Chapter 26
Cecily’s cough was worse by the following morning. Honora had noticed it in the night, a rough, wet sound that woke her twice before dawn.
By the time the light illuminated the room properly through the nursery curtains, the baby’s gurgles sounded raspy, as if her throat ached. Honora sat up in the chair beside the crib, where she had fallen asleep sometime after the second waking, and lifted Cecily against her shoulder.
“There now.”
Cecily coughed again, then burrowed her face into Honora’s neck.
The sound of it went straight through her.
Four days in that room, she thought, and could not finish it properly.
The rest involved the cold and the damp and the bread that had never been enough.
She had not yet found a way to think about it without her hands beginning to shake.
Instead, she focused every thought on Cecily.
She recalled how Leopold had insisted that Honora should have spoken up about needing a physician sooner the last time Cecily was ill.
She quickly stepped out into the hall, gently bouncing the wheezing child until a maid approached.
“Please, let His Grace know we need the physician,” she said.
The maid’s eyes widened when Cecily coughed again and nodded, hurrying away without a word. Cecily tried to cry, but a fit of coughing racked her tiny body, and she could barely catch her breath.
Weak, gasping whimpers were all the child could manage to express her misery, and Honora’s heart sank into her stomach. She had never seen Cecily so ill, and she was beginning to fear for the baby.
Leopold arrived before the physician did. He came into the nursery still in his riding coat, which was wrinkled and crooked. He looked as though he had heard the news while riding and had flown off the horse rather than dismounting properly and raced the whole way to the nursery.
“How is she?”
“Worse than yesterday.” Honora turned Cecily so he could see her.
He touched the back of his fingers to the baby’s forehead, the same gesture he had made the night of the fever. “Warm.”
“Not as warm as before.”
“It is warmer than if she was well.”
“Yes. I am worried sick.”
Leopold gave her a nod.
“The physician will help her. She will be all right.”
She gave him a weak smile. I must believe that is true, she thought as tears filled her eyes. She had been terrified that she and Cecily were going to die in that cold, wet room. Now, she was afraid the conditions of that room were not finished taking their toll on the baby.
They did not speak while they waited for the physician, although Leopold perpetually looked as though he wanted to say something. She wanted to speak to him, too, but she was unsure what to say.
She was grateful he had come to rescue her and Cecily.
But she had not forgotten the terrible things he had said to her when he sent her away.
And if he had given her a chance to explain instead of throwing them out and into the hands of Isolde, Cecily might not be suffering like she was then.
Part of her felt like she was being irrational with such thoughts.
But she could not help the parts of her that did not feel that way.
He did not leave while the physician examined Cecily.
He stood by the crib, watching every movement of the man’s hands and asking questions before Honora could form them herself.
The physician answered each one patiently.
After what felt like an hour, he packed away his equipment and handed Honora a bottle of paregoric.
“You can rest easy,” he said. “There is no fluid deep in her lungs, which is what I first feared. This is nothing more than a lingering effect from the days of cold and poor nutrition. It will clear perfectly with some rest for a few days, warmth, and the tincture I just gave you, which will soothe the cough and any pain, and it will help her sleep.”
Honora nodded, tears of relief slipping down her cheeks before she realized she was crying.
“Thank you, Doctor,” Leopold said, sounding as emotional as Honora felt.
He remained another hour after the physician left, sitting in the chair by the window while Honora walked Cecily slowly around the room, rising only when Wilfred appeared with a look that meant duty had finally caught up with him.
At the door, Leopold paused, placing a paper on the dresser nearby.
“Send for me if anything changes.”
“I will.”
He looked at her a moment longer, and Honora thought he might finally say what he meant to say. Instead, he nodded silently and left.
The guilt burdens him, she thought. She had seen it in the way he watched her, as though waiting for a sentence she had not yet decided to speak. And in realizing that, she also understood that she was not angry with him for sending her away.
She had told him a lie large enough to justify such actions. It was something she had anticipated for weeks, yet she did nothing to prevent it before someone else went to him. She suddenly wished he would return so she could tell him it was not his fault. It was hers. And she owed him an apology.
Honora settled into the chair once the medicine helped Cecily drift into an easier sleep than she had had during the night. Only then did she think again about the paper that Leopold had put on top of the dresser.
She quietly crossed the room and fetched it, noticing right away what it was. It was Celestine’s birth record. He had told her about it in the carriage on the way from Alton, but she had been too tired to think about what that meant. Right then, however, she was eager to see it.
Celestine Joan Belgrave. Born to His Grace William James Harcourt, Duke of Belgrave and Her Grace Verity Renee Harcourt, Duchess of Belgrave.
Honora read the words twice before they became real.
Her sister had been born in that house. Not in the modest townhouse in Wiltshire where Honora had grown up believing they shared everything.
It had been there, in the mansion, in a room somewhere above the one she now sat in, to a duke and duchess who had kept her hidden for three days and then sent her away.
Across the room, the crib was quiet. Cecily slept with one small fist curled beneath her chin, exactly as Celestine used to sleep. But she noticed something else, too. With her wrinkled brow and lips turned down as she slept, there was a bit of resemblance to the dowager.
Her sister had also had the same forced smile when she was trying to hide her displeasure. The same strained smile that her mother has, she thought, gasping. How did I not see it sooner?
She was consumed with memories before she realized it. Her father’s face when he looked at Celestine, especially in unguarded moments, at breakfast, or across a room when he believed no one was watching. Honora had always taken it for pride.
A father delighted by a beautiful daughter. Perhaps it had been a bit of that, as well. But then, she understood it had been guilt, as well. Had he wanted to tell Celestine the truth all those years? Had he secretly felt differently about Celestine than he did Honora?
She thought of her mother at church, with Celestine’s small hand held in hers with a grip too tight to be casual, as though she could not keep her close enough. Honora had thought it was simply a loving gesture.
But right then, she wondered how much of it had been fear. They were frightened of losing her, she thought. Not to illness, not to any ordinary danger, but to Belgrave and whatever arrangement had put her in their house in the first place.
She thought of the way strangers stared at Celestine in the market, at her white hair and her pale, searching eyes, and the way her parents had never once explained why she looked nothing like the rest of the family.
Honora had asked once, as a child, and been told only that some families were simply made that way. She had believed it because there had been no reason not to.
Celestine was different because she had come from somewhere else, she thought. And somehow, life brought me to her real family. Honora pressed the birth record against her chest and let herself cry quietly, careful not to wake the child asleep behind her.
You never knew, she thought. Celestine had gone her whole life, twenty-nine years without ever learning what Honora knew then.
She had grown up believing she was simply the second Bellamy daughter, the pale one, the one strangers looked at twice.
Then she had married, borne a child, and died on a road in Wiltshire without a single person telling her the truth.
And Honora had grown up beside her, sharing a room and a garden and every secret either of them had, and had never once suspected there was anything to know.
What if Celestine knowing the truth had changed her life, including how soon her life ended?
She did not hear Martha in the doorway until she spoke.
“There you are.”
Honora wiped her face quickly. “Martha.”
Her eyes moved from Honora’s face to the paper in her hand. She came into the room and closed the door behind her.
“What happened?”
Honora looked down at the record. There seemed no point anymore in choosing her words carefully. She told her everything, including the full truth about how Honora herself had ended up at Belgrave and how Cecily was actually a member of the Harcourt family.
Martha listened without interrupting. When Honora finished, she sat down slowly in the chair across from her, and for a moment, she said nothing at all.
Then she nodded, once, as though a great many loose threads had finally been drawn together.
“That explains quite a bit.”
Honora looked up. “Like what?”