Chapter 16
“Ready?” William asked, leaning closer to her.
“Yes.”
Cecily was not entirely ready. She had wanted this visit, had asked for it, had thought about it since the study, Harwood’s careful evasions, and her conversation with Beatrice in the warm drawing room.
But wanting a thing and standing in front of it were different experiences. The building in front of her had the specific appearance of a place that was going to ask something of her once she went inside, and she was still deciding what she had to give.
The orphanage was on Granger Street. Cecily had expected something institutional—the particular blank-faced utility of a building designed for function rather than welcome—and in that she was not wrong.
It was a narrow three-story building wedged between a chandler’s shop and a solicitor’s office, its stone front the color of long rain, its windows small and set high in the way of buildings that had been designed with economy in mind and not much else.
A brass plate beside the door read St. Clement’s Home for Foundling Children, est. 1798, and beneath it someone had recently added, in letters slightly less well-formed than the original, Supported by the Blackmoor Estate.
William handed her down from the carriage, and she stood for a moment looking at the building while he spoke briefly to the driver. The street smelled of coal smoke and damp stone. From somewhere inside, she could faintly hear the sound of children.
William knocked.
The matron was a tall woman of about sixty, spare and upright. She introduced herself as Mrs. Peel, curtseyed, and then led them inside.
The entrance hall was clean. That was the first thing Cecily noticed, and she noticed it because cleanliness was clearly being maintained at some cost—the floor scrubbed, the walls wiped down, everything in its place—in a building that was, beneath the cleanliness, simply too thin.
Too thin in the walls, too thin in the light, too thin in the sounds that came from the upper floors, where the older children were at their lessons, voices reciting something in the flat, patient monotone of children doing what was required of them.
“How many children are you currently housing, Mrs. Peel?” Cecily asked as they were led down the narrow corridor toward the main room.
“Thirty-one, Your Grace. Seventeen girls and fourteen boys. Ages ranging from six weeks to eleven years.”
“And your staff?”
“Three women, including myself. We had a fourth until last month.” A pause, brief and neutral. “She took a position elsewhere.”
“Was she replaced?”
“Not yet, Your Grace.”
Cecily glanced at William. He was looking at the corridor wall, at a place where the plaster had been patched and the patch had begun to separate again at the upper edge.
“The building,” he said. “When was it last properly maintained?”
“The roof was seen to in the spring, Your Grace,” Mrs. Peel replied carefully. It sounded to Cecily like the tone of someone identifying the thing that had been done rather than the longer list of things that had not. “There are some matters outstanding.”
“Such as?”
“The windows on the upper floor do not seal properly. We have managed with additional blankets, but…” Mrs. Peel trailed off. “We manage, Your Grace.”
“What kind of additional blankets?” Cecily asked.
A small pause. “Whatever has been available.”
They reached the main room.
It was a large, low-ceilinged space that might have been comfortable if it had more of everything—more light, more heat from the inadequate fireplace at the far end, more furniture than the two long tables and the collection of mismatched chairs arranged around them.
A group of small children was assembled around the nearest table, perhaps eight or nine of them, between the ages of two and five, overseen by a young woman who looked up when they entered with an expression that was simultaneously hopeful and cautious.
The children looked up, too. Several of them stared with the frank, uncomplicated curiosity of children who had not yet learned that staring was impolite.
One small boy in a patched grey coat had a wooden horse in his hands that he had apparently been in the middle of showing his friend when they arrived, and he held it now mid-demonstration, frozen, his eyes very large.
Cecily looked around the room. The blankets were thin.
She had been told they were thin, and she had understood it as information.
But standing here and looking at them draped over small chairs and folded on the window seat, she understood it differently—the kind of thin that had been washed too many times, that let the cold through, that was doing its best with diminishing resources.
The fire was small. The windows, as described, did not seal. She could feel it from where she stood, the faint draft moving through the room at child height, exactly where children spent most of their time.
She pressed her lips together.
“The younger ones,” she said to Mrs. Peel, keeping her voice even. “Where are they kept?”
“The nursery is through here, Your Grace.”
The nursery was even smaller and warmer—someone had made sure of that, at least—with four wooden cribs arranged along the far wall and a low chair between them, where the young nursemaid was sitting with an infant against her shoulder.
She stood quickly when they entered, shifting the baby with practiced care.
Cecily looked around.
Three of the four cribs were occupied. The babies were small.
Two of them were sleeping, curled under thin blankets with the dense sleep of infants who had exhausted themselves, and a third in the crib nearest the window was lying awake on her back and looking at the ceiling. It was this one that stopped Cecily.
She crossed to the crib.
The baby was tiny. Not the ordinary smallness of infancy, but something more specific, a smallness that spoke of difficult beginnings and not quite enough of everything since.
She lay still with her eyes open, not distressed, not reaching or kicking the way babies did when they had energy to spare. Just still. Just there. Waiting in the patient, wordless way of someone very young who had already learned that waiting was what they did.
Cecily frowned.
“How old?” she questioned.
“Six weeks, Your Grace,” Mrs. Peel answered. “Her mother–” A pause. “She came to us a fortnight ago.”
“Is she unwell?”
“She is not thriving as we would wish,” Mrs. Peel said, with the careful honesty of someone who had thought about this word choice.
“She feeds, but not well. She sleeps a great deal. The doctor has seen her once. He said she requires warmth, regular feeding, and time.” Another pause. “We do our best.”
“I’m sure you do.” Cecily meant it.
She looked at the baby, who had turned her head slightly at the sound of voices and was looking now in the general direction of Cecily’s face with unfocused, effortful attention. Then she made a sound. Small, thin, the sound of a child deciding whether to cry, the kind that could go either way.
It went toward crying.
Not loudly—she didn’t have the strength for loud—but with a persistent, exhausted quality that was somehow more touching than noise would have been.
Cecily reached into the crib instinctively and then stopped, uncertain, aware that she had no idea what she was doing.
William stepped forward.
He moved past her without haste and reached into the crib. He lifted the baby with both hands, one beneath her head, one supporting her back. He brought her against his shoulder, adjusting her position once with the automatic ease of long practice.
The crying faded into small hiccups. Then quiet.
William stood with his hand against the baby’s back, the same slow, rhythmic movement Cecily had watched Beatrice use that afternoon, and looked at the window with the expression of a man thinking about something else entirely, which she understood after a moment was not indifference but focused calm.
She watched him.
She watched the steadiness of him—the lack of awkwardness, the absence of that particular stiff uncertainty that men usually displayed when handed infants, the careful overhandling of something they were afraid of dropping.
There was none of that. He held the baby as though it were simply what his hands were made for.
“You know what you’re doing,” she noted.
He glanced at her briefly. “She needed someone to pick her up.”
“That’s not what I mean.” She kept her voice quiet. “Most men haven’t the slightest idea how to hold a baby.”
He looked at the baby. “Letitia was four when my parents died,” he said.
“Four-year-olds need to be carried frequently. Isadora was six and had decided she was too old for it, which was not true, but was important to her dignity, so I respected that.” The corner of his mouth twitched faintly.
“Letitia had no such dignity to protect. She required carrying for at least another year.”
Cecily said nothing, waiting for more.
“There was a period,” William continued, more quietly, “shortly after, when they both slept poorly. Letitia, particularly. She would wake up in the night and cry .” He stopped and adjusted the baby slightly.
“The staff did what they could. But a frightened child wants family, not a housemaid. So I learned what was needed.”
“You had to,” Cecily said softly.
He looked at her.
“Yes,” he said simply. “Someone had to.”
Their gazes held for a moment.
There was something on his face that she did not have a name for. Not composure, not the deliberate ease he arranged himself into in rooms full of people, but something older than that and less defended. The expression of a man not currently standing between himself and being seen.
It lasted only a moment before he looked back at the baby. But she had seen it.
Something shifted in her chest—not the quick warm feeling she had been managing since the library, not the complicated awareness of him she’d been cataloging since the garden.
It was something quieter and more serious than that.
Something that felt, uncomfortably and undeniably, like the beginning of being in genuine trouble.
She looked at the baby instead.
The child had closed her eyes. Her breathing was the deep, slow rhythm of sleep, her small fist loosely curled against William’s shoulder, her face arranged in the profound peace of someone who had found a warm and solid place in the world and had decided to stay for now.
“She needs more than warmth and time,” Cecily said, turning to Mrs. Peel, who had been standing quietly near the door with expectation and hope in her expression. “She needs better feeding. More regular. And this room is cold near that window. There is a gap in the frame, I can feel it from here.”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
“Who is responsible for repairs?”
Mrs. Peel’s expression shifted almost imperceptibly. “The requests go through the estate, Your Grace.”
“And how long have you been waiting for this one?”
A pause. “Since August, Your Grace.”
William looked up. “You submitted a request for repairs in August?”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
“It’s November.”
Mrs. Peel said nothing.
William looked at the window, then at the thin blankets in the crib, then at the room in general—the methodical, sweeping assessment he gave to estate accounts and parliamentary arguments and everything else he intended to understand properly—and Cecily watched understanding dawn on him.
“Mrs. Peel,” he asked, “what do you need most urgently? Not what you have submitted for, but what you need.”
Mrs. Peel looked at him for a moment with the expression of a woman recalibrating.
Then she said, “Coal, Your Grace. We are nearly out. And blankets. Proper wool ones, not… The children are cold at night, particularly the young ones. And the window in this room, and the two upper windows. Those are the most urgent.”
“You’ll have coal by Thursday,” William assured her.
“Blankets before the end of the week. The windows I’ll have assessed tomorrow.
” He looked at the nursemaid, who had been standing through all of this with the wide-eyed attention of someone watching events far above her station unfold in her immediate vicinity.
“Is there anything else the nursery specifically requires?”
The nursemaid looked at Mrs. Peel, who gave the smallest nod.
“A second nursemaid would help, Your Grace,” the nursemaid said carefully. “At night, especially. For the little ones.”
“Arrange it,” William instructed Mrs. Peel. “Through the household. I’ll ensure you have the funds.”
Mrs. Peel curtseyed. “Yes, Your Grace. Thank you.”
The baby in William’s arms stirred, resettled, and did not wake.
Cecily looked at Mrs. Peel. “The small one. This baby. I would like to be informed of her progress personally. If her condition changes—if she improves, or if she does not—I want word sent directly to Blackmoor House. To me, not through general correspondence.”
“Of course, Your Grace.”
“I will visit again next week.” It was not a request.
“We would be very glad of it, Your Grace.”
William passed the baby back to the nursemaid with the same careful, practiced hands, supporting her until the nursemaid had her properly settled, and then he stepped back and looked around the room once more—at the gaps and the thin blankets and the three small sleeping faces—with the expression of a man adding things to a list he intended to work through.
The evening had fallen properly while they were inside, the street dark and cool, the carriage lamp lit. William helped Cecily up without a word and followed, before the door closed and London moved past the windows in the cold dark.
They were quiet for a moment.
“She’ll be all right,” William said, after a moment.
Cecily looked at him. “The baby?”
“Yes.” He was looking at the window. “She’s small, and she’s had a difficult start, but she will be all right.” He said it with the quiet certainty of someone who needed it to be true and had decided it was.
“Yes,” Cecily murmured. “She will be.”
The carriage turned a corner, and the city shifted around them. Neither of them spoke again for some time.
The silence between them was not the silence of people who had nothing to say, but of people who had said enough for one evening and were sitting with the weight of it together.
She thought about small fists and thin blankets and a man who had learned to carry children through the night because someone had to.
She looked at the window and felt the quiet, serious trouble of it settle in her chest, where it intended to stay.