Chapter 19
“Your Grace.”
William looked up.
Mr. Prentiss stood in the study doorway with his hands folded behind his back.
“The nursery lamp was lit at five this morning, Your Grace. I thought you should know the servants are aware.”
“Thank you, Prentiss.”
“Of course.” A pause. “Doris says the baby took a full feeding.”
“Good. That is very good.”
“Yes, Your Grace.” Mr. Prentiss withdrew.
William looked back at the document in front of him. The same document he had been looking at for twenty minutes. The same paragraph he had read four times and retained nothing of.
He put down his quill.
He had been in the nursery at five because he had woken at four-thirty and lain in the dark for a few minutes and then stopped pretending he was going to sleep again.
That was the honest version. The version he would give anyone who asked was that he wanted to check the baby’s breathing before Doris arrived.
Both were true. One was more complete than the other.
The baby had been awake when he came in. Not distressed, simply awake, looking at whatever the low light offered her. He had stood at the side of the crib for a while. She had found his face and stilled.
He had given her his finger. She had taken it immediately, with the same grip as the night before.
He had stood there for twenty minutes and let her hold it and thought about nothing in particular.
Perhaps she knows she’s safe.
He picked up the quill. Set it down.
The thing about Cecily was that she said things like that—simple, direct, with the full weight of what she meant behind them and no performance of meaning—and he had learned over the past weeks that his defenses against the deliberate version of her were considerably more functional than his defenses against that version.
The unguarded one. The one that appeared at three in the morning in a wrapper with her hair loose, that sat in the nursery chair with a book she was not reading and did not pretend she was reading it.
He had not been prepared for the unguarded version.
He had not been prepared for the way she looked at him sometimes. Not with intent. Not even with awareness, half the time. Simply looked, the way she looked at everything she was actually seeing rather than looking at.
He had not been prepared for what it felt like to be seen like that.
He stood and moved to the window. The grounds below were gray in early morning, the gardens still, the path where they had walked with his sisters disappearing into the hedgerow.
He had ridden that path a hundred times. He knew every inch of it. He had shown Cecily where the ground was soft, and she had remembered. For the next time they went out, she had skirted the same spot without being told.
It was a small thing, but he kept thinking about it.
He pressed two fingers against the cold glass pane and looked at the grey grounds, and was honest with himself in a way he was only honest with himself when there was no alternative.
It felt like something.
The evenings in the nursery, the way the room shrank when it was only the two of them, the hand over the basin and the cloth and the twenty seconds in which neither of them moved… It felt like something, and he knew what it felt like, and that was precisely the problem.
He had watched his parents from the stairs at seven years old and understood, with the blunt perception of children who had not yet learned to look away, what love looked like when it soured.
Not at the end—he had been nineteen at the end, old enough to understand it clearly—but in the middle. The middle was what he remembered.
The way the house had felt. The silence before the angry voices rose.
The way his mother had looked at his father sometimes, wanting something that was no longer there to be given, and the way his father had looked at her.
Not with cruelty, which would have been simpler, but with exhaustion.
With the hopeless fatigue of a man who had wanted to be better than he was and had run out of the will to keep trying.
He had promised himself at nineteen, standing in the solicitor’s office with the title and the debt and two little sisters at home who didn’t yet know the carriage wasn’t coming back, that he would not build that.
Would not start something that could become that.
Would not let anyone close enough to be damaged by him or to damage him in return.
He had been comfortable with that promise.
He turned away from the window. The document was still on the desk and required his attention, which was where his attention was going to go, because that was what he had decided, and what he had decided generally held.
He sat and picked up the quill. He looked at the page.
The distance would hold. It had to hold, because the alternative was a house that had started with hope and become something that damaged everyone inside it, and he would not do that to his sisters.
Would not do it to Cecily, would not do it to a baby who had already had enough of the world’s carelessness.
He began to read the document, frowning in concentration. He retained none of it.
The distance, he thought, would hold. He was almost certain.
* * *
Cecily was in the nursery when he found her that afternoon.
The baby was awake and playing with the soft toy Letitia had left beside her before going for her lessons.
Cecily was talking to her in a low tone about the garden, about the roses that would bloom in spring, about the color of the wallpaper, which she had decided privately was the wrong shade of yellow and intended to change.
She didn’t think the baby cared about it all, but she felt comfort talking to her.
She heard William in the doorway before she saw him.
“She’s much better,” she said, without turning. “Doris thinks two more days, and she’ll be strong enough.”
A pause.
“Strong enough to go back,” he said.
Cecily looked at the baby, who chewed on the toy. She had been thinking about this moment for three days, preparing the words for it with the careful attention she gave to conversations that mattered.
She turned away from the crib to face him.
“I don’t want to send her back,” she declared.
William stepped further into the room. He looked at the baby for a moment, then at Cecily. “She belongs to the orphanage, Cecily.”
“She belongs to no one,” Cecily retorted. “That is precisely the point.”
He was quiet.
“I want us to apply for guardianship,” she continued. “I’ve been thinking about it for days. I know it isn’t simple, and I know there are legal considerations, but she has no one, and we have a house and the means to–” She stopped. Took a breath to steady herself. “I want her to have someone.”
William looked at the baby for a long time.
“Guardianship is not a small matter,” he cautioned.
“I know.”
“It isn’t visiting. It isn’t sponsoring the orphanage or ensuring the coal arrives on time.
” His voice was even, but there was something careful underneath the evenness.
“A child needs consistency. Stability. The same faces, the same house, the same people reliably present.” He paused.
“A child demands steadiness from a household.”
Cecily looked at him. She knew what was coming. She had known it was coming when she rehearsed the words, which was perhaps why it had taken her three days.
“Our arrangement is temporary,” William said quietly. “We agreed on that from the beginning.” He did not look away from her. “When the scandal has died down, when the ton has moved on, you will have your own life, and I will have mine. That was what we agreed on.”
“I know what we agreed on.”
“Then you understand why I can’t…” Something flashed across his face—it looked like pain—and then it was gone. “It would be unfair to her. To begin something and then–” He looked at the baby. “She has had enough of things that don’t hold.”
The room was very quiet.
Cecily looked at the small face in the crib. The baby had found something on the ceiling to examine and was gurgling, entirely unaware that her future was being decided two feet above her head.
He is right.
And he was. William was entirely, maddeningly right. This was not a real marriage. It had never been a real marriage. She had agreed to that, clearly and in her own words, in what felt like a lifetime ago.
“You’ll continue to sponsor the orphanage.” It was not a question.
“Of course.”
“And we will visit.” She met his eyes. “Both of us. Regularly.”
“Yes.”
“And if her circumstances change—if anything changes—we are the first to be contacted.”
“I’ll have it formalized,” he offered. “Through the solicitor. Whatever protection can be arranged without guardianship, I’ll arrange.”
Cecily nodded and looked back at the baby with watery eyes.
“She’ll have everything she needs,” William added. Not to convince her, but simply because it was true and he needed to say it.
“I know,” Cecily breathed. “I know she will.”
The baby made a small sound and turned her head toward Cecily’s voice.
Cecily reached into the crib without thinking and gave her her finger, and the baby’s fist closed around it with the absolute, unthinking certainty she brought to everything.
Cecily felt the grief move through her cleanly, like weather.
“She knows your voice,” William said from beside her.
“You think so? It’s just proximity.”
“I don’t think it’s just proximity.”
She looked at him. He was looking at the baby.
This is what it would have looked like.
A second later, she shook her head firmly.
Don’t.
She looked back at the baby’s hand around her finger and felt the distance between what she had agreed to and what she was standing in the middle of, and understood with quiet certainty that the two were no longer the same thing.
Whether he knew that, too, was a question she could not yet answer.