Chapter 21
She had come to the nursery for no particular reason she could have defended. The baby had been gone for four days, and the room had no practical claim on her anymore, but she had been passing the door, and her hand had simply found the handle, almost like a habit.
She pushed it open.
William was standing by the shelf at the far wall with his back to her. He was so still that for a moment, she thought she had imagined him.
The room was dim, the curtains half drawn, the crib stripped back to its bare frame in the way of things restored to their neutral state. The fire had not been lit. It smelled faintly of lavender and clean linen.
He had something in his hand.
She looked at it as he turned. A small wooden horse, paint worn smooth at the neck and the ears, the kind of wear that came from years of small hands.
He looked at her.
She looked at the horse.
He did not set it down, which she thought was because he had been about to and had caught himself doing it and decided, for whatever reason, not to.
“Do not leave on my account.” She extended her hand as if to stop him from moving.
He stood with the wooden horse in his hand and said nothing.
She stepped further into the room and said nothing.
For a moment, they simply occupied the space together, the silence comfortable.
“Letitia’s?” she asked.
“She carried it everywhere from the time she was two until she was five.” He looked down at it. “She called it Anthony. I have no idea why.”
“Children don’t need reasons for names,” Cecily said. “I named a fern Bartholomew when I was seven. He lived for three years, and I grieved him appropriately.”
The corner of his mouth twitched. “She left it here after the baby came. I think she forgot she had it.”
“Or she didn’t need it anymore,” Cecily suggested.
He looked at her. Then at the horse. Then he moved to the window and stood there, looking out at the grey afternoon.
She thought he might leave it there—the conversation, the room, all of it. He sometimes did that, collected himself and walked back out of the moment.
He didn’t.
“Were they very difficult?” She said it gently. “When they were small.”
“No, not difficult.” A pause, long enough that she thought that might be all. “Only afraid.”
She waited.
“The house was loud,” he continued. “When our parents were in it together, it was loud. Not always, but enough that you could feel when it was coming, the quiet before it. Isadora would find a book and get very small over it. Letitia didn’t understand what was happening, but she could feel the atmosphere.
She would cry and come to find me.” He turned the horse over in his hands.
“She was two when it started getting bad. She barely remembers a time when it wasn’t. ”
Cecily said nothing. She moved to stand near the window. Not beside him, just near. Close enough.
“What was it like?” she asked. “After.”
He was quiet for a moment. Outside, the sky had gone the flat white of a day that had decided not to commit to weather.
“The morning I found out, q man came to the door. He had the expression people have when they are about to say something they would rather not say and have been rehearsing it anyway. I hated that expression.”
He paused. “I came home. The girls were with the housekeeper. Isadora had understood that something was wrong but hadn’t said anything.
She was six, and she was sitting at the breakfast table with her hands folded in front of her, waiting.
” He looked at the horse. “Letitia asked me where Mama was. Three times. Quite cheerfully the first time, less so the second.”
Cecily felt grief and pity coil in her chest.
“What did you do?” she asked softly.
“I answered her,” he said simply. “And then I sat down at the table with them, and we had breakfast because it was half past eight and they hadn’t eaten, and that seemed like the most concrete thing available.
” He was quiet for a moment. “After that, it was just… days. One after the next. The solicitor, the accounts, the staff, the tenants. Isadora needed a new governess. Letitia had decided she was afraid of the dark, which she hadn’t been before.
I learned to braid hair that winter. Sat through enough lessons that I could have taken them myself.
” Something that was almost wry flashed across his face.
“I knew considerably more about French verbs and watercolor techniques than any nineteen-year-old boy should reasonably need.”
Cecily looked at him. “Did anyone help you?”
“James came for a fortnight in December.” He considered. “He was not helpful in any practical sense. He was simply there. Which was its own thing.”
“Yes, it is.”
He set the horse on the windowsill beside him and looked at it with emotion in his eyes.
“I used to lie awake calculating,” he murmured.
“Isadora would debut. She would have a Season in what, six years? Seven? And Letitia, two years after that. The estate had debts that would take three years to clear at the rate I was managing them. The north tenant cottages needed rebuilding. The roof of the east wing was near collapse.” He paused.
“I did the arithmetic obsessively. For months. If I could see the numbers, I could see the shape of what needed doing. And if I could see the shape, I could manage it. And if I could manage it, then nothing terrible would–” He broke off.
“Happen,” Cecily finished.
“Yes.”
The word landed between them quietly.
She looked at his profile in the grey light—the line of his jaw, the slight tension in it that she had learned was not composure but the effort of composure, which was a different thing.
She thought about a boy of nineteen at a breakfast table with two small frightened girls and an arithmetic problem where the stakes were everything, and she thought she understood, for the first time, why he assessed every room before walking into it.
He looked at her. “You cannot afford to fail them.”
“Is that what you’re afraid of? Still?”
A pause.
“It is what I am careful about. Still.”
She stepped closer without deciding to.
“William,” she said.
He looked at her. She had his full attention now.
“They are not afraid,” she assured him. “Not anymore. Isadora walks into a room and thinks before she speaks because she is measured, not because she is frightened. Letitia argues with you at breakfast because she trusts that you will still be there when she’s done arguing.
” She held his gaze. “You did that. Whatever it cost you, however you did the arithmetic, you did that.”
Something moved through his expression. He looked at her in a way that was different from all the previous ways he had looked at her.
He opened his mouth.
Say it. Whatever it is, say it.
He closed it.
He reached for the wooden horse, turned it once in his hand, and set it back on the windowsill with the deliberate movement of a man replacing something in its proper place. He straightened.
“The ball is tomorrow,” he said. “You should rest.”
He walked past her and out the door. She heard his footsteps in the corridor, steady and unhurried, growing quieter, and then the house was still.
She stood in the empty nursery, with the grey light filtering through the half-drawn curtains and the bare crib in the corner and the small wooden horse on the windowsill, and felt the shape of what had almost been said fill the room like a held breath.
She stayed there for a long time. Because she was not yet ready to go back to the part of the house where she would have to pretend she was fine. And she was not quite fine.
She had wanted him to stay. Not just in the room.
She had wanted him to stay, finish the sentence, and let whatever was on his face be on his face.
She had wanted it with an earnestness that frightened her more than anything that had come before it, more than the library, more than the nursery in the morning, with his hand on her waist and the world reduced to four inches of warm air.
She looked at the wooden horse.
Anthony. Of course, it is Anthony.
She laughed, very quietly, to herself in the empty room. Then she straightened and went to dress for dinner, all while telling herself she was perfectly all right.
But she was not perfectly all right. She was somewhere considerably past the point where all right was available as a destination.