Chapter 8
“Do you think he knows my voice?”
Mrs. Bridwell looked up from the linen she was folding. Tommy lay in Mary’s arms, his eyes half-closed, his mouth working around the edge of his fist.
Ten days old. Ten days of bottles and burping and baths and the small, relentless work of keeping a human being alive.
“He knows your voice better than anyone’s, Your Grace.”
“Better than his mother’s?”
Mrs. Bridwell set the linen down. She had the steady, unhurried manner of a woman who had spent twenty years caring for other people’s children and had learned to navigate the grief that came with it.
“He knows the voice that’s here. That’s the one that matters.”
Mary pressed her lips to Tommy’s forehead.
He smelled of the lavender soap and warm milk, and his skin was impossibly soft against her mouth.
She had memorized him in ten days. The way his brow furrowed before he cried.
The hiccup that followed every feeding. The particular weight of him in the crook of her left arm, which he preferred to the right for reasons only he understood.
“Mrs. Bridwell?”
“Your Grace.”
“Does it strike you as odd that His Grace has not held this child? Not once?”
The nursemaid picked up the next cloth. She folded it with great attention. “It is not my place to say, Your Grace.”
“It is not your place. But I am asking.”
Mrs. Bridwell smoothed the folded linen and placed it on the stack. “In my experience, some people are afraid of what they’ll feel if they let themselves hold a child. Especially a child they didn’t expect.”
“And some people are simply cold.”
“That is also possible.” Mrs. Bridwell met her eyes. “But cold men do not stand in doorways watching babies sleep, Your Grace. And they do not cover sleeping women with blankets when they think no one is looking.”
Mary went still. “The throw. That was him?”
Mrs. Bridwell said nothing. Her expression said everything.
Mary looked down at Tommy. His eyes had closed, his breathing deepening into the steady rhythm of sleep.
She should have felt something warm at the knowledge that Evander had been there, that he had crossed the room and tucked the throw around her shoulders while she slept. She should have felt it as a kindness.
Instead, she felt the shape of what was missing. He had come in the dark, when she could not see him. He had touched her only when she could not feel it. He offered care the way a man leaves coins on a table and walks out before anyone can thank him.
She was married to a man who would cover her with a blanket but would not sit beside her in the light of day.
“Did you have children of your own, Mrs. Bridwell?”
“Two, Your Grace. Both are grown now. A son in the Navy and a daughter married to a shopkeeper in Bath.” A quiet pride moved across the nursemaid’s face. “They were terrors as babies. Far worse than this one.”
“And their father?”
“Lost at sea. Twelve years ago.” Mrs. Bridwell said it the way she said everything, with a steadiness that came from long practice.
“He was a good man. Clumsy with words. Better with his hands. He built the cradle our children slept in, and he sat beside it every night for the first month, just listening to them breathe.” She paused.
“Some men show love with their presence, Your Grace. Others show it with the things they do when they think no one’s watching. ”
Mary turned the words over. She thought of her own father, who had shown love by arranging marriages and managing reputations and never once asking what she wanted. She thought of Charlotte, who had shown love by running toward it and leaving everyone else behind.
And she thought of Evander, standing in a dark nursery, draping a throw over a woman he would not speak to at breakfast.
“I am lonely, Mrs. Bridwell.” The words left her before she could catch them. She held Tommy closer, as though the baby could absorb the confession before it reached the air. “I did not expect to say that.”
“You can say whatever you need to say in this room, Your Grace.”
“I am angry with my sister for leaving. I am angry at his brother for taking her. I am angry at my father for handing me to another man like a debt to be settled, and I am angry at the Duke for—”
She stopped.
Tommy stirred against her chest, sensing the tension in her arms, and she forced herself to soften.
“For making me feel as though I am furniture in this house,” she continued. “Something useful that he arranged to have delivered.”
Mrs. Bridwell pulled the rocking chair closer and sat down. She folded her hands in her lap and looked at Mary with the same patience she showed Tommy when he fussed.
“You are not furniture, Your Grace.”
“Then why does he treat me as though I am?”
“Perhaps because he does not know how to treat you as anything else.” Mrs. Bridwell paused.
“I have been in service to many families. I have seen marriages that began with less than yours and grew into something real. I have also seen marriages that began with promise and rotted from neglect.” She held Mary’s gaze.
“The difference was never the beginning. It was whether someone kept trying.”
Mary said nothing. She rocked Tommy and listened to the clock on the mantelpiece count the seconds of another afternoon in a house where her husband moved through rooms she was not in and left through doors she was not meant to follow through.
“Goodnight, Harding.”
Mary stood at the top of the staircase. Below, Evander crossed the entrance hall in his greatcoat, his collar turned up, his stride the purposeful clip of a man going somewhere he intended to be.
Harding held the door. The night air swept in. He stepped through without looking up, and the door closed, and the house settled into the silence he left behind.
The fourth night in a row.
Mary gripped the banister. She had taken to positioning herself here at half past ten, not because she intended to confront him, but because she needed to see it.
Needed the evidence. The first night could have been business.
The second, a gentleman’s club. The third, she had told herself, he was searching for Richard, because the alternative was a thought she did not want to finish.
By the fourth night, the thought finished itself.
He left at eleven and returned after two. She knew because she lay awake and listened for his footsteps, and when they finally passed her door, steady and unhurried, she pressed her face into the pillow and counted the beats of her own heart until it slowed.
She descended the stairs. Harding had retreated to wherever butlers retreated when the house was locked.
“Harding.”
He reappeared with the swiftness of a man who never truly left.
“Where does His Grace go at night?”
“I could not say, Your Grace.”
The same answer as last time. The same careful blankness. Mary studied his face and saw nothing, because there was nothing to see. Harding was a locked door, and she did not have the key.
“Thank you.”
She climbed the stairs again. The corridor stretched before her, dim and quiet.
She walked past the nursery door without stopping.
Tommy was asleep. Mrs. Bridwell would tend to him if he woke.
Mary did not need to stand over his crib again, whispering reassurances to a baby who could not understand them and drawing comfort from a child because no one else in this house would offer it.
She was tired of being the only one who showed up.
In her room, she sat at the dressing table and unpinned her hair.
The mirror showed a woman she was beginning not to recognize.
Thinner in the face. Sharper around the eyes.
Ten days of caring for a baby, managing a household, and being avoided by her own husband had carved something new into her features. Not grief. Something harder.
She set the pins down and looked at her reflection.
Mary had spent her life being what other people needed. The dutiful daughter. The accommodating bride. A wife who sat in the dark while her husband disappeared at night. The woman who held someone else’s baby and called it enough.
She was finished being enough.
Tomorrow, she would stop waiting for the Duke of Blackholm to become the husband she needed. She would stop listening for his footsteps outside her door. She would stop hoping that the man who covered her with a blanket in the dark might one day find the courage to do it in the light.
She would make a life in this house whether or not he participated in it.
Mary blew out the candle and climbed into bed. She did not listen for footsteps. She did not count heartbeats. She closed her eyes, and for the first time since her wedding, she fell asleep before the Duke came home.