Chapter 2
The baby had opinions.
Cecily had known this in the abstract—babies cried, babies required things, babies operated on a schedule entirely their own with no regard for anyone else’s—but knowing it in the abstract and lying awake at half past four in the morning while those opinions were expressed at considerable volume through the wall were two different experiences entirely.
She stared at the ceiling. The crying continued.
Then, distantly, she heard Beatrice’s footsteps—her sister’s particular soft, unhurried tread that meant she had done this enough times that she no longer started—and a moment later, the volume reduced itself to a series of hiccupping complaints, and then near silence.
Beatrice had been married for three years now. She moved through motherhood with a steadiness Cecily both admired and did not entirely understand, as though sleepless nights and small crises were simply another form of order.
Cecily waited, decided sleep was no longer a realistic ambition, then reached for her wrapper.
The nursery was at the end of the corridor, small and warm and smelling of milk and lavender. A single lamp burned low on the table.
Beatrice sat in the chair by the window with the baby against her shoulder, patting his back in a steady, rhythmic way, her hair loose down her back, her expression entirely peaceful for a woman who had been awake since before the sun had started to rise.
She looked up when Cecily appeared in the doorway.
“You didn’t have to get up,” she said, quietly enough so as not to disturb the baby.
“I was awake.”
“You were awake because he was awake.” She said it without any guilt, nodding toward the other chair. “Sit, then. Keep me company.”
Cecily sat, tucking her feet beneath her, and looked at her nephew.
He was five months old and already possessed of the particular gravity that his father wore in formal portraits—Edward’s expression in oils always suggested Parliament might be convening at any moment.
She had decided she would not mention the resemblance to Beatrice until the boy was old enough to find it amusing.
“There now,” Beatrice murmured. “I know. I know.”
The baby’s cries softened to hiccupping breaths.
“He does this every night?” Cecily asked.
“Only when he senses I’ve had enough sleep to spare.” Beatrice adjusted the baby gently. “He has excellent instincts.”
“He gets that from you.”
“He gets that from Edward. I was never this relentless.”
Cecily raised an eyebrow and said nothing, which was its own form of commentary. Beatrice caught it and smiled, the small private smile she wore when she chose not to argue because she knew she’d lose.
A faint sound came from the adjoining room—movement, a soft rustle of linens. Beatrice glanced briefly toward the door, then relaxed when it stilled again.
“Eloise,” she said quietly. “She will sleep through anything, eventually.”
Cecily nodded, her gaze returning to the baby.
They sat in the comfortable quiet for a moment, the lamp flickering, the sound of the sea just barely audible through the window. Brighton at this hour was entirely itself—the grand social performance of it stripped away, nothing left but salt air and the distant pulse of water.
“So,” Beatrice said, in a tone that meant she had been waiting to say something and had decided the middle of the night was as good a time as any. “Mr. Alderton.”
Cecily closed her eyes briefly. “Must we?”
“He called three times.”
“He did.”
“He’s very well-regarded. His estate in Wiltshire is–”
“Beatrice.”
“–apparently quite beautiful. Cecily, I’m only–”
“I know what you’re doing.”
“I’m making conversation.”
“You’re making a case.” Cecily looked at her. “There’s a difference.”
Beatrice had the grace to look mildly caught out. She shifted the baby to her other shoulder and tried again, in a different register—less prosecution, more genuine curiosity. “What was wrong with him? Truly.”
Cecily considered the question with more honesty than she usually allowed herself.
Mr. Alderton had been perfectly pleasant.
Soft-spoken, attentive, the kind of man who stood when a lady entered a room, not because he’d been reminded to but because it had long since become instinct.
He had asked her opinion on things and listened to the answers.
He had a good face, not remarkable but kind.
“Nothing,” she answered. “Nothing was wrong with him.”
“Then–”
“When he talked about his estate, his face didn’t change.
He described it the way you’d describe a piece of furniture you’d inherited.
Accurate. Dutiful. And when I said I’d heard the gardens were lovely, he said yes, the previous owner had invested heavily in the grounds, as though that were the end of it.
” She looked down at her hands. “He was kind, Bea. But there was nothing—there wasn’t anything underneath it.
I kept waiting for something to light up in him, and it never did. ”
Beatrice was quiet for a moment. “You can’t marry someone’s enthusiasm for their garden.”
“No. But you can tell rather a lot about a person by whether they have any.”
“That is not a sound matrimonial strategy.”
“It’s mine, though.”
Beatrice sighed—not an impatient sigh, more the sigh of someone who understood the argument completely and found it both admirable and maddening in equal measure. The baby made a small sound. She patted his back again, the rhythm unbroken.
“Cecily,” she said carefully. “You’re twenty-three.”
“I’m aware.”
“Mama is–”
“Also aware, and not shy about reminding me.”
“She worries.”
“She thinks too badly of the situation.” Cecily softened it with a slight smile.
“I know she means well. I know you both do. But I cannot… I’ve sat across from a great many very suitable gentlemen in a great many very well-appointed drawing rooms, and I have tried, genuinely tried, to imagine spending the next forty years breakfasting with them, and Bea, I cannot do it.
I cannot do it if there isn’t something real there. ”
“Real,” Beatrice repeated.
Cecily didn’t know if she was mocking the word or simply testing it. “You know what I mean. You have it. With Edward.”
Something moved across Beatrice’s face at that—quick and warm and a little undone, the expression she wore when Edward was mentioned in certain ways.
She looked down at the baby. “Edward was not an easy beginning.”
“No. But it was real. From the very start, even when it was difficult, it was real.” Cecily met her sister’s eyes. “That’s what I want. Not easy. Not perfectly arranged. Just… real.”
Beatrice didn’t answer immediately. The lamplight shifted. Outside, the sky was beginning to change color in the way it did just before dawn, that particular dark blue that wasn’t quite night anymore.
“And if it doesn’t come?” she asked. Not cruelly, but with genuine care, which was almost harder to hear.
Cecily had thought about this. Alone in the dark, in the particular honest hours between midnight and morning when she couldn’t pretend she hadn’t. She had thought about it carefully and had come to a conclusion she mostly believed.
“Then I’ll manage. I have things I care about. Books. People. I’m not—it isn’t as though my life would be empty.” A pause. “It would be quieter than I’d like, but I won’t fill the quiet with the wrong person just to fill it.”
Beatrice looked at her for a long moment. Then she said, “That is either very brave or very stubborn, and I genuinely cannot tell which.”
“Both, probably.”
“Yes.” A small smile. “Probably.”
“Cecily.” Beatrice’s voice had shifted, that particular half-step from sister into something older, more careful.
“I only mean that love is not always—it doesn’t always arrive the way it does in your novels, fully formed and certain.
Sometimes it grows. Sometimes you choose a person first, and the feeling follows. ”
“I know that.”
“Do you? Because from where I’m sitting, you’ve refused six men in three years, and your standard for something underneath it seems to be rising with each one.”
“My standards,” Cecily said with great dignity, “are entirely reasonable.”
“Your standards,” Beatrice retorted with equal dignity, “would challenge a saint.”
“Edward was hardly a saint when you met him.”
“Edward was a disaster when I met him. But that is not the point.” Beatrice shifted the baby again, who stirred and then resettled with a sigh of profound indifference to the conversation happening above his head.
“The point is that I didn’t walk away because it wasn’t perfectly arranged.
I stayed. And it became something real because I stayed long enough to let it. ”
“I understand that.” Cecily kept her voice even.
“Truly, I do. But you also felt something, Bea, even at the beginning. Even when it was complicated, and nothing was certain, there was something there. You’ve told me as much.
” She paused. “With Mr. Alderton, there was simply nothing. And I cannot build a life on nothing and call it a foundation. I would rather have no house at all than one with nothing holding it up.”
Beatrice looked at her for a long moment. The baby breathed. The lamp burned.
“A cold arrangement,” she said finally, “is still better than scandal. Or loneliness.”
“You don’t believe that.”
“I believe it more at twenty-five than I did at eighteen.” But she said it quietly, without real conviction.
Cecily could hear the slight retreat in it—Beatrice pulling back from an argument she knew she hadn’t quite won and wasn’t entirely sure she believed herself.
The silence that followed was not uncomfortable, exactly. It was the silence of two people who loved each other and had reached the edge of what could be resolved before sunrise.
Cecily unfolded her limbs and rose from her seat. “I need some air,” she declared. “I think I’ll walk down to the shore.”
Beatrice looked up. “Now?”
“It’s nearly dawn. The light will be lovely.”