Chapter 14
Chapter Fourteen
Andrew had not meant to pass the nursery.
There was no need for it. The shortest route from the library to his study ran along the west corridor and down the back stair. He knew that perfectly well. Sinclair House was his own house, and a man did not misplace himself beneath his own roof.
Yet somehow, he had taken the east passage.
He told himself he had been thinking of estate matters. There were letters waiting on his writing table, a tenant dispute requiring attention, and an account from the steward that would not improve merely because he delayed reading it.
His thoughts had been elsewhere. That was all.
Then he heard Frances’ voice. It came through the nursery door, which stood slightly ajar. It was threaded with that dry amusement she never quite abandoned even when speaking tenderly.
“And I must tell you frankly, madam, that a heroine who faints twice in one chapter cannot be relied upon in a crisis. One may forgive the first collapse, perhaps, if there is a storm, a mysterious stranger, or an inconveniently placed skeleton. But the second shows a want of discipline.”
Andrew stopped. He ought to have moved on at once.
Instead, he looked.
The nursery was warm with firelight. Its glow lay honey-gold upon the cream curtains, the polished cradle, the little table where a book lay open upon its face.
Frances sat in the chair near the hearth with the baby in her arms, the child tucked securely against her.
One tiny fist had caught in the loose ribbon at Frances’s sleeve. Frances had not tried to free it.
Her hair had been dressed for the day, but a few dark strands had escaped and softened the line of her cheek. She looked down at the child with an expression Andrew had never seen upon her face before.
The baby stared up at her in solemn fascination, as though Frances were a marvel sent for her private examination. Frances bent her head closer, and her voice dropped.
“You agree, I see. Sensible girl.”
The child made a small sound. Frances smiled. And Andrew’s breath caught before he could stop it. For one unguarded instant, the scene arranged itself into something so simple and complete that it was almost painful: a woman beside the fire and a child in her arms.
A mother and child.
The thought struck him with such force that his hand closed around the handle of the letter he carried.
No. Not mother and child. Not hers, not his, not theirs… never theirs.
He stepped back from the door as though the warmth inside had burned him.
Fool, he told himself sharply.
He had known from the beginning that Frances would be kind.
He had seen enough of her character to expect it.
She had defended him when silence would have served her better.
She had taken the child into her arms when others hesitated.
She would not be cruel to an infant merely because the circumstances surrounding her were inconvenient.
That was all this was, duty hiding behind kindness, and the dangerous imagination of a man who had spent too many years avoiding cradles and had now been foolish enough to look into one.
He turned away… and collided almost at once with Nurse Ellis.
The nurse gave a small gasp. A covered jug in her hands tipped dangerously, and Andrew caught it by instinct before it could spill. Warm milk sloshed beneath the cloth, sending up a faint sweet steam.
“Your Grace!” Nurse Ellis whispered, looking horrified. “Oh, forgive me. I did not see you there.”
“No,” Andrew answered, releasing the jug the moment he was certain she had it. “It is I who should apologize. I was in your way.”
“In my way?” She blinked, then glanced from him to the nursery door, which still stood open behind them.
Andrew’s spine tightened. Nurse Ellis’s face softened with too much understanding.
“She is settling well this evening,” she said quietly.
“I am pleased to hear it,” he replied.
The baby made another small sound from within the room, followed by Frances’ gentle murmur.
Nurse Ellis smiled. “Would Your Grace care to come in?”
“No.” The answer came too quickly.
The nurse lowered her gaze at once. “Of course, Your Grace.”
Andrew heard the sharpness of his own refusal and disliked himself for it. He forced his voice into something calmer. “I have business.”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
“Urgent business.”
“Certainly.”
The addition made him sound ridiculous. He knew it. Nurse Ellis was far too polite to suggest as much, but there was a certain kindness in her expression that was worse than mockery.
Andrew inclined his head, turned, and walked away, but not too quickly. A duke did not flee his own nursery.
Still, by the time he reached the stair, his pulse had altered. By the time he entered the study, shut the door, and stood alone among the ordered ranks of books and papers, something inside him had become disorderly beyond tolerance.
He set the letter down upon the writing table. Then, he placed both hands flat on the polished wood and bowed his head.
It was only a room, only a woman reading nonsense to a child, only a baby catching at a sleeve in the firelight.
And yet the image had followed him. For a moment, he wanted it.
The realization was so dangerous that he closed his eyes against it.
He had made promises to Mary, to himself, to the dead, unnamed child he had once watched vanish from his childhood like a candle blown out in a dark room.
He had built his life around the certainty that love, once given to a child, became a blade turned inward.
He would not let affection make him helpless again.
And Frances… Frances was not part of this. She had entered the arrangement by necessity. She had not asked for his secrets, his fears, his burdens, or a child who came wrapped in scandal and silence. The kinder she became, the more carefully he had to keep the boundaries where they belonged.
Respect. Protection. Distance.
He repeated the words in his mind as though they were prayers.
But the room seemed to hold another memory beneath them: Frances’ loving voice through the nursery door, calling the baby a sensible girl.
Andrew opened his eyes. The papers on his writing table blurred for half a second before he forced them into order.
Urgent business, he had told Nurse Ellis. Very well.
He would make it urgent.
That same evening, Frances discovered that feeding an infant required a steadier hand than she possessed.
The milk had arrived warm beneath its folded cloth, and Nurse Ellis had shown her, once again, how to hold the little cup, how to tilt it only a little, and how to pause when the baby turned her head away with all the offended dignity of a dowager refusing inferior tea.
“She will take more if Your Grace gives her a moment,” Nurse Ellis said softly.
Frances nodded as if she understood. She did not. Or rather, she understood the instruction but not the instinct behind it. There seemed to be a whole language to infants made of sighs, grimaces, rooting mouths, clenched fists, and sudden outraged cries.
Nurse Ellis read it fluently. Frances was still sounding out the alphabet.
At that moment, the baby squirmed in her arms.
“Oh, no,” Frances whispered. “We had an agreement.”
The baby’s face puckered.
Nurse Ellis, who was folding linen near the hearth, glanced over. “A little higher, Your Grace. Yes, that way.”
Frances adjusted the child against her. The movement was too stiff. The baby protested at once, drawing up one tiny knee beneath the blanket and making a sound of deep personal betrayal.
“Yes, I know,” Frances murmured, heat rising in her cheeks. “I am clumsy. You need not announce it to the entire household.”
The baby rooted again.
Frances offered the milk with extreme care, holding her breath as though one wrong movement might undo them both. A drop escaped and ran down the baby’s chin. Frances gasped and reached for the cloth, nearly dislodging the cup in the process.
Nurse Ellis was beside her in an instant, though not in alarm. “There now. No harm done.”
Frances tried again. This time the baby drank.
It was only a little at first, and done suspiciously, as if testing whether Frances deserved trust. Then, more.
Her tiny mouth worked with surprising determination, her lashes fluttering low over her cheeks.
Frances’s arm began to ache beneath the baby’s weight, though the child could hardly weigh anything at all.
It seemed absurd that something so small could make one feel so physically inadequate.
“There,” Nurse Ellis said. “Very good.”
Frances did not look away from the baby. “You are speaking to her, I hope.”
“To both of you, Your Grace.”
By the time the baby had taken enough milk, Frances’s wrist was stiff, her shoulders tense, and the front of her gown bore one small damp spot she suspected would betray her incompetence to anyone sufficiently observant.
The baby, however, looked drowsy and warm, and her earlier indignation was now softened into heavy blinks and loose fingers.
“She will need settling now,” Nurse Ellis said.
Nurse Ellis had demonstrated it before: the careful lifting, the gentle pat, the little walk, the soft murmur, the manner of holding the baby close without jostling her.
Frances had watched with the grave attention she usually reserved for difficult passages in essays, but unlike books, babies refused to remain still upon the page.
“I can take her,” Nurse Ellis offered.
Frances almost accepted. The offer would have been sensible. Nurse Ellis would know precisely what to do. The child would sleep sooner. Everyone would be spared the awkward spectacle of a duchess negotiating with an infant and losing.
But the baby’s cheek rested warm against Frances’s sleeve, and one small hand had opened against the bodice of her gown.
“No,” Frances said, surprising herself. “I should like to try.”
Nurse Ellis’s expression softened. “Then try.”
Frances stood slowly, and the baby stirred. Frances froze. The baby’s mouth trembled, and Frances immediately began to sway from one foot to the other. The movement had the careful, anxious rhythm of a person crossing a frozen pond and hoping no one noticed the cracks beneath her shoes.
“Hush,” she whispered. “Please do not cry. I have no strategy prepared for crying.”
Frances resumed the sway, a little slower. She held the child higher against her shoulder, as Nurse Ellis had taught her, and patted lightly at her back. She glanced toward the nurse.
“Like this?”
“A little firmer, Your Grace. She will not break.”
Frances walked a little, from the hearth to the window and back again.
The room had settled into evening quiet.
The lamps were lowered, and the fire threw a gentle glow over the nursery walls.
Outside, the glass reflected a blurred image of Frances moving with the baby in her arms, her own face paler than usual, her mouth set with concentration.
Still, as she held the baby, she could not help looking for him in her.
The fair hair? Perhaps. The set of the brow? Impossible to tell. The stubbornness? Well, that could belong to anyone, though Andrew possessed enough of it to share generously.
Was he her father? She could not, for the life of her, tell.
The baby fussed again, turning her face against Frances’s shoulder.
Frances tightened with alarm. “No, no. We were doing so well.”
Nurse Ellis murmured from near the hearth, “Keep walking.”
Frances obeyed. Then, she began to recite the first lines of the novel she had been reading earlier, then stopped when she forgot them. Instead, she invented.
“There was once a very small lady,” she murmured, “who came to a very large house and immediately made herself its most important resident. She possessed no fortune, no title, and very little hair, yet everyone obeyed when she cried.”
The baby quieted.
Encouraged, Frances continued.
“This small lady had a fearsome temper, excellent lungs, and a habit of looking at people as though they had disappointed her before they had even begun. But she was also very brave, though she did not know it, because everything in the world was new to her.”
The words softened as she spoke them. The baby’s body grew heavier by degrees. Frances hardly dared breathe. Her hand, supporting the baby’s head, had begun to cramp from holding the same careful position too long.
Still, she did not stop, and at one point, she heard a surrendering sound.
Frances looked down.
“Asleep?” she whispered.
Nurse Ellis came nearer, peered gently, and smiled. “Asleep.”
Relief washed through Frances so swiftly that she almost laughed. It was a small victory. Yet, it felt enormous.
Frances stood very still, holding the sleeping child.
She did not know the truth. She did not know whether Andrew had lied by omission, whether he protected another, whether some future revelation would make a fool of her compassion.
She did not know what claim this baby had upon her husband’s life.
But she knew the child had fallen asleep in her arms. She knew the small weight of her. She knew the warmth. She knew that when the baby cried, something in her now answered before reason did.
That frightened her more than she expected.
Frances lowered her cheek, not quite touching the baby’s cap, but close enough to feel the softness of it.
“Oh, little one,” she whispered so quietly even Nurse Ellis could not have heard. “What are you doing to me?”
The baby slept on, unconcerned by questions of blood, scandal, marriage, or belonging.
And Frances, standing in the low golden nursery light with aching arms and an unsettled heart, understood that despite every doubt, despite every unanswered question, despite not knowing whether this little girl was her husband’s child or not, she was beginning to care far more than she had meant to, and far more than was safe.