Chapter 10
Chapter Ten
Andrew had intended to leave her there.
It was not cowardice, precisely. A man could hardly be called a coward merely for withdrawing from a scene in which his presence was no longer necessary.
Mrs. Carter understood the house. Frances would need the linen closets explained, the morning-room keys surrendered, the names of servants repeated, the ordinary machinery of domestic command placed into her hands with all proper ceremony.
None of that required him. Indeed, he had decided it was kinder that it should not.
A new duchess did not require a husband standing at her elbow like a jailer.
She did not require him watching while she learned where bells were rung and which maid attended which chamber.
She certainly did not require him observing the exact moment when the grandeur of his house ceased being picturesque and became obligation.
So he inclined his head to Mrs. Carter. “I shall leave Her Grace in your capable hands.”
Frances turned slightly. She seemed to want to say something, but the sound of a baby crying prevented her from doing so. It came thinly through the great hall, sharpened by distance and stone. It pierced the ordered quiet with a small, desperate insistence.
Andrew stopped. Every servant in the line seemed to breathe differently at once.
Mrs. Carter’s hands stilled before her. Carter, who had been standing near the rear of the hall, lowered his gaze.
The footmen looked ahead with particular determination, as though the gilt molding opposite had become a matter of urgent study.
The cry came again. It was not loud. And that somehow made it worse.
Beside him, Frances had gone very still. He looked at her before he meant to. Her gaze had lifted toward the staircase. Her lips parted, then closed. The color had not left her face, but her whole body seemed to tighten, as though instinct had seized her before thought could interfere.
Mrs. Carter spoke softly. “I beg your pardon, Your Grace. Nurse must have–”
A rustle sounded from the passage above. Then hurried footsteps descended the staircase, light but uneven, and a woman appeared upon the landing with an infant bundled in her arms.
“Nurse Ellis,” Mrs. Carter murmured.
The nurse came down with evident distress upon her face, though she held the baby with all the competence of long habit.
She was a neat woman of perhaps forty, with a round, kind face and tired eyes.
The cap beneath her bonnet had slipped slightly askew, and one ribbon trailed loose against her shoulder.
“Forgive me, Your Grace,” she said, pausing several steps above the hall. “I did not know you had arrived. She woke fretful from her sleep and would not settle.”
She.
The word made itself a weight in the air.
Andrew had not meant Frances to meet the child like this.
In truth, he had not meant to think of how Frances would meet the child at all.
He had arranged rooms, servants, explanations sufficient for a household and insufficient for a wife.
He had told himself that matters would be addressed in proper order.
But babies, he had learned long ago, possessed no respect for proper order.
The infant wailed again, her tiny face red and crumpled above the folds of linen. Nurse Ellis swayed gently, patting her back with soothing murmurs.
“Hush now, little lamb. There, there,” the nurse whispered tenderly.
Andrew’s fingers closed once at his side. “Is she ill?”
The question came too sharply.
Nurse Ellis looked at once apologetic. “No, Your Grace. Only cross, I think. She has fed well enough.”
“Has she slept?”
“Some.”
“Some?”
Frances turned her eyes toward him, and he knew at once she had heard more than the question.
She had heard the edge beneath it. He made himself still.
The baby continued crying. A thin, furious, wounded sound, as though life itself had offended her and she meant to lodge a formal complaint with heaven.
Then Frances stepped forward. “May I hold her?”
No one moved. Andrew looked at her. He could not have been more surprised had she asked for his ledgers or his pistol.
There was no simpering eagerness in her face, no elaborate softness of the sort ladies sometimes adopted around infants when gentlemen were present.
She looked uncertain, yes, but not unwilling.
Nurse Ellis hesitated, then glanced toward Andrew. It was sensible that she should. Everything concerning the child had passed through him. Every instruction, every precaution, every careful silence. He had made himself the sole gate between that small life and the world.
And now Frances stood before him with her hands half lifted and her gaze very steady, asking permission to enter.
Andrew nodded once.
Nurse Ellis descended the remaining steps and approached. “She is not always so fierce, Your Grace,” she told Frances, with the faint apologetic pride of a nurse whose charge had chosen the worst possible moment for display. “Though she does have a will.”
“I am told that is not always a defect,” Frances replied.
Andrew’s mouth almost moved. The nurse smiled, then carefully placed the infant into Frances’s arms. For a moment, the crying worsened.
Andrew felt his whole body prepare to intervene. He did not know what he meant to do. Take the child back? Summon the physician? Order quiet by ducal decree, as if infants were tenants behind on rent?
Frances did not flinch. She adjusted her hold slowly, awkward for only a second before instinct, or observation, or some mysterious feminine knowledge corrected her.
One hand supported the baby’s head, the other gathered the blanket more securely.
The infant rooted angrily against her bodice, with its mouth open in another indignant cry.
“There now,” Frances murmured.
Her voice had changed. Andrew had heard it in argument, cool and bright as a blade. He had heard it in church, composed into solemn obedience. He had heard it in the carriage, careful and restrained, each sentence placed between them like a book set neatly upon a shelf.
He had not heard it like this.
“There now, you need not tell us everything at once. We are attentive, I assure you.”
The baby hiccuped upon a cry. Frances looked down at her with such serious consideration that Andrew found himself unable to look away.
“Yes,” she continued softly, “I quite understand. It is a very large house, and everyone has been staring. I should protest also, had I lungs half so impressive.”
Nurse Ellis gave a quiet, startled laugh and pressed her fingers to her mouth. The baby cried again, though less forcefully.
Then, Frances began to move. It was only a slight sway, a careful rhythm from one foot to the other.
Her travelling gown whispered faintly against the polished floor.
The scent of cold air still clung to her cloak, mingled with lavender and something like ink, faint but unmistakable, as if even her gloves had been near books.
Andrew stood transfixed. The child’s cries thinned. One small hand emerged from the linen, red and clenched, then opened blindly against Frances’ sleeve.
Frances glanced up. For a moment, her eyes met his. He should have looked away.
He did not.
She held the child as though the act required courage, and perhaps it did. Perhaps tenderness always did. The baby gave one last exhausted protest, then pressed her cheek against Frances’ bodice and quieted.
The hall seemed to alter around the silence.
Andrew had grown accustomed to quiet. He preferred it.
He had built his life from it. But this quiet was not the old hollow thing that came after crying stopped.
This was warm, breathing quiet. This was a little body growing heavy with sleep in his wife’s arms.
His wife.
The thought arrived with unwelcome force.
Frances looked down. “Oh,” she whispered, and the single syllable held so much surprise that something in his chest tightened. “She is asleep.”
Nurse Ellis beamed with relief. “Indeed, she is, Your Grace.”
Mrs. Carter’s expression had softened almost beyond recognition. Andrew, feeling the scrutiny of every servant in the hall and hating that he had given them any expression worth observing, drew himself back into composure.
“She should be returned to the nursery,” he said to no one in particular.
Frances looked at him. The softness did not vanish, but it retreated a little behind her usual intelligence. “Should I put her into her crib?”
Despite the simplicity of the question, it struck him like a hand laid gently upon a wound.
“Yes,” he nodded. “I will show you the way.”
Mrs. Carter took half a step forward. “Your Grace, I can–”
“That will be all,” Andrew dismissed her.
The words were not loud, but they carried.
Mrs. Carter stopped at once. “Of course, Your Grace.”
He turned toward the staircase, then glanced back. Frances followed, carrying the child with both caution and care. Her steps were slower than usual, robbed of their sharp certainty by the sleeping weight in her arms. Andrew moderated his pace without meaning to.
The hall fell away behind them. The great staircase curved upward beneath portraits of stern, dead Sinclairs who had survived wars, debts, scandals and their own unfortunate taste in waistcoats.
Candlelight from the sconces trembled along the gilt frames.
Outside, late afternoon pressed pale and cool against the tall windows, turning the glass silver.
Halfway up, Frances quietly spoke. “You did not tell me she was a girl.”
Andrew kept his eyes ahead. “No.”
“Was that an omission of strategy or merely habit?”
“Must it be one of the two?”
“With you, I begin to suspect everything is either strategy or evasion.”
He glanced at her then. She was looking down at the baby, but there was the faintest curve at the corner of her mouth.
“I see marriage has not made you charitable,” he pointed out.
“Marriage has made me observant. Charity remains under consideration.”
Against his better judgment, amusement touched him. “That is unfortunate. I had hoped for charity first.”
“You should have married a less observant woman.”
“I did try to avoid marriage altogether.”
“As did I. Yet here we are, Your Grace. We must both endure the consequences of our poor execution.”
The nursery lay in the east wing, though he had avoided calling it that whenever possible.
It had once been a suite of rooms used by his mother’s ladies, then shut up after her death, then aired and furnished with almost brutal efficiency once Mary’s child had been brought from the cottage.
It was comfortable now. He had seen to every detail as one might provision a fortress against siege.
A fire burned low in the grate when they entered.
The room smelled of warm milk, clean linen, beeswax and the faint powdery sweetness particular to infants.
Curtains of soft cream muslin had been drawn back to admit what remained of the day.
A cradle stood near the hearth, polished pale wood beneath a canopy embroidered with faded silver thread.
Frances approached the cradle. The baby made a small sound, not quite waking, and Frances lowered her with such slow care that Andrew felt the motion in his own shoulders.
She bent over the cradle, with one hand lingering beneath the child’s head until the last possible moment.
The infant stirred. Frances rested two fingers lightly against the blanket and whispered something he did not catch.
Whatever it was, the child settled.
Andrew stood by the door and watched his wife bend over another woman’s baby with a tenderness she had not promised anyone.
The sight unsettled him more than the crying had.
It was not that she looked maternal, though she did.
It was not that she seemed naturally suited to the scene, though that too was true in a manner he found almost alarming.
It was that she had entered the room with no claim at all and, in the span of a few moments, made the child seem less like a responsibility and more like a person.
A very small person, perhaps, but a person all the same.