Chapter 20
Cecily stood at the window of the nursery.
She had been standing there for twenty minutes, listening to the baby breathe and thinking about tomorrow and not thinking about tomorrow, and looking at the garden as though it had something useful to say.
The baby was finally asleep. The deep, unhurried sleep she had not managed for the first three days of her illness—her small chest rising and falling in an easy rhythm.
Cecily had stood at the crib for a long time watching it, the way one watched something they were relieved to see and not yet ready to walk away from.
Tomorrow, Mrs. Peel would come. The carriage would be brought around. The baby would go back to Granger Street, to the nursery with the window that had been repaired and the new blankets and the second nursemaid who had started last week, all of it better than it had been, all of it still not this.
She heard the door open. William came in quietly. He saw her at the window and stopped.
She turned.
For a moment, neither of them said anything. The fire was low, the room warm, and he was still in his evening clothes, which meant he had been in the study late again.
He looked at the crib, then at her.
“Asleep?” he asked.
“An hour ago. Properly, this time.”
“You’ve been standing there for a while.”
“I didn’t want to move, in case she heard it.”
He said nothing to that, which she took as understanding.
He came to the crib and stood over it in the way he did, looking down at the baby’s small sleeping face. He stood there for a while. Cecily turned back to the window and let him have it.
“The east window in the main corridor,” he began. “Did Prentiss speak to you about it?”
“He mentioned it yesterday. The frame has warped.”
“I’ve had someone look at it. They can fix it on Thursday, but it means the corridor will be cold for two days.” He glanced at her. “I thought you should know, given your feelings about cold corridors.”
“I don’t have particular feelings about cold corridors.” She hid her smile.
“You told Mrs. Eldridge last week that the one outside the library was cold enough to store meat.”
“That was an observation, not a feeling.”
“Mrs. Eldridge found it memorable enough to repeat.” He moved to the chair by the fire and sat, stretching his limbs.
Cecily turned away from the window. “I may have been emphatic.”
“You were accurate,” he chuckled. “It is cold enough to store meat.” He looked back at the fire. “Thursday.”
“Thank you.”
She moved to the other chair, not the one she had been occupying for the past two weeks—she had made a vague decision not to take the same chair every time, as though this would prevent the evening sessions from becoming a habit, which she recognized as the sort of logic that would not survive interrogation and had therefore not interrogated it.
The baby breathed evenly.
“The roof on the east outbuilding,” William added. “Harwood had it on the list for spring. I’m moving it up to February.”
“Because of the accounts.”
“Because of the accounts.” A pause. “It needs fixing properly, and spring is too long to wait. I’ve also had Harwood pull together the orphanage accounts. There are some things I want to look at more carefully. Nothing that needs discussing tonight.”
She nodded.
The fire settled. Outside, the wind kicked up, pressing against the glass pane in a way she could feel from where she sat.
“I’ll need to have the drawing room curtains seen to,” she said. “They’ve started pulling at the top left corner. Mrs. Eldridge says it’s been like that for two years.”
“It has?”
“And no one addressed it.”
“No one noticed it.”
“I tend to notice things.” Cecily shrugged.
“I’ve noticed that.” His tone was dry, a smile in it.
The baby shifted, made a small sound, then resettled. Both of them looked at the crib. Both of them waited. The sound did not come again.
William said nothing. The fire flickered.
“Letitia cried,” Cecily revealed. “This afternoon. She didn’t want me to see, so I didn’t.”
“She’ll be devastated for approximately a week,” William said, “and then she’ll redirect her energy to something else. She always does.”
“Is that how you know her or how you manage her?”
He looked at her and smiled wryly. “Both,” he said, and it was honest enough that she didn’t press him.
“She’ll be warm enough at Granger Street now.” Cecily was not sure if she said it for his sake or hers.
“She will.” He said it without hesitation. “I’ll check personally before the end of the month.”
“I know you will.”
He looked at her briefly.
“You’ve changed the house,” he said, after a moment.
She looked at him. “I haven’t changed anything.”
“Not the house, but the house.” He said it differently the second time, and she understood what he meant.
She felt warmth spread through her that she did not try to stop.
“The girls are different. Last Thursday, Isadora talked at dinner for twenty minutes about the logistics of the Salamanca campaign. Letitia is reading. Actual books, not just the first chapters.” He looked at the fire.
“Mrs. Eldridge told Prentiss that the house feels lived in, and Prentiss told me. I believe it was meant as a compliment.”
“I should hope so,” Cecily quipped.
“It was.” A pause, and then he said quietly, “You’ve unsettled my carefully ordered household, Duchess.”
She looked at him for a moment. “Perhaps it needed unsettling.”
Something moved at the corner of his mouth. When Cecily saw that it was a smile, her pulse fluttered.
He looked down at his hands, then back at the fire, and she had the sense he had said more than he intended and was deciding how to feel about it.
The baby made a small sound and resettled, her fist opening and closing once before she stilled again. Both of them looked at her, then away.
“I should go,” Cecily sighed.
She stood, turned, and her foot caught in the edge of the rug. His hand found her waist mid-fall.
They were close, closer than they had been since the riding path and the library. Closer than any of the careful distances she had been maintaining with such deliberate effort for weeks. The warmth of him was real and immediate.
She could not make herself move.
She was upright. She had been upright for a full second.
There was no practical reason for either of them to remain exactly as they were, which was her hand on his arm and his hand on her waist and approximately four inches between them in a quiet room with a sleeping child and a fire that had burned to its last good hour.
She did not step back.
Neither did he.
“You’re all right?” he asked quietly.
“Yes.”
He did not remove his hand.
“You always keep moving away from me,” he said.
She looked up at him. This close, in this light, his eyes were very dark.
“You’re the one who keeps stepping back,” she countered.
He held her gaze. Something in his face had changed. His composure was thinning, becoming insufficient, showing what was underneath it, not because he had chosen to show it but because there was less left to hide behind.
“Huh,” he muttered.
She did not know what to do with that. She did not think she was supposed to do anything with it.
His eyes dropped to her mouth. He leaned closer.
She should step back. She knew she should step back. She had a very clear understanding of all the reasons she should step back, and yet she looked at him in the low firelight with his hand still on her waist and his eyes on hers, and she did not step back.
She leaned in, just slightly. Her heartbeat was loud, and her breathing was not steady. His wasn’t either.
His hand tightened on her waist, and he tilted his head down by a degree close enough to see the tick in his jaw. She could feel the warmth of his breath, and she was not breathing at all.
The world had reduced itself entirely to the four inches that were becoming three, his eyes on hers, and the absolute, devastating certainty that she wanted this, had wanted this for longer than she could justify, and that in approximately one more second—
The baby sighed.
Both of them turned toward her.
The spell—she could not think of another word for it—broke, and they were two people standing in a nursery again, close together, his hand on her waist and her hand on his arm, which she had gripped without realizing.
He released her slowly. They stood side by side at the appropriate distance, looking at the baby as though she were the most interesting thing in the room.
She was not the most interesting thing in the room.
“She’s peaceful,” Cecily noted.
“Yes,” William agreed.
A pause. She could feel his eyes on her.
“We’ll miss her,” she said.
She had not planned to say we. It came out of its own accord, but she did not take it back.
William looked at the small sleeping face for a long moment.
“Yes.” His voice was very quiet. “We will.”
Neither of them moved for a while.
The fire burned down to its last warmth, and the baby breathed. Outside, the wind pressed against the glass.
Eventually, Cecily said goodnight, and he said it back. She left, he stayed, and the door closed softly between them.
* * *
“The thing about Horatio,” Letitia said as she tried to elegantly chew on her toast while talking with a full mouth, “is that he is fundamentally misunderstood.”
Isadora did not look up from her toast. “Horatio ate a glove. Cecily told us the story.”
“That’s what I mean. Everyone remembers the glove. Nobody considers the circumstances.”
“What circumstances?”
“He was left alone for four hours.”
“Dogs are frequently left alone for four hours.”
“Horatio,” Letitia said, with the patience of one defending an important principle, “is not a dog who manages solitude well. He is a dog with an inner life.”
William looked at his correspondence.
It was a Thursday morning in late November, which meant the light was thin and came in at the wrong angle and did his paperwork no favors. Letitia had been talking since before the toast arrived.