A knitted throw lay folded over the back of the rocking chair. He picked it up, shook it open, and draped it over Mary. He tucked the edge around her shoulder the way he had once tucked blankets around Richard after carrying their father to bed.
The gesture came from the same place. Muscle memory. The instinct to cover what was vulnerable.
Mary stirred. Her lips parted. She murmured something that sounded like a name, and Evander stepped back before she could surface enough to see him.
He looked at Tommy. The baby lay on his back with his fists above his head, surrendered to sleep. His face was round and untroubled. Richard’s brow. Charlotte’s nose. A child built from the two people who had left the most wreckage behind them.
Something moved in Evander’s chest. Not the tightening he had felt in the corridor that afternoon. Something deeper. A pull, low and persistent, like a tide he could not see but could feel shifting the ground beneath him.
He turned from the crib.
There was work to do. Richard to find. A duchy to manage.
A scandal to contain. He had correspondence waiting in his study, a report from the Bow Street runner to review, and a list of debts Richard had left behind that grew longer with every inquiry.
He did not have time to stand in a nursery at midnight, watching a woman sleep beside a baby that was not hers, feeling things he had no right to feel.
He nodded to Mrs. Bridwell and left the room. His footsteps were quiet on the corridor runner. He did not look back.
Downstairs, he collected his greatcoat from the stand in the entrance hall. Harding appeared, as he always did, and held the door without comment.
The night air hit Evander’s face, cold and bracing, and he walked to the waiting carriage, and the door of Blackholm House closed behind him, and inside, the woman he had married slept in a chair beside the child he would not hold, and the house held them both in his absence the way it always did.
The way he could not.