Chapter 22
Life at Jameson Manor had settled into a rhythm neither of them had quite expected to find so easily.
Mornings began late, by the old household's standards — Damon had quietly informed the staff, within a week of the wedding, that nothing short of fire required waking either of them before eight, a decree the servants had received with poorly concealed delight.
Breakfast was taken together, always, regardless of what the day demanded afterward.
Elizabeth kept her small study on the east side of the manor, its door unmarked, its contents entirely her own, and spent her mornings there with legal papers spread across the desk exactly as they always had been, only now with better light and considerably better tea.
Damon divided his days between estate matters, the slow, patient work of building the alliances Paul had first suggested, and long afternoon walks that had become, by unspoken agreement, something the two of them nearly always took together.
It was, by any measure either of them could construct, a good life. Neither had entirely trusted, in the earlier and more dangerous months of their acquaintance, that such a thing would ever be available to either of them.
◆◆◆
The morning it began, Elizabeth was in a temper before she had even properly risen from bed.
"The tea is wrong," she announced, pushing the cup away with more force than the offense strictly warranted. "It has always been made this way. I do not know what has changed."
"Nothing has changed," Damon said carefully, from behind his newspaper. "Mrs. Hollis has made it the same way for three years running."
"Then my palate has changed, and I do not care for it." She pressed a hand briefly to her stomach, frowning. "And I am tired in a manner I cannot properly account for, given that I slept the whole night through without incident."
"You have seemed tired rather often, this past fortnight," Damon observed, lowering the paper.
"I am aware of that, thank you, I do not require the observation repeated back to me."
He wisely returned to his paper.
She was still frowning into her rejected tea when one of the younger housemaids, a girl named Sophie who had joined the staff only a few months before, appeared in the doorway looking as though she had spent a considerable while gathering the courage to enter it at all.
"Begging your pardon, Your Grace," she said, addressing Damon, her hands twisting slightly in her apron. "Might I have a word? Only — it is a delicate matter."
Damon set his paper aside, curious. "Of course."
They stepped into the corridor together, and Sophie's nerve very nearly failed her entirely before she managed to speak.
"It is only, Your Grace — I have three older sisters and I could not help but notice — the tea, and the tiredness, and Her Grace being cross over the smallest things, and this morning I saw her turn quite pale at the smell of the kippers—" She stopped, flushing deeply.
"Forgive me, Your Grace, it is not my place at all to say such a thing, but I wondered — that is, I suspected that she is pregnant, Your Grace. "
Damon went very still.
"You suspect she may be with child," he said, quietly.
Sophie nodded, miserable with the impropriety of having said it aloud at all. "I did not mean to overstep, Your Grace. Only, my sisters had the very same signs each time, and I thought—"
"You have not overstepped," Damon said. "You have done something rather kind, in fact, and I will not forget it."
Sophie curtsied, visibly relieved, and hurried off before her courage could desert her entirely.
Damon stood alone in the corridor for a long moment, something unsteady moving through his chest that had nothing to do with fear at all.
◆◆◆
He arranged the visit to Dr. Franklin's clinic that same afternoon, framing it to Elizabeth as nothing more than a precaution given her recent tiredness, and she agreed readily enough, still faintly irritated with her own body's uncooperative behavior and eager for an explanation of any kind.
The clinic smelled the same as it always had — lavender water and old paper, the particular hush of a room built for careful listening.
Franklin examined her with the same brisk, thorough manner Elizabeth remembered from their first difficult meeting, though considerably warmer now, softened by a year and a case that had, in its strange way, made something like friends of them both.
"Well," he said, once he had finished, setting his instruments aside with the satisfied air of a man confirming something he had already half suspected the moment they walked in.
"You are quite correct to have come, Your Grace.
You are with child. Some weeks along, by my estimate — early yet, but unmistakable. "
Elizabeth went very still.
Damon, beside her, went stiller.
"You are certain," she said.
"Entirely," Franklin said. "The tiredness, the change in appetite, the sensitivity to certain smells — all precisely what one would expect. I would say you have some months yet before you need trouble yourself with any of the harder work of it."
Elizabeth turned to look at Damon, and found him already looking at her, something in his expression she had rarely seen there before — not the composed warmth he wore for most of the world, not even the private tenderness he reserved only for her. Something closer to wonder.
"A child," she said, very quietly, as though testing whether the word might dissolve if she said it too loudly.
"A child," Damon agreed, and the wonder in his face broke, finally, into something like a smile too large for his own composure to properly contain.
Franklin, watching them both with the particular satisfaction of a man who had once stood in a much colder room asking Damon difficult questions about a dead woman, and had lived to see this moment instead, allowed himself a small, private smile of his own before discreetly excusing himself to give them the room.
They did not speak for a long while after he had gone.
Elizabeth sat very still, one hand resting against her stomach, and Damon knelt in front of her chair, exactly as he had once knelt on an office floor with a bottle of wine and no composure left at all, and pressed his forehead gently to her hand.
"Hello," he said, very quietly, to no one who could yet hear him. "I have been waiting rather a long time to meet you."
◆◆◆
By the fifth month, the household had adjusted, though not entirely without incident.
There were more flowers now, arranged in every corner of the manor at Elizabeth's own insistence, and more windows kept open for air, and considerably more footsteps on the staircases than there had been a year before.
"These strawberries are wrong," Elizabeth announced one afternoon, from the sunroom, seated in a chair that had been moved no fewer than three times that morning in pursuit of tolerable sunlight.
Damon looked up from a stack of letters — two barons and something from a minister's private secretary, all of it considerably less interesting than the woman across the room. "I had them sent from the same farm you approved last week."
"They taste of nothing at all," she said, pushing the bowl away. "Or possibly of betrayal. I cannot decide which."
"Shall I send for Franklin?"
"Do not you dare." She rubbed her stomach, half exasperated, half laughing at herself. "I do not know what I want, Damon. Yesterday I wanted peaches desperately. This morning the sight of one nearly undid me entirely."
"You also wept over a boiled egg on Tuesday," Damon reminded her, entirely too solemnly.
"It was an unreasonably round egg."
"It was, as I recall, an entirely ordinary egg."
She gave him a look sharp enough to wither most men where they stood. Damon, undeterred, crossed the room, knelt beside her chair, and pressed a kiss to the small curve of her stomach.
"We are managing splendidly," he informed it. "Your mother has reduced an entire kitchen staff to fearful silence over the matter of strawberries. I consider it excellent practice for whatever temperament you inherit from her."
Elizabeth swatted at his shoulder, though the laugh escaped before she could properly stop it. "You are ridiculous."
"I am your husband. The two are not mutually exclusive."
That was, more or less, the shape of their days now — sharp bursts of frustration, followed always by tenderness, followed by tea, followed by Damon appearing at her elbow the moment she so much as shifted in her chair.
If she walked to the garden, he noted the uneven gravel by the second rose bush.
If she rose from her seat, he asked whether she required assistance.
Milton had, according to Paul, begun keeping a private tally of how many times a day Damon startled at some ordinary sound, convinced it signaled distress.
It was not only worry, though. It was something steadier than that, underneath.
Some nights he did not sleep well, not since the evening she had dreamed he had abandoned her for some imagined rival made entirely of Earl Grey tea, and had woken crying and flinging a pillow at his head for the crime of a dream he had played no part in.
He had learned, by then, the names of several herbal teas recommended for a woman in her condition, and had ordered a set of softer pillows without being asked, and still, at the end of every long and unpredictable day, he tucked her into bed as though she were something rare and easily broken.
"I am not thirsty," she said, one such evening, when he brought her a glass of warm milk she had not requested.
"You always say that. Then you drink it regardless."
She took it, and drank it, and studied him over the rim of the glass. "You look tired."
"I am content," he said. "The two often resemble each other, at this stage."
"You are lying."
"Only a little."
She let her head fall against his shoulder as he settled beside her. "I feel everything far too intensely these days. Happiness. Fear. Irritation, mostly, I am sorry to say."
"I know," he murmured, pressing his lips to her hair. "And I love you through all of it. Particularly the irritation. You are rather magnificent when you are cross."
"You are mad."
"Entirely. And happily so."
He kissed her, slow and unhurried, and she closed her eyes against his shoulder.
"Promise me," she said quietly, "that when the child comes, you will love me still, exactly as you do now."
He touched her cheek. "When the child comes, I expect I shall love you more. For surviving it. For becoming whatever it is you are about to become."
She breathed him in, and felt, for a moment, entirely safe.
Tomorrow would bring its own share of cravings and worry and unreasonable eggs. But tonight, she was warm in his arms, and nothing else required her attention at all.
◆◆◆
The breakfast salon caught the morning light well, and Elizabeth sat within it in her robe, one hand cradling her stomach, attempting without much success to persuade a piece of toast to behave itself.
"This toast," she announced, "is mocking me."
"It is dry," Charles said, from the doorway. "Not sentient."
He entered with his coat over one arm and a stack of correspondence in the other hand, his eyes going, as they always did now, first to her stomach and then to her face.
"Did you sleep at all?"
"Good morning to you as well, Uncle. And yes. Damon insisted, on pain of burning every book in my study, that I sleep properly."
Charles snorted. "The two of you missed your calling in the theatre." He glanced toward the stairs. "Is he up?"
"Shaving. Or pacing. Or reciting names for the child in three separate languages. Possibly all three at once." She sipped her tea. "Why?"
"Because I have news," Charles said, settling into the chair beside her with the particular gravity he generally reserved for legal proceedings.
"No preamble whatsoever?"
"There will be preamble," Charles said smoothly, reaching for a slice of apple from her plate.
She swatted his hand away before he could take it. "No."
"You intend to eat all of that?"
"I might. Do not question a woman in my condition on the matter of apples."
He was still chuckling, half amused and half genuinely proud of her, when Damon appeared in the doorway, a towel around his neck, his waistcoat still unbuttoned.
"Are you tormenting my wife before breakfast, Charles?"
"Tradition," Charles said. "And a certain amount of justice, given how often she torments the rest of us."
Elizabeth lifted her teacup with as much dignity as she could summon. "I am the victim in this household, and I would like that noted for the record."
Damon crossed to her, kissed her forehead, and took the seat across from her. "Noted, and disputed. Now — Charles, you were saying?"
Charles set down the apple slice he had never quite managed to steal. "The trial date has been set," he said, without further preamble at all. "Harwood and Alderton. Six weeks from today."
Damon rose slowly. "You are certain we have what we need?"
"I am," Charles said. "Henry's testimony has held under every challenge their solicitors could construct.
Elizabeth's evidence regarding the security company withstands scrutiny at every point.
And your own testimony, when the time comes, will carry weight no jury in London could easily dismiss.
" He allowed himself, for the first time since entering the room, something like a smile.
"We have them, Damon. Properly, this time.
Not through speed, or convenience, or a rushed and corrupted process — through years of patient, careful work, done exactly as it ought to have been done from the beginning. "
Elizabeth reached for Damon's hand.
"Six weeks," she said.
"Six weeks," Charles agreed. "And then, I hope, we may finally put the whole of it behind us."
Damon looked between the two people who had built this victory alongside him — one his oldest ally in the fight, one soon to be the mother of his child — and felt, for the first time in longer than he could measure, that the ending they had all fought so hard toward was finally, truly, within reach.
"Then let us finish it," he said. "Properly. One final time."