Chapter 18
“He won’t settle, Your Grace. I’ve tried everything.”
Mrs. Bridwell met them at the top of the stairs with Tommy screaming against her shoulder and an apology written across her face.
The nursemaid’s cap was crooked, her eyes bleary with interrupted sleep, and the baby’s wails filled the corridor with a fury that made the wall sconces tremble.
Mary reached for him without breaking stride. The transfer was seamless now, practiced over weeks of midnight feedings and fussy afternoons, and Tommy’s weight settled into the crook of her arm with the familiarity of something that had always belonged there.
“How long has he been crying?” Mary pressed her cheek against the top of Tommy’s head. His skin was hot, his face mottled, and his cries had the ragged edge of a baby who had been at it for some time.
“Nearly an hour, Your Grace. I walked him, rocked him, and offered him a bottle. He took a few swallows and refused the rest.” Mrs. Bridwell wrung her hands. “I was about to send for you when I heard the carriage.”
“You did well.” Mary carried Tommy into the nursery and began the slow circuit of the room, rocking with each step.
Tommy’s fists beat against her collarbone. His screams thinned to sobs, then to the shuddering gasps that meant he was tiring himself out. Mary hummed, low and steady, a melody without words, and felt his body ease against hers by degrees.
Footsteps in the corridor. Mary glanced toward the doorway.
Evander stood on the threshold. His coat was off, his cravat loosened, and his hair was disheveled from the carriage, from her hands, from the evening that had rearranged everything between them. He leaned against the doorframe, and for once, he did not look like a man preparing to leave.
He looked like a man deciding to stay.
“Is he all right?” Evander asked. His voice was low enough not to startle the baby.
“He’s overtired. Sometimes they cry past the point of being able to stop themselves.” Mary shifted Tommy higher on her shoulder. “Mrs. Bridwell, go and rest. I have him.”
The nursemaid curtsied and slipped past Evander into the corridor, leaving the three of them alone.
Tommy’s sobs had faded to hiccups. Mary continued her circuit of the room, past the window where the first gray hints of dawn pressed against the glass, past the rocking chair, past the changing table.
When she turned at the far wall, Evander was still there.
Still watching. Not from the corridor this time, but from inside the room. He had crossed the threshold.
Mary stopped beside the crib. Tommy’s eyes were closing, his grip on her collar loosening one finger at a time.
She lowered him into the crib with the slow precision the task demanded, holding her breath as his back touched the mattress.
His face scrunched. His fists tightened.
Then his body relaxed, and his breathing evened, and the nursery went quiet.
She straightened and found Evander standing beside her, close enough that she could smell the night air on his clothes and his intoxicating cologne.
They stood over Tommy’s crib together, shoulder to shoulder, and the silence between them held none of the distance that had defined their first weeks in this house.
“He looks like Richard when he sleeps,” Evander said.
Mary looked at Evander’s profile in the candlelight. The hard lines of his jaw, the shadow beneath his cheekbones, the way his eyes softened when he looked at the baby.
This was the man behind the walls. The man who told fox stories in dark corridors, and searched the worst corners of London for a brother who might not want to be found.
“You miss him,” she said.
“Every day.” Evander’s voice was quiet. “I raised him, Mary. After our mother died and our father… after our father stopped being capable, Richard was mine to look after. I taught him to ride. I helped him with his Latin. I sat outside his room when he had nightmares because he was afraid of the dark and too proud to admit it.” He paused.
“I should have seen what he was becoming. The gambling, the debts, the recklessness. I was so busy managing everything else that I missed what was happening right in front of me.”
“You cannot carry that.”
“I have been carrying it since the day he disappeared.”
Mary reached down and adjusted Tommy’s blanket, smoothing the wool across his chest. “Charlotte used to have nightmares, too. She would come to my room and climb into my bed without asking, and I would tell her stories until she fell asleep. She liked the ones about princesses who rescued themselves.” Mary’s fingers lingered on the blanket’s edge.
“I told myself that if I had asked the right questions and noticed the right signs, she would have confided in me. That I could have kept her from running…”
Evander held her gaze. The candle on the side table flickered, Tommy’s breathing filled the small room, and the first pale light of morning crept across the floor between them.
“We will find them,” he said.
“I know.”
“And when we do, I will not let Richard run again.”
“And I will hold Charlotte accountable for every day she has missed with this child.” Mary glanced down at Tommy. “But I will also hold her. Because she is my sister, and she is Tommy’s mother, and whatever she has done, she deserves the chance to come home.”
Evander was quiet for a moment. Then, he reached into the crib and touched Tommy’s hand, just barely, the tip of his index finger resting against the baby’s curled fist. Tommy’s fingers closed around it in his sleep, and Evander went still.
Mary watched him. Evander, standing over a crib at dawn, was held in place by the grip of a sleeping infant. His expression was unguarded in a way she had never seen, stripped of the control and the discipline and the careful architecture of distance. He looked younger. He looked afraid.
He looked like a man falling.
“Goodnight, Mary,” he said. He eased his finger free from Tommy’s grip, slowly, as though the act cost him something. “Or good morning, I suppose.”
“Goodnight.” She smiled. “Thank you for tonight. For telling me the truth.”
Evander nodded. He turned and walked to the door, and this time, when he paused at the threshold, he looked back. Not at the baby. At her.
“The sapphire,” he said. “For the Atherton ball. You will look extraordinary.”
He left before she could respond. His footsteps faded down the corridor, and his door closed, and the house settled into the stillness that preceded dawn.
Mary sat in the rocking chair beside Tommy’s crib and watched the light change. Gray to silver to the pale gold of early morning, creeping across the nursery floor, finding the edges of the curtains, warming the room by degrees.
Tommy slept through all of it, his breathing steady, his fists curled in the pose of perfect surrender.
Mary pressed her fingers to her lips. They were tender. The memory made her breath catch. His hands. His mouth. His fingers. The way he had watched her face as though her pleasure mattered more than his own, as though giving her that was the one thing he could offer without reservation.
Mary rocked the chair, stared at the ceiling, and tried to organize her thoughts into something manageable.
The man who proposed marriage like a business transaction was the same man who told a fox story to a crying baby in a dark hallway, his voice rusty and uncertain.
The man who sent housekeepers to ask questions he could not bring himself to ask in person was the same man who walked into boxing rings and pleasure houses, night after night, searching for a brother who had left destruction in his wake.
The man who fled breakfast rather than face the woman he had kissed was the same man who whispered I do not trust myself around you with his hand on her jaw.
They were not different men. The coldness and the tenderness, the walls and the cracks in them, the discipline and the wanting that lived beneath it. All of it belonged to the same person.
And Mary was falling for every part of him.
She was falling. The realization did not arrive with thunder or fanfare. It settled over her quietly, the way morning settled over the nursery, one degree of light at a time, until everything was illuminated and there was no pretending she could not see.
Mary looked at Tommy sleeping in his crib. She had come here for Tommy. She had stayed for duty.
Now, she was staying for something else.