Chapter 25
“Hold still, Tommy. I cannot wash what I cannot catch.”
Mary bowed beside the basin in the nursery, Tommy propped between her hands, his legs kicking at the warm water with the fury of a baby who had just discovered splashing.
Water arced over the rim and soaked the front of her dress. She reached for the linen cloth on the changing table without looking up.
A hand held it out to her. The wrong way.
Mary startled. Evander stood beside the changing table with a folded towel over his arm and the square of linen pinched between two fingers, offering it the way one might offer a dead mouse.
“You are holding the cloth wrong,” she said.
“Mrs. Bridwell told me it was bath time.” He turned the cloth over in his hand, found no improvement, and held it out again. “I came to help.”
Mary took the cloth from him. She studied his face for a long moment, searching for the catch. The last time they had spoken, he had offered her a child and withheld himself in the same sentence, and she had spent the rest of the day refusing to be in the same room with him.
“You want to help,” she repeated.
“I want to help.”
Evander kneeled beside the basin and dipped his hands into the water. Tommy stared at him with solemn interest. Mary handed him the cloth, and he began washing Tommy’s arm, gently, copying the motion he had watched her do through a dozen doorways.
When the cloth reached Tommy’s fingers, the baby grabbed it and stuffed a corner into his mouth.
“That is not food,” Evander said.
Tommy sucked harder.
“He does that with everything,” Mary said. The edge of a smile tugged at her mouth, reluctant but real. “Mrs. Bridwell’s cap. My pearls. The corner of his blanket. If it fits in his mouth, it belongs in his mouth.”
“A man of conviction.” Evander eased the cloth free from Tommy’s grip and wrung it out. “I respect that.”
Mary lifted Tommy from the basin, and Evander wrapped the towel around him.
The baby emerged damp and indignant, his face scrunching in protest at the cold air, and Mary held him against her chest while Evander tucked the towel around his shoulders.
Their hands brushed over the baby’s back.
Mary’s fingers were warm and wet, and the contact was brief, and neither of them pulled away.
They dressed Tommy together. Evander held the clean gown while Mary guided her arms through the sleeves, and they worked in a silence that held none of the frost of the past day.
It held something else. An awareness. The quiet acknowledgment of two people doing a small, ordinary thing that felt, for reasons neither could name, like the most important thing in the world.
Mary settled Tommy in his crib and covered him with the wool blanket.
The baby’s eyes were already heavy, the bath having done its work.
Evander stood beside her and looked down at Tommy’s face, round and flushed from the warm water, and the feeling that moved through him was the same feeling that had moved through him in the nursery at midnight, vast and unnamed, and this time he did not try to push it away.
“Have you thought about what I said?”
Mary’s hands stilled on the blanket’s edge. She did not look at him. “I have thought of little else.”
“And?”
Mary straightened. She turned to face him, and her eyes were clear and dry and terribly calm. The composure of a woman who had made a decision and was not going to let it break her, even if the cost of it was visible in the set of her mouth.
“I accept.”
Evander exhaled. The relief he expected did not arrive. In its place came something heavier, something that sat against his ribs and pressed.
“But I need to know how it is done.”
Evander blinked. “How is what done?”
Mary’s cheeks flushed. The calm composure cracked, just slightly, and beneath it, Evander caught a flash of the vulnerability she had been hiding.
“The act itself, Evander. No one has told me. My mother died when I was young, and Charlotte was the elder sister, and she never—” Mary pressed her lips together.
“I know the generalities. I am not a child. But the specifics have not been made available to me, and I would rather not discover them without some preparation.”
Evander stared at her. He had not considered this.
In the cold mathematics of his offer, in the careful construction of a proposal that gave Mary a child while protecting himself from the risk of loving her, he had not once thought about the fact that his wife, his twenty-one-year-old wife who had never been touched, would need someone to explain what would happen between them.
The realization landed with a force that knocked the composure from his face.
“Mary—”
A knock at the nursery door. Hattie stood in the corridor, pink-cheeked and breathless.
“Your Graces, forgive the interruption. A guest has arrived. The footmen have returned, and they’ve brought—”
“Charlotte.” Mary’s voice was barely a whisper. Her hand flew to her mouth. “Charlotte is here.”
She was past Hattie and through the door before Evander could speak. Her footsteps ran down the corridor, hit the staircase, and descended at a pace no duchess should attempt in house slippers.
Evander followed.
“Oh, God. Oh, Mary!”
The woman in the parlor was taller than Evander had expected.
Fair-haired, as Richard had described, with blue eyes swollen from crying, and a traveling dress creased from the road.
She stood in the center of the room with her hands clasped and her face blotched and her chin trembling, and the moment Mary appeared in the doorway, Lady Charlotte Gillies made a sound that was not a word but held every word she had not spoken in months.
Mary crossed the room and took her sister in her arms.
Evander stayed in the doorway. He watched the two women hold each other, Charlotte’s face buried in Mary’s shoulder, Mary’s hand pressed flat against the back of her sister’s head, both of them shaking.
Charlotte wept openly, her body heaving, and Mary held her the same way she held Tommy when he cried, with the steady, unbreakable grip of someone who would not let go until the storm passed.
“I’m sorry.” Charlotte’s voice was muffled against Mary’s shoulder. “I’m so sorry, Mary. I’m sorry—”
“I know.” Mary’s voice broke. “I know you are.”
They stood like that for a long time. Evander did not move. He understood, with the instinct of a man who had spent his life observing from doorways, that this moment did not belong to him.
Charlotte pulled back and gripped Mary’s hands. Her eyes were raw. “Tommy. Is he—”
“He is perfect.” Mary squeezed her hands. “He is upstairs, sleeping. He is healthy, growing, and perfect, Charlotte.”
Charlotte’s face crumpled again. She pressed Mary’s hands against her mouth and closed her eyes, and the tears ran over her knuckles.
Evander stepped into the room. Charlotte’s gaze found him, and the weeping paused, replaced by something more uncertain.
She released Mary’s hands and curtsied. The gesture was formal and stiff, the deference of a woman who understood exactly how much trouble she had caused the man standing before her.
“Your Grace. I cannot begin to express my gratitude. What you have done for Tommy, for my sister—”
“Sit down, Lady Charlotte.” Evander’s voice was not unkind, but it carried no warmth. “We have a great deal to discuss, and you have traveled a long way.”
Charlotte sat. Mary sat beside her, their hands still clasped. Evander remained standing.
“Your son is safe and well cared for,” Evander said.
“Mary has been his mother in every way that matters since the day he arrived.” He let the words land.
“Richard told us his account of what happened. The betrothal. The pregnancy. The plan to disappear. I have listened, and I have brought your sister here, and now I need to hear the truth from you.”
Charlotte’s chin trembled. She looked at Mary, then at Evander, and her mouth opened, but before she could speak, footsteps sounded in the corridor.
Richard appeared in the parlor doorway.
Charlotte went rigid. Her hand tightened on Mary’s. Richard stood on the threshold, pale and unshaven, and the two of them looked at each other across the room with the hollow recognition of two people bound together by a secret that had finally reached its end.
“Charlotte,” Richard said. “It’s time.”
Charlotte closed her eyes. When she opened them, the tears had stopped, and something harder had taken their place. Resolve, perhaps. Or surrender.
She looked at Mary.
“There are things I need to tell you,” Charlotte said. “About Tommy. About his father.” Her voice dropped. “About why I really left.”
Mary’s grip on her sister’s hand tightened. Evander lowered himself into the chair opposite and folded his arms.
The parlor was quiet. The fire crackled.
And Charlotte began to speak.