Chapter 3
Three
“‘One wonders,’” Henry read, “‘what has become of London’s most celebrated bachelor, who has not graced a club, a card table, or a single drawing room since a certain infant arrived to take possession of his household. The Duke of W—, it is whispered, has been entirely vanquished by a creature that weighs rather less than a game bird.’”
He lowered the sheet and looked at Marcus over the top of it.
Marcus did not look up. He was sitting in the one chair the nursery possessed that had not been requisitioned by some nurse or physician in the course of the past four days, and he had Violet in the crook of his arm, and she had at last, after the better part of an hour, consented to stop screaming. He was not inclined to risk that.
“A game bird,” Marcus said. “That is rather good. Whoever writes these has been saving that one.”
“You are meant to be wounded.”
“I am too tired to be wounded. Read me the rest. I find the abuse soothing.”
Henry obliged, because Henry could be relied upon to do the opposite of what would comfort a man, on the grounds that comfort was generally what made a man useless.
He read the remainder of the column and Marcus listened to himself described as undone, as unmanned, as a rake brought low by a thing that could not yet hold up its own head, and felt nothing he could honestly have called offense.
The house had been like this for four days.
He had stopped marking the hours. There were nurses, two of them now, who came and went and disagreed with one another in the low fierce whispers of women who each believed the other a fool.
There was a physician who arrived each morning to pronounce the child in excellent health and then lingered, expensively, in the hall.
There was a steady traffic of callers downstairs, the sort of people who descended upon a house of death with cards and condolences and a barely concealed appetite for detail, and Marcus had not seen a single one of them.
He had sent down word that the Duke was indisposed.
The Duke was indisposed. The Duke had not changed his coat since yesterday, and could not have said where the coat had got to, and was sitting in a nursery at an hour he had once reserved for far less reputable occupations, holding his sister’s child.
“She has stopped,” Henry observed.
“Do not say it aloud. You will frighten her into beginning again.”
The child slept. She did it suddenly and completely, the way she did everything, with no warning and no negotiation. Her whole fist was closed around one of his fingers. She had quite the grip.
“They are saying,” Henry went on, folding the sheet and setting it on the windowsill, “that you ought to engage a proper nurse, a good firm woman of the kind that raised half the peerage, and let her have the running of it. And that you ought then to go back to your clubs before the whole of the ton concludes you have lost your reason.”
“Are they.”
“I am told you have already engaged two nurses.”
“I have. They are extremely capable. They disagree about swaddling with a violence that would shame Bonaparte.” Marcus looked down at the sleeping child, at the appalling smallness of her, the dark whorl of hair he had not known infants possessed.
“I am informed by both of them that I am underfoot and ought to take myself off.”
“And yet here you are. Underfoot.”
“Here I am.”
He could not explain it to Henry. That was the trouble, and he turned it over while the fire ticked and the child breathed against his arm.
There was a perfectly sensible course laid out before him, the one the column recommended, the one the nurses recommended, the one any man of his rank and habits would have taken without a second thought a fortnight ago.
He could hand her to the capable women. He could let the household close over her like water and visit the nursery on the appointed afternoons and resume the life that fit him like a well-cut coat.
No one would think the worse of him. It was what was done.
He was not going to do it. He had known that, with a certainty he did not understand and could not defend, since the first morning, when the nurse had brought her down and put her into his arms before he had decided whether he wanted her there, and Helena’s face had looked up at him out of a face four months old.
He had meant to ride to Hartwell in the summer.
He had been busy. There had been the ledgers and the Season and the party with its chandeliers that had not lost their nerve, and his sister had died waiting for a visit he had been too occupied to pay, and the only thing in the whole turning world he had left of her was asleep against his coat with his finger in her fist.
But to say any of that to Henry would have been to say it aloud, and to say it aloud would have been to name it, and Marcus was not ready to name it. So he said nothing. He looked at the fire.
Henry watched him.
This was the thing about Henry Ravenscroft, the reason Marcus had kept him these eighteen years when he kept almost no one.
Henry did not require to be told. He had buried a wife and raised a daughter alone, and he knew, better than any man Marcus had ever met, the exact weight of the things that could not be put into words.
He sat in the second-best chair with his long legs stretched toward the fire, and he did not say that Marcus looked half-dead, which he did, nor that he ought to sleep, which he ought, nor that he was making a great deal of difficulty for himself over a course that the whole of society would have made easy. He said none of it.
“You have something on your shoulder,” he said instead. “I believe it is curd.”
“It is almost certainly curd.”
“I shall not tell the gossip sheets.”
“You are a true friend, Blackmere.”
Henry made a sound that might, in another man, have been the beginning of a laugh. Then he settled deeper into the chair, crossed his arms, and stayed.
He did not leave for some time. He did not say why he stayed, any more than he had said why he came.
He simply remained, while the fire burned low and the child slept and the great disordered house went on creaking and whispering around them, and Marcus, who had spent eight years making certain that no one depended upon him too completely, sat very still so as not to wake the one creature in the world who now did.
“Days, not weeks. I thought you would wish to know, since you have made such a study of the matter.”
Cecilia stood in the doorway of Edmund’s study and did not come further in, because to come further in was to accept the conversation as one between equals, and it never had been. “The announcement is not till the fortnight. You said the fortnight.”
“I have reconsidered. Fenwick is impatient, and an impatient bridegroom is an asset one does not squander.” Edmund did not rise from his desk.
He had a pen in his hand and he went on writing, which was its own kind of message.
“The announcement will go into the papers within the week. The settlement is all but signed.”
“She is a child, Edmund.”
“She is seventeen, and shortly to be a marchioness, which is rather more than you have managed to make of yourself.” He set down the pen.
He looked at her then, with that pale, patient regard that gave away nothing because there was nothing behind it to give.
“I will tell you, Cecilia, what I have told you before, and what I shall not trouble to tell you again. You have no standing in this. You hold no guardianship. You command no household, no fortune of your own, no authority that any court in England would recognize. You may disapprove. You may weep over it in the nursery, where I understand you spend a great deal of your time. None of it signifies. The thing is decided.”
She had come ready to fight. She had arguments arranged like soldiers, the gout, the temper, the dead first wife, Caroline’s tears, the obscenity of three-and-fifty and seventeen.
She deployed them. She heard her own voice doing it, clear and controlled, and she watched each one land against her brother and slide off him like rain off slate, and she understood, somewhere in the middle of it, that he was enjoying himself. Not openly. Edmund did nothing openly.
“There it is,” he said, when she had finished. “You see, you have a great deal of feeling, and not one particle of power. It is a most useless combination. I have always thought so.” He took up his pen again. “Close the door as you go. It lets in the cold.”
He bent back to his letter. He had dismissed her. She stood a moment longer, because she would not be seen to flee, and then she went out, and she closed the door, and it did let in the cold, and the long-case clock in the corridor marked the hour with its cold and even accounting.
She did not go upstairs to Caroline. She could not promise her anything yet, and she would not stand in front of her sister with empty hands a second time.
She went, instead, to the cold drawing room, and she sat, and she made herself think.
Edmund was right. That was the unbearable thing, the thing she turned over until its edges were smooth.
She had feeling and no power. She could argue with him from now until the announcement and it would change nothing, because argument was only feeling with a better vocabulary, and her brother did not bend to feeling.
He bent to one thing only, and that was a force greater than his own.
A rank he could not dismiss. A household he could not outlast. A claim on Caroline that the law itself would set above his.
She did not have such a thing.
But she knew a man who did.