Chapter 30
“Slower,” Isadora called from the top of the front steps, the moment the carriage had fully stopped. “Letitia, you are going to knock her over.”
“I am not going to knock her over,” Letitia protested, already halfway down. She was not, in fact, going slowly.
Cecily stepped out first.
William, who was stepping out behind her with the baby tucked against his chest and her fist curled against his lapel, had approximately two seconds to clear the way before the impact.
Letitia launched herself at Cecily, sobbing.
Cecily tapped her. “Letty, can’t breathe…”
“Oh! Sorry.” Letitia grinned and loosened her grip. “You came back,” she murmured into her shoulder. “You’re actually back.”
“I said I would.” Cecily pressed her face briefly into Letitia’s hair, which smelled of the rose water she used on Sundays.
“You said you hoped to.” Letitia’s grip was still very tight. “That is not the same thing, and you know it.” She pulled back and looked at Cecily’s face
“I missed you.” Cecily beamed.
“Obviously,” Letitia said. “The house was bleak without you in it. Nobody laughed at breakfast. The heroine in my new book is very peculiar, and I cannot wait to tell you about her.” Letitia stepped back and took a good look at Cecily’s face
“You look better.”
“I feel better.”
“Good.” She looked over Cecily’s shoulder at William with an expression that conveyed a fortnight’s worth of accumulated editorial. “You are still on notice.”
“Letitia–” William began.
“I told you that you were an idiot. I want it to be on record.”
“You are on record.”
“Good.” She looked at the baby. Her expression changed immediately, the sharpness leaving and something softer taking its place. “Is that…”
“Yes,” Cecily confirmed.
“Oh,” Letitia gasped. “Today is the best day ever!” William moved closer to them and Letitiaheld out her hand and stroked the baby’s cheek.
Isadora had come down the steps at her own pace. She looked at Cecily with her dark, steady eyes and said nothing for a moment.
“Well…” she trailed off.
Then she stepped forward, and Cecily drew her into a hug. She clung to Cecily and sniffed softly.
They stood like that for a while before she drew back.
Cecily took a deep breath.
This is also home. These are also mine.
“You’re back,” Isadora said quietly.
“I’m back.”
“Good.” She pulled away. Her eyes were bright, and her cheeks rosy. “I have thoughts about the past three weeks.”
“I imagine you do.”
“I will reserve them.” She glanced at William. “For now.”
“I appreciate the restraint,” he muttered.
“It is not restraint. It is strategy.” She looked at the baby in William’s arms. “I am so glad she is back.”
At the door, Mr. Prentiss stood and bowed.
“Welcome home, Your Grace,” he said.
Cecily looked at him. “Thank you, Prentiss. Very much.”
He nodded with a small smile. “Mrs. Beam has made apple cake.”
William’s hand found the small of Cecily’s back as they crossed the threshold, and she felt his warmth spread through her. She looked up at him. He was looking at her.
“All right?” he asked, voice low for her ears only.
“Yes,” she said. All of it was exactly as she had left it, all of it entirely itself. “Very.”
His thumb rubbed small circles on the small of her back, and she leaned into his touch.
After dinner, after the baby had been settled in the nursery with the solemn ceremony that was becoming her established preference—this involved being held by at least three people before she would consent to the crib, a negotiation Letitia had told her very seriously that she was winning—William sent word to Mr. Prentiss to assemble the servants in the entrance hall.
Cecily stood to the side and watched him stand in front of them—Mr. Prentiss, Ellen, Mrs. Beam, the kitchen maids, the footmen, the maids—with the same look he had worn at eight o’clock every morning this past week, reading documents at his desk.
“You’ll have noticed certain changes in the past weeks,” he began. “I want to address them plainly, which is how this household will now be run.”
He looked at each of them in turn, unhurried.
“The estate accounts have been reorganized and will be audited directly by me on a monthly basis. The tenant arrangements are being reviewed. If any of you have observations about the way things have been managed that have not previously been welcome, I am asking you to bring them to Prentiss now. There will be no consequences for doing so.”
The silence was of the listening kind.
“The orphanage fund,” he continued, “has been separated from the household accounts entirely and placed under a trust. Three trustees, independent governance.” He paused.
“Her Grace will oversee the work from this house going forward. All correspondence, all requests, all reports from St. Clement’s are to be directed to her.
Her decisions in that capacity are not to be redirected elsewhere or delayed.
” He looked at them pointedly. “That is not a suggestion. That is how this household works from now on.”
Mrs. Beam looked at Cecily. “Very good, Your Grace.”
Mr. Prentiss inclined his head with the gravity of giving something his highest official approval.
“One more thing.” William looked at the assembled servants somberly.
“The Duchess is not a guest in this house. She is not a visitor. She is my wife. She is not here on any arrangement or agreement. She is the mistress of Blackmoor House. She has been from the day she came here, which the rest of us are now going to act like we understood all along.” A pause. “Because we should have.”
The entrance hall was very quiet.
Then Ellen, nineteen years old and the only person in the hall who had apparently decided this called for a direct response, said, “Yes, Your Grace,” with such genuine feeling that Mrs. Beam looked up at the ceiling.
Cecily pressed her lips together.
William caught her eye, and the corner of his mouth twitched.
Later, the house was quiet, and the fire burned low in the library. He found her there, not because she was waiting. Except that she was, a little.
She was lounging on the settee, with a book that was not getting much of her attention. He came in and sat beside her, and she looked up.
“Everyone is settled,” he said.
“Even Letitia?”
“Letitia hardly falls asleep easily when she is excited. She has to expend the energy by talking the house down. So much energy for a fourteen-year-old.”
Cecily laughed. He watched her laugh, and she blushed under the intensity of his gaze.
“William,” she said.
“Mm.”
“Stop looking at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like–” She gestured vaguely. “Like that.”
“I’ll try,” he said, without any conviction.
She looked at him. He looked at her. The fire crackled.
She found that she liked looking at him and his dreamy eyes.
“I want to tell you something,” he said.
She set down the book.
“I nearly drowned when I was seventeen,” he revealed.
“We were on the shore with James, the last summer before I came down from school. The current was stronger than I had accounted for, and it took me out–” He stopped.
Breathed. “I thought, in the time between going under and coming back to the surface, that that was it. That was going to be how it ended.” He met her eyes.
“I have thought about it many times since then, when I have needed to understand what real fear feels like.”
She went very still.
“Watching your carriage roll through the gates, losing you…” he rasped. “It was worse.”
The library was very quiet.
“I want to keep stepping closer. I want to do it correctly this time, and I want to keep doing it for… for a very long time.”
Cecily thought about the girl who had sat under a yew tree in her mother’s garden and written I will only marry for love in a violet notebook, convinced and afraid in equal measure that she was being foolish.
That girl knew something.
“I never needed you to be perfect,” she said.
“I want you to understand that. I didn’t need a man without fear, or without mistakes, or who never said the wrong thing.
I needed someone who would stand beside me, not in front of me.
Not a man who would manage me or protect me or be responsible for me, as though I were something that required handling.
” She paused. “Just beside me. As an equal. As a partner.”
“Yes.” He nodded.
“And I need you to stay there,” she continued. “When it is difficult and when it isn’t. When the fear arrives. I don’t need you to not be afraid. I need you to tell me when you are.”
He looked at her for a long moment.
“I can do that,” he relented.
She gave him a watery smile.
“I love you,” she said.
He kissed her.
He brought his hand up to her jaw, tilted her face, and kissed her with a thoroughness that was entirely deliberate, entirely his with the warmth of his mouth, the steadiness of his hands, the weight of his full attention brought to bear on exactly this and nothing else.
She felt him breathe her in. She felt the unhurried certainty of it, the tenderness of a man who had decided he did not need to hold back and was not going to.
She kissed him back with everything she had.
He pulled back just enough to rest his forehead against hers. She felt him smile against her mouth.
She pulled back just enough to look at him.
“Hello,” she said.
His green eyes were open and entirely hers.
“Hello,” he returned.
His hands were still in her hair, and he was looking at her with an expression that was simply reserved for her—only ever for her.
“I love you,” he murmured.
The house with the baby asleep upstairs and his sisters three floors above them was exactly what it was supposed to be.
“Good,” she said. “I intend to make regular use of that.”
He laughed and kissed her again, and she rose on her tiptoes, and the library was the only room in the world.