Chapter 15
“Anything further from the Hampstead lead, Your Grace?”
Godfrey folded his notebook and tucked it into his coat as the carriage rattled through the Mayfair streets.
They had spent the evening at a coffeehouse near Chancery Lane, meeting with a private investigator Godfrey had engaged to supplement the Bow Street runner’s efforts.
The man had contacts in Hampstead and claimed to have located a former servant of Madame Fontaine’s who might recognize Richard from a description.
Another thread. Another maybe.
Evander was running out of patience for maybes.
“Follow it,” Evander said. “Pay whatever he asks. If the servant can place Richard at that house within the last six months, I want dates.”
“Understood.” Godfrey hesitated. “It is nearly midnight, Your Grace.”
“I own a clock, Godfrey.”
“Of course. I only mention it because Her Grace has taken to asking Mrs. Cahill about your evening schedule. With some regularity.” Godfrey kept his eyes fixed on his notebook. “I thought you should know.”
Evander leaned his head against the seat and closed his eyes. The carriage swayed over the cobblestones, and the stitches in his arm itched beneath the fresh bandage, and his wife was tracking his movements through the housekeeper.
He was too tired to decide what to do about any of it.
“Noted,” he said. “Goodnight, Godfrey.”
The carriage stopped at Blackholm House. Godfrey departed for his own lodgings, and Evander let himself in through the side entrance to avoid waking Harding.
The house was dark and still; the lamps were turned low in the corridors. His boots were quiet on the carpet as he climbed the stairs.
The nursery door was open. The room beyond it was empty. Tommy’s crib stood neatly made, the blankets folded, the pillow smooth.
No baby. No Mrs. Bridwell.
Where are they?
Evander’s chest tightened. He crossed the corridor to the nursemaid’s quarters and found the door closed, a thin line of darkness beneath it. Asleep. Which meant Tommy was elsewhere, and the only elsewhere that made sense was Mary’s room at the end of the east corridor.
Her door was ajar. Evander pushed it open and stood on the threshold, letting his eyes adjust.
Mary lay on her side in the bed, fully clothed, her shoes still on, one arm curled beneath her head. She had fallen asleep waiting for something or in the middle of something, and whatever it was had overtaken her before she could undress.
On the bed beside her, nestled in the wicker basket that had arrived on Evander’s doorstep five weeks ago, Tommy slept with his fists above his head and his mouth slightly open.
Evander exhaled. The tightness in his chest released, replaced by a warmth that he chose not to examine too closely.
Both of them were safe. Both of them were here.
He crossed the room and lifted the basket. He cradled it against his chest and turned toward the door, stepping carefully over Mary’s shoes where she had not quite managed to kick them off.
The corridor was dark. Evander carried the basket to the nursery, thirty feet of careful, measured steps, holding his breath with each one. Mrs. Bridwell’s door was closed, a thin line of darkness beneath it. He nudged the nursery door open with his shoulder and crossed to the crib.
He lowered the basket to the floor beside the crib and kneeled to lift Tommy out.
Before his hands reached the blanket, Tommy’s face crumpled.
His body stiffened inside the basket, his back arching, and the cry that erupted from his small lungs was loud enough to rattle the paintings on the nursery wall.
Evander froze. If this continued for another ten seconds, Mary would wake. He was standing in the nursery holding a screaming baby in a basket at midnight, and there would be no dignified way to explain himself.
He stared at the baby. Tommy screamed. His face had turned the color of a radish, and his fists punched at the air, and the sound coming out of him was astonishing for something that weighed less than a Christmas goose.
“Stop that,” Evander whispered.
Tommy did not stop one bit.
Evander crouched beside the basket. He had commanded hundreds of servants.
He had managed an estate since the age of seventeen.
He had faced three armed men in a Southwark alley and walked away with nothing worse than a knife wound.
None of this had prepared him for the focused, ear-splitting rage of a very small person who wanted to be somewhere else.
He tried patting the blanket around Tommy’s chest. The screaming intensified.
He tried rocking the basket on the floor, a gentle back-and-forth motion that seemed logical.
Tommy’s face went from radish to beetroot.
He tried making a low humming sound, which produced no effect whatsoever except to make Evander feel ridiculous.
This was absurd. He was a grown man with a Cambridge education, and he could not manage a creature that weighed nine pounds.
Mary’s voice surfaced in his memory, fragments from the conversations he had overheard through nursery doorways and pretended not to hear.
Hold him close. Rock him. Small movements, not large.
He had watched her do it a dozen times from the corridor, memorizing the angle of her arm and the rhythm of her step without admitting to himself that he was learning.
Evander reached into the basket and lifted Tommy.
The baby was warm and furious and surprisingly solid. Evander tucked him against his chest the way he had seen Mary do, one hand spread across Tommy’s back, the other supporting his head. The wailing continued against Evander’s collarbone, wet and hot and outraged.
“All right,” Evander murmured. “All right.”
He began to walk. Down the corridor, past the gallery of portraits where his ancestors watched with painted disapproval, and back again.
His steps were slow and even, and he rocked Tommy against his chest with each stride, a small, rhythmic motion that felt awkward at first and then, gradually, began to feel like something else.
Something that fit.
Tommy’s screams thinned to sobs. The sobs thinned to hiccups.
His fists, which had been battering Evander’s chest, unclenched and gripped the lapel of his coat instead.
Progress, of a sort. The baby was still crying, but it was the exhausted crying of a battle winding down rather than the opening salvo.
Evander stood at the end of the corridor and rocked his nephew and searched for something else, something to fill the silence between the hiccups.
A song, perhaps.
Mary sang to Tommy. Mrs. Bridwell hummed. Evander had not sung anything since school, and the thought of his baritone echoing through the corridor at midnight was enough to extinguish the idea entirely.
But his mother had told stories.
The memory arrived unbidden, vivid in a way that old memories sometimes were when summoned in the dark.
His mother’s voice, low and warm, her hand on his back as he lay in bed.
She had told them the same story every night for years: a tale about a brave little fox who lived in a hollow oak at the edge of a great wood and went on small adventures that always ended with him returning home to find his supper waiting.
Richard had loved the fox. Evander had loved the sound of his mother’s voice.
“There was once a fox,” Evander began. His voice was low, barely above a whisper, and the words felt strange in his mouth, as though rusty from disuse.
“A small red fox who lived in a hollow oak tree, and every morning he woke up and looked out of his tree and wondered what he might find if he went a little further than the day before.”
Tommy’s hiccups slowed. His eyes, dark and enormous in the dim corridor, were fixed on Evander’s face with an intensity that bordered on the unsettling.
Evander continued down the corridor, his voice low, the words finding a rhythm that matched his stride.
“The fox crossed the brook, which was wider than it looked and colder than he expected, and on the other side he met a hedgehog sitting on a log.” Tommy’s fist loosened on Evander’s lapel.
“The hedgehog was very old and very prickly and not at all pleased to be disturbed. ‘Where are you going?’ the hedgehog asked. ‘I don’t know yet,’ said the fox.
‘Then you had better keep walking,’ said the hedgehog.
‘Standing still won’t help you find it.’”
Evander turned at the end of the corridor and started back. Tommy’s body had gone heavy against his chest, the rigid fury melting into warm, boneless weight.
“So, the fox climbed the hill beyond the brook, and at the top he found a meadow full of rabbits.” Tommy blinked up at him, his dark eyes wide and fixed on Evander’s mouth.
“The rabbits were useless. They couldn’t tell him where to go or what to do.
But they were entertaining, and the fox sat and watched them chase each other through the grass for a while, because sometimes that is enough. ”
A small sound from Tommy. Not a cry. Something softer, almost conversational, as though he had an opinion about the rabbits.
“At least you have taste,” Evander murmured. “You recognize quality storytelling.”
Tommy blinked. His mouth moved, working around nothing, and his eyes stayed locked on Evander’s face.
He rounded the landing and paced back toward the nursery. Tommy’s eyelids drooped, fought open, drooped again.
“The fox followed the river after that, all the way to a pond at the edge of the wood, where a very old toad sat on a stone.” Evander’s voice had dropped to barely a whisper.
“The toad had been sitting on that stone for a hundred years, and he had seen every creature in the forest pass by at one time or another. ‘What are you looking for?’ the toad asked. ‘Something I haven’t found yet,’ said the fox.
The toad thought about this for a long time.
Then he said, ‘The bravest thing a fox can do is know when to go home.’”