Chapter 18 #2
He was looking at her. Not at the basin, not at the baby. But at her, in the low, warm light of the nursery at half past two, with his sleeves rolled up and the fire behind him.
Up close, at this hour, with his guard as far down as she had ever seen it and the firelight doing what it did and no audience anywhere in the world, he was devastating in a way that had nothing to do with charm. It was simpler than that and worse.
He was simply a man who had sat through this night beside her, who had rolled up his sleeves and watched the breathing of a sick baby, and was now looking at her the way she had been terrified he would look at her—with full, undeflected attention.
She could feel the slight tension in him, the same tension she could feel in herself—a pull that had been accumulating.
Her pulse was loud in her ears. She felt the warmth move from her hand up her arm and into her chest.
This is the thing I was afraid of.
Not him. Never him. But this.
She lifted the cloth from the basin. William let her take it.
She wrung it carefully, turned back to the crib, and laid it against the baby’s forehead.
She smoothed it into place with both hands, and when she straightened, he had moved the basin back to the table and was looking at the baby again with the composed, watchful expression he had on earlier.
He had moved his chair slightly back, which was a thing she noticed and did not remark on, because he had done it for both of them, and she understood that.
“You should have gone back to sleep,” he said, after a while.
Cecily didn’t think it sounded like a complaint.
“I know,” she muttered.
Neither of them moved.
* * *
The fever broke properly by the second morning.
Dori, who had expected this outcome and was pleased to have been right, confirmed it. Mrs. Peel, who had come each day and stood at the nursery door with the careful hopefulness of a woman who had learned not to assume, allowed herself to sit down on the third day.
“She fed well this morning,” Doris reported to the room in general. “Both times. And she’s keeping it down.”
“Both times,” Mrs. Peel repeated.
“Both times.”
Mrs. Peel looked at the baby for a moment. Then she pressed her lips together and said nothing further.
The baby lay in the crib with her eyes open. She was still small. She would be small for a long time yet. But the flush was gone from her cheeks, and her breathing had settled into something that no longer required counting.
When Cecily leaned over the crib and said good morning, the baby turned her head toward the sound with slow, deliberate effort, as if learning that voices were worth attending to.
“Good morning,” Cecily said again.
The baby blinked, then smiled weakly.
“She recognizes you,” Doris observed.
“She recognizes a voice near the crib,” Cecily countered.
“Same thing at this age,” Doris said with triumph.
The sisters visited every afternoon.
Letitia arrived on the first day with a small cloth rabbit she had found in the attic, which she presented to the baby with the solemn ceremony of someone making a significant diplomatic gesture. The baby looked at it with her usual focused expression.
“She likes it,” Letitia declared.
“She can’t see it clearly yet,” Isadora pointed out. “Infants can only focus at close range.”
“She likes the idea of it.”
“That isn’t how vision works, Letitia.”
“She doesn’t know that.”
Cecily watched them arrange themselves around the crib—Letitia talking to the baby with complete unselfconsciousness, Isadora reading the physician’s notes with methodical attention that reminded her so much of William—and thought that whatever happened next, whatever shape this household took in the months ahead, these two girls would be all right.
She was fairly certain of that.
She was less certain of a number of other things.
William came in the evenings, after the day’s work was done, and stayed for an hour. He did not make a ceremony of it. He simply appeared, stood by the crib, asked Doris the practical questions, and listened to the answers with the focused quiet of a man updating his information.
He spoke to the baby occasionally, not with the performed enthusiasm of someone trying to engage an infant, but just quiet words. The baby turned toward him, which Doris said was significant, and which William received without visible reaction.
Cecily was present for most of these visits, in the chair by the fire with a book she was not reading, and over the course of several evenings, they had developed a kind of domestic shorthand—the exchange of information about the day’s progress, the physician’s latest instructions, and whether the feedings had gone well.
Practical. Comfortable in the way of two people who had been through something together and were still in the aftermath of it.
It was the most honest they had ever been with each other without either of them having said anything particularly honest. Something about the nursery at that hour made performance unnecessary.
She was not sure what to do with that.
On the fourth evening, William had come in at the usual hour, spoken to Doris, and looked at the baby. Cecily was in her chair. The fire was good. Outside the window, the November dark had come down early, pressing against the glass and making the room feel more enclosed than it was.
Letitia was sitting cross-legged on the floor, conducting a one-sided conversation with the cloth rabbit, apparently on the baby’s behalf. Isadora was seated at the small writing desk with the physician’s notes, a quill in hand, which meant she was writing questions.
William leaned over the crib. The baby was awake, tracking whatever came within her limited sight. She found his face and went still with the absolute focus of someone encountering something interesting.
“She’s looking at you,” Letitia said from the floor.
“She looks at the lamp as well,” William said.
“The lamp doesn’t look back.”
He reached into the crib and offered his finger.
It was a thing Cecily had seen him do before, almost absentmindedly, giving the baby something to hold in the way one gave a restless person something to do with their hands.
The baby’s fist closed around it with the immediate, unthinking grip of an infant who had decided this was hers now.
William went still. He did not pull away.
He stood at the side of the crib with his finger enclosed in a fist the size of a walnut, looking down at the baby with an expression that Cecily had never seen on him in any other context.
It was not composure, or deliberate ease, or watchfulness, but something quieter than all of those. Something that had nothing behind it.
His thumb moved slowly across the baby’s knuckles. Once. Twice. And Cecily felt her chest constrict so hard she had to rub it.
She looked down at her book for approximately four seconds, took a calming breath, and then looked back at him, because she was apparently incapable of not looking at him, which was information she was still processing.
The baby had not let go. She showed no signs of letting go. She was looking up at him with serious, unblinking eyes, and he was looking back at her, and the room was very quiet.
Letitia, with uncharacteristic sensitivity, had stopped talking to the rabbit. Isadora had also stopped writing.
Cecily said nothing. She watched William’s face in the firelight and thought about a boy of nineteen with two little sisters and a house full of noise and grief, who had learned to carry children through the night because someone had to, and who was standing now at the side of a crib with his finger trapped in a small fist, and who looked—for just this moment, in this room, as if no one was watching him—entirely undone by it.
He grew aware of her watching.
His eyes moved to hers. She didn’t look away in time.
“Her grip is improving.” His voice was level. The composure had returned, or most of it. It was the practiced kind, the kind that arrived quickly because it had been deployed many times before. “Doris mentioned it this morning. It’s a good sign.”
“Perhaps she knows she’s safe,” Cecily said, the corner of her mouth quirking.
He looked at her.
She had not planned to say it. It had come out of somewhere deep, and now it was in the room.
He was looking at her, and the air between them had the quality it sometimes had—compressed, charged, a room with less space in it than its dimensions suggested. His thumb was still stroking the baby’s knuckles.
“Perhaps,” he said.
He did not look away. Neither did she.
“William,” Isadora piped up from the writing desk, in the tone of someone who had been waiting for a gap and had decided to make one. “The physician said to watch for fever in the second week. Does that mean we should still be checking her temperature in the night, or only if she seems restless?”
William looked at his sister. The room had resumed its normal dimensions.
He straightened carefully, and the baby’s grip loosened as he withdrew his finger by degrees—not pulling, just gradually freeing himself, which took longer than it should have because she tightened her grip once before she let go.
He waited for her with the unhurried attention of a man who had decided not to rush it.
Cecily watched his face while he did this.
She should not have. She knew she should not have. But she watched him look at the baby as he freed his hand, the slight pause before he stepped back, the look of someone setting something down carefully.
I cannot unsee this.
Not the baby, not her grip. But all of it. Every evening in this room, every quiet exchange across the water basin, every moment he had thought she wasn’t watching and had been entirely, unguardedly himself.
She could not unsee any of it.
“If she’s both restless and warm, call Doris,” William said, answering Isadora with the practical calm of someone returning to ground they knew.
“If she’s only restless, she may simply be unsettled.
At this age, the two can look similar.” He looked at the notes.
“What else does the physician say about the second week?”
Isadora read aloud. William listened. Letitia had resumed her conversation with the rabbit.
Cecily looked at her book. The words on the page meant nothing. They had meant nothing for four days, and she did not expect them to start meaning something now.
She turned a page anyway, for the appearance of it, and sat in the warm nursery while the evening settled around her. She did not look at her husband again.
She was, she had concluded, doing very badly at not looking at him.