Chapter 13 #2
He is doing what he does with his sisters—taking her seriously, not making it smaller than it is.
The nurse appeared then in the doorway with the baby, who was blinking as if he had not yet taken a position on being conscious.
Beatrice crossed the room and took him with practiced ease.
“There he is,” she said softly, and settled him against her shoulder.
For a few minutes, the room had the comfortable, layered quality of a family at ease—two conversations happening at once.
Eloise was now telling Edward about Horatio with the righteous energy of someone finally finding an audience who hadn’t heard it, while William was speaking quietly to Beatrice about something Cecily couldn’t hear.
The baby lasted approximately four minutes in a state of benign goodwill toward the world. Then he cried.
The sound filled the room in an instant, and the room responded. Beatrice shifted him, murmured to him, patted his back with the rhythmic calm of long practice.
The nurse stepped forward. Edward set down his cup and waited with the resigned competence of a man five months into his understanding that this was simply part of the afternoon now.
William stood up. Eloise slid off his knee with an expression of personal affront at the interruption.
“Is he unwell?” William was already moving.
Not toward the baby—he stopped himself a few feet short—but standing, upright and alert, his attention focused on the child with an intensity that had nothing of the drawing room in it.
“What’s the matter with him? Has he been checked this afternoon?
Is the room too cold? Is it colder near the window? Should the nurse–”
“William.” Beatrice looked up at him, surprise in her laughter. “He is five months old. They cry at this age.”
“He sounds–”
“Unhappy,” Beatrice finished. “Yes. That is precisely what that sounds like. He will stop.”
“Has he been checked? His temperature–”
“Is normal. He was checked an hour ago.” She looked at William with an expression that was somewhere between amusement and something more compassionate. “Come and sit down.”
William said nothing. He did not sit down. He stood at the edge of the room with his hands at his sides, watching the baby with focused, taut attention. His jaw was set. His eyes did not leave the child.
Cecily watched him. She had seen him composed in drawing rooms and firm at breakfast and quietly devastating in a library at night. She had seen him patient with his sisters and deliberate with his solicitors and perfectly calibrated in every room she had observed him in.
This was, she understood with clarity, what it looked like when he was frightened.
Not the dramatic kind—he would never allow the dramatic kind.
This was the other kind. The one that stood very still and watched with all its attention and did not breathe quite properly until the thing that mattered was safe again.
He did not know how to stand in a room with a crying child and do nothing. He did not know how to be anywhere near someone small and vulnerable and not account for every possible thing that could go wrong.
His sisters. Letitia, four years old, in a house without parents.
Cecily thought of everything he carried and how long he had been carrying it and how completely he had chosen to carry it. The thought lodged somewhere deep and quiet and did not leave.
The cries faded into small hiccups, then, mercifully, into silence. Beatrice had found the right angle, or the right rhythm, or simply outlasted the baby, and he settled against her shoulder and promptly fell asleep.
The room exhaled.
William sat down. He reached for his tea with both hands, not drinking it immediately, just holding the cup.
Cecily watched him do it and understood that the cup had nothing to do with tea. He was simply giving his hands something to hold while the rest of him came back from wherever the alarm had taken him.
After a moment, his grip eased. He set the cup down.
Edward said something about the parliamentary session, and William answered him in a perfectly normal voice, the voice of a man who had been discussing politics all afternoon and had not, moments ago, been standing in the middle of a drawing room with his hands at his sides and his whole face open with fear.
But his eyes went to the baby once more. Just once. Just to check.
Cecily looked at her teacup and felt something move through her that she had not expected and was not prepared for.
She had thought, until today, that she understood him. She had built a reasonable picture—the rules, the composure, the careful management of every room he entered—and she had understood it as a character, as a disposition, as simply the particular shape of the man she had married.
He had stood in that solicitor’s office at nineteen years old with two small sisters at home who did not yet know they were orphans, and he had looked at everything that remained and understood that it was his now.
All of it. Every cold morning and every winter illness and every bad dream and every door that needed to be between them and the world.
He had picked it up, he had carried it, and he had never once in ten years set it down. Not because he didn’t know how, but because setting it down meant something could get through, and he could not bear what might get through if he did.
The rules are there not because he doesn’t love them. The rules are there because he does not know what he would do if love were not enough.
She looked at him across the room—at the line of his shoulders, easier now, at the hand that had steadied around the teacup—and felt the warmth spread through her again.
This time, she did not try to tame it, or set it aside, or instruct it toward anything more manageable. She simply felt it and looked at him.
He said something to Edward that made him laugh. His profile in the afternoon light was clean and certain, the jaw she had cataloged since the shore, the green eyes she had been trying not to think of since approximately the first morning. He had not looked at her since he sat down.
She was still looking at him when Beatrice appeared at her elbow.
“More tea?” Beatrice asked, in a tone that meant something entirely different from tea.
“Yes,” Cecily answered breathily. “Please.”
Beatrice poured without hurry. The small smile she wore—the one she had been wearing, Cecily now realized, since approximately the first ten minutes of the afternoon—told Cecily that her sister had seen all of it and had arrived, some considerable time before she had, at the same place.
Cecily opened her mouth.
“It’s alright,” Beatrice said pleasantly, and handed her the cup.
Cecily closed her mouth with a small frown. She looked back across the room.
Eloise, restored to general goodwill, had reclaimed her position on William’s knee. She was leaning against his arm with her thumb in her mouth, her eyes going soft and heavy.
William had noticed—she could see it in the slight, unconscious adjustment of his arm, making the angle easier for her without interrupting his conversation with Edward, without drawing attention to the gesture.
Cecily watched his face. He was talking about land reform. He was also, without appearing to, holding a three-year-old upright with one arm while she fell asleep against him, and he made no more of it than he would have made of anything else that was simply his to do.
The warmth in her chest tripled.