Chapter 29
He was on Beatrice’s doorstep at half past ten. He had been standing there for approximately forty seconds, which he was aware was not a long time and felt considerably longer, unable to decide whether to knock or not.
He knocked anyway.
Collins opened the door. He looked at William. “Your Grace.”
“I would like to see my wife,” William declared.
A pause. Collins seemed to consider this.
“If you’ll wait in the drawing room, Your Grace,” he said finally.
“Thank you.”
William was shown in. He did not sit. He stood at the window and looked at the street, thinking about what he was going to say, which was the thing James had told him not to spend time doing, which was advice he had been unable to follow for the entirety of the carriage ride over.
He heard the door open and turned.
Cecily stood in the doorway.
He sucked in a breath and couldn’t stop his pulse from thundering. He swallowed.
She was in a morning dress, her hair simply done, and she looked at him with the clear eyes that had been looking at him since a shore at dawn and had never once looked at him the way he probably deserved to be looked at right now, which was with significantly less composure than she was currently displaying.
She looked tired.
His heart sank. He had done that.
“William.” Her voice was very quiet.
“Cecily.” All he wanted to do was pull her into his arms and hold her. He straightened instead. “I… uh… I need to show you something. Will you come with me? Please?”
She looked wary, and he couldn’t blame her.
“Why?” She drew her shawl tighter around her shoulders.
“That is the best way I can think of to tell—no, show you what I think you should know.”
She studied him for a minute.
“Where?”
“The orphanage.”
He looked at her as she thought about it.
“All right, give me a few minutes,” she said.
She said very little in the carriage. They sat on opposite sides, with the morning moving past the window.
He was acutely aware of her, yet he looked at the street and thought about everything he intended to say and the order in which he intended to say it and arrived at no conclusion whatsoever.
“How are your sisters?” she asked, at some point past the Strand.
“Letitia is getting better at her Italian,” he replied, grateful that she spoke. “Isadora is reading the essays again. She has started annotating in the margins.”
The corner of Cecily’s mouth quirked up. “She told me she would.”
“She was right.” He looked at her. “They miss you.”
She looked at the window.
“I miss them too,” she said quietly.
He said nothing further. He had more to say, and he was going to say it, but not in a carriage.
What he had to say deserved to be said standing still, with nothing moving around him, in a place that meant something to both of them.
Granger Street looked different. That was the first thing that crossed his mind. It was in the quality of the building itself, which he had last seen in the November dark, with the smell of coal smoke and the institutional bleakness of a place doing its best with insufficient resources.
It was still a narrow three-story building wedged between a chandler and a solicitor’s office.
But the windows on the upper floor were new, the glazing catching the light cleanly.
The front steps had been swept. A cart was pulled up to the side entrance, and two men were carrying in what appeared to be a substantial delivery of firewood.
He heard Cecily exhale beside him.
He offered his arm. She hesitated before she took it, and they went in.
Mrs. Peel met them in the entrance hall with excitement. She looked at William.
“Your Grace.” She curtseyed to them both. “The physician is still upstairs with the older children. He’ll be finished by noon.” She paused. “More new blankets arrived yesterday. All of them.”
“Good.” William nodded.
“And the kitchen–” She stopped. Collected herself. “The cook says there is proper food for the week, and she has been given a budget for the month. She came and told me. She said she wanted me to know.”
“You should know,” William agreed. “You all should. Put it in writing if it helps. The steward who was in charge has been dismissed. The trust arrangement is formal and permanent, and the figures are secured. This will not change again.”
Cecily’s eyes widened in surprise.
Mrs. Peel stared at him for a moment. “Thank you, Your Grace.”
She looked at Cecily and curtsied again. Then she turned and led them through.
The main room was warm. The children at the nearest table looked up when they entered. The small boy in the grey coat was still there, the wooden horse in his hands, but he looked different somehow. Brighter.
William felt Cecily go still beside him.
He knew what she was seeing. He himself had stood here on Tuesday, alone, after the first supplies had been delivered and before Aldiss had confirmed the trust documents.
He had stood in this room and looked at what it was becoming, and thought about a woman who had walked into his study and discovered the manipulation in one morning.
“The nursery?” Cecily said to Mrs. Peel.
“This way, Your Grace.”
She was awake. The baby—their baby, he thought, was awake in the crib nearest the window, which was no longer drafty, the new frame set properly, the gap sealed.
She was alert and wide-eyed, tracking the light, her small fist loosely curled against the blanket.
A proper blanket. Wool. The kind that kept warmth in.
Cecily made a sound that was very small and very genuine.
He looked at her face. She was not quite holding it together, and he understood that, because he was not quite holding it together either.
Her eyes glistened as she crossed to the crib and leaned over it.
The baby found her face immediately. Cecily said something so quietly that he didn’t hear, and the baby’s fist opened and closed.
He looked at them.
I almost walked away from this.
Mrs. Peel withdrew with practiced discretion, understanding when a room needed fewer people in it. The nursemaid moved to the far corner.
William came to stand beside Cecily, and for a moment, they simply looked at the baby, who looked back at them with serious, unblinking attention.
“She’s bigger.” Cecily laughed through her tears.
“A lot.”
“She’s got more color.” She looked up at him. Her lashes were wet.
“She’s being fed properly,” he said. “The nursemaid says she is feeding every three hours.”
Cecily looked back at the baby. William watched her breathe carefully, wiping her face with her sleeve.
“Cecily.” She looked at him. “Come outside with me. I need to… There are things I want to say, and I would like to say them properly.”
There was a small courtyard at the back of the building, reached through a side door, just a square of flagstone with a low wall, a bare tree in the corner, and the sky above it. William had found it on Tuesday and had stood there for ten minutes.
He thought about what he was about to say. No version of it was going to be anything other than exactly what it was.
They stood in the courtyard with the cold air around them, and he looked at her—at the face he had described to James in a club four months ago as the kind one looked at and then found themself looking at again. He had been right about that and had not yet understood the full extent of it.
“I was wrong,” he began.
She raised an eyebrow.
“Not about the arrangement,” he said. “The arrangement was what it was, and it was what we agreed on. I am not going to pretend the terms were unreasonable or that either of us made a mistake in Brighton.” He held her gaze.
“I was wrong about what happened after Brighton. About what I allowed myself to believe and then refused to believe and then…” He stopped. “I said you were a responsibility.”
“Yes,” she said clearly.
“That was not the truth. It was something I told myself because the truth was considerably more frightening, and I had been telling myself that particular version for long enough that I had convinced myself it was accurate.” He released a breath.
“You were never a burden or a responsibility. You are the first thing in ten years that I wanted entirely for myself, without any of the duty or the obligation or the management that I had arranged my entire life around. And that frightened me more than anything Harwood could have arranged on a beach.”
She did not respond.
“I have spent twenty years,” he continued, “being careful about exactly this. About not beginning something that could become what my parents had. I watched love destroy everything it touched in that house, and I decided, at nineteen, that I was not going to build it. That I was not capable of building it correctly.” He paused. “I was wrong about that, too.”
The courtyard was very quiet. The children’s voices were distant and ordinary. The bare tree did not move.
“Cecily,” he rasped, “I am not afraid anymore.”
She looked at him.
“I was afraid in the study. I was afraid when I came home from the garden and lay in the dark and thought about my parents’ carriage and the solicitor’s office and every breakfast table I had sat at in a house full of noise.
I was afraid when I sat across from you and said what I said and watched you digest it.
” His voice was level and entirely honest.
“I have been afraid since the second morning you were in my house, because you walked into it and made it into something I did not know it was capable of being, and I understood that I was not going to be able to keep my distance.” He paused.
“And then I tried anyway, because I am… because I have always been better at maintenance than at admission.”
“You are,” she said, very quietly.
“Yes.” The corner of his mouth curved. “I know that about myself.”
The cold air moved between them.
“Cecily, I do not want a marriage in name only,” he said.
“I do not want an arrangement. I did not want an arrangement six weeks ago, but I told myself otherwise. I was wrong, and I have been wrong about several things in the past month, but that was the one that cost the most. I am not–” He stopped and took a deep breath.
“Oh God, I’m rambling. I am not going to stand here and think about how to say this.
I am going to say it plainly because you are a woman who has always preferred the truth to a comfortable version of it, so here I am. ”
She was looking at him intently.
“I love you.” He felt the words leave him and stood with vulnerability. “I have loved you since you argued with me over the butter dish.” He held her gaze. “I love you, and I am not going to regret it, and I am not going to call it a mistake, and I am not going to step back.”
Something broke in her expression. She gasped, tears filling her eyes, and he itched to wipe them away.
“William,” she sobbed.
“I want you to come home,” he pleaded. “Not as an arrangement. Not as a convenience. But as my wife. Because I choose you.” He paused.
“Because I would choose you, Cecily, in any room, in any circumstance, regardless of shores or scandals or anything the papers have said or will say. I would choose you.” He let that sink in for a moment. “And I want…”
He reached into the inner pocket of his coat and produced a folded document. He held it out to her.
She took it. Opened it. Read the first line.
Her hand went still on the page.
“Legal guardianship,” he explained. “Both of us. Her name on it, our names on it, everything Aldiss could make permanent before the end of the week.” He watched her face.
“I know it is what you wanted. I know I told you our marriage was temporary and it would not be fair to a child. I was…” he trailed off.
“I was telling myself the truth as I understood it then, but I understand it differently now. She should have a home. A real one. With people who will stay.” A pause. “I intend to stay.”
Cecily looked at the document.
He watched her read it, saw the exact moment she read the baby’s name, the guardians’ names, the formal language that made it real and permanent and irrevocable. He saw what it did to her face and felt it do the same thing to his chest.
“William…” Her voice was shaky.
“I do not know whether you will have me. I know what I said in the study, and I know what it cost you, and I am not standing here expecting anything simply because I have said what I should have said weeks ago.” He looked her in the eye.
“But I am asking. I am asking you to come home. And I will do everything within my considerable means and my apparently extensive capacity for being a thorough idiot to–”
“William,” she cut him off. “I never stopped.” Her voice broke on the last word. “I tried. I sat in Beatrice’s nursery for a week, telling myself it was foolish and I had agreed to the terms. I was not going to—I tried very hard.”
She looked at him with the clear blue eyes that had never once looked at him with anything other than the full, honest weight of what she was actually seeing.
“I never stopped. I love you so much it hurts.”
He stepped forward, cupped her face in his hands the way he had in the garden, and kissed her.
It was nothing like in the garden.
The kiss in the garden had been a beginning, tentative and slow, the careful approach of two people who had not yet admitted what they were approaching.
This kiss was different. This was the thing that came after the beginning, after the weeks and the distance and the cost of the distance.
It was just him and her in a courtyard outside an orphanage, with the cold air around them and the document in her hand and all of it, finally and completely and without any reservation, real.
She kissed him back with everything she had not been saying, and he felt it.
I will not lose this again.
When they broke apart, her forehead came to rest against his. They stood there in the cold air, neither of them speaking for a while. The silence was the best kind.
“The baby would need a name,” Cecily said eventually, into the warm space between them.
He laughed. “She does.”
“I have been thinking about it for weeks. When she was with us.”
“Have you?”
“I have a list.”
“Of course you do.”
She pulled back enough to look at him. Her eyes were bright, and he thought that he had never in his life seen anything as arresting as her face in this particular moment.
“Come home,” he coaxed, “and tell me about the list.”
She smiled at him. “Yes.”