Chapter 23
“Five o’clock. Just wonderful.”
Evander sat on the edge of his bed and stared at the clock on the mantelpiece.
He had slept for two hours, maybe less. The ceiling had occupied the rest of his night, along with the ghost of Mary’s mouth on his and the press of her palm against his jaw in a dark corridor.
He touched his lips. Dropped his hand. Stood.
The washstand was cold. He splashed water on his face, gripped the edge of the basin, and looked at his reflection in the mirror above it.
Tired eyes. Stubbled jaw. The face of a man who had spent the night driving to Sussex and back, finding his brother, absorbing a revelation that upended everything he had believed for weeks…
And then kissing his wife in a corridor as though she were the only solid thing left in a world that had come unmoored.
Love.
That was the word for it.
The word he had spent fourteen years barricading himself against, the word that had destroyed his father and driven Richard into hiding and sent Charlotte fleeing from a pregnancy she could not face alone.
Love had done all of this. Love had tangled four lives into a knot that Evander was now expected to untie, and the cruelest part was that the same force that had created the mess was now pulling him toward Mary with a gravity he could no longer pretend did not exist.
He dressed. He buttoned his waistcoat, knotted his cravat, and pulled on his boots.
“Control in all things,” he whispered to himself.
The morning would require precision, and precision required that the man who walked downstairs look like a duke.
Even if the man inside the clothes had spent the night falling apart.
He reached the kitchen and cleared his throat before speaking.
“Mrs. Cahill. A word.”
The housekeeper looked up from the kitchen worktable, where she was reviewing the day’s menus with the cook.
The kitchen staff stood at attention around the room: two footmen, three maids, the scullery girl, and Harding, who had appeared at the kitchen door the moment he heard Evander’s footsteps on the stairs.
“All of you, listen.” Evander stood in the center of the kitchen with his hands clasped behind his back.
“My brother is back home. He arrived last night, and he is currently in my study. This information does not leave these walls. Not to the tradesmen. Not to your families. Not to anyone outside this household.”
The cook’s eyebrows climbed. A maid exchanged a glance with the scullery girl. Harding’s expression did not change, which meant he had already deduced as much from the three sets of footsteps he had heard at three in the morning.
“If I discover that word of Richard’s presence has reached anyone beyond this kitchen,” Evander continued, “I will identify the source, and I will dismiss them without a reference. There will be no second chances and no appeals. Am I understood?”
A chorus of “Yes, Your Grace” rippled through the room.
“Good. Mrs. Cahill, prepare the blue guest room for Lord Richard. Clean linens, fresh water, a breakfast tray by seven.” He turned to the housekeeper. “And send James and Tobias to me in the entrance hall. Immediately.”
Mrs. Cahill curtsied. Evander walked to the entrance hall and waited. The two footmen arrived within minutes, young and reliable, the same men who had helped carry his father to bed in years past. Evander had chosen them for a reason.
“You will take the carriage to this address.” He handed James the folded directions Richard had given them.
“You will find a midwife’s cottage. A young woman named Charlotte Gillies is staying there.
You will tell her that the Duke of Blackholm has sent for her, and that Lord Richard is in London and has told us everything. ”
James took the paper. Tobias stood straight and silent beside him.
Evander reached into his coat and withdrew two items. Richard’s handkerchief, the embroidered R.B. faded at the corner. And the engagement ring, the one that had been tied to Tommy’s basket with a strip of blue ribbon.
He placed both in James’s palm.
“If she doubts that I sent you, show her these. She will recognize them.” Evander held the footman’s gaze. “Leave now. Do not stop. Bring her to Blackholm House as quickly as the roads allow.”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
The footmen bowed and disappeared through the front door.
Evander listened to the carriage pull away and stood in the empty entrance hall with his hands at his sides and the ring’s absence from his pocket registering as a physical loss.
He had carried that ring since the morning it arrived on his doorstep. Letting it go felt like releasing a thread he had been gripping for weeks.
He turned and walked to the study.
“You look terrible,” Evander said.
Richard sat in the desk chair with his shirt untucked and his hair standing in several directions.
The makeshift bed Harding had assembled from sofa cushions and spare blankets lay in a rumpled pile beside the bookshelf.
Richard’s eyes were red-rimmed, and the remains of a brandy bottle sat on the desk beside an empty glass.
“I didn’t sleep,” Richard said.
“Neither did I.”
“Evander. About everything. I need you to know—”
“Not now.” Evander held up a hand. “There will be time. When Charlotte arrives, when the full picture is clear, we will sit in this room, and you will answer every question I have, and you will answer them honestly. But not now.”
Richard closed his mouth. His hands gripped the armrests, and his knuckles whitened, and Evander recognized the posture. The same way he himself gripped the arms of a chair when a conversation was taken from him before he was ready to let it go.
“Come with me,” Evander said.
“Where?”
“Upstairs.”
Richard stood and followed him out of the study, up the staircase, and down the east corridor.
Their footsteps fell into rhythm, the way they had when they were boys walking to lessons or climbing the stairs after their father had been put to bed: side by side, the elder leading, the younger following.
The nursery door was open. Evander stopped on the threshold.
Mary sat in the rocking chair with Tommy on her lap, his small hand wrapped around her thumb, his eyes open and alert.
The morning light from the window fell across them both, and Mary was murmuring something to the baby, her lips moving close to his forehead.
Tommy’s gaze tracked her face as though she were the center of his world.
Richard drew a breath beside him. Evander glanced at his brother and saw the same expression he had worn the first time he watched Mary hold Tommy in the parlor weeks ago.
Awe.
The disarming shock of seeing a small human being cradled in someone’s arms and understanding, for the first time, what that meant.
Mary looked up. Her eyes moved from Evander to Richard, and the warmth left her face. Her arms tightened around Tommy, pulling the baby closer against her chest, a reflex so immediate it preceded thought.
Evander saw it: the instinct to shield. The mother’s instinct, though Tommy was not hers by blood and the title was not hers by right.
“Mary,” Evander said. “Let Richard see him.”
Mary’s jaw set. She sent a deathly glare towards Richard. “He is welcome to look. Though by his own account, he is not even Tommy’s father. Allegedly.”
Richard flinched. The word landed where she intended it to, and his face crumpled. He seemingly recovered, but the recovery was slow, and Evander watched his brother absorb the blow.
“I deserve that,” Richard conceded.
“You deserve considerably more than that,” Mary snapped back.
“Mary.” Evander kept his voice even. “Please.”
Mary held his gaze for a long moment. Then she looked down at Tommy, adjusted the blanket across his chest, and sat very still in the rocking chair. She did not release the baby, but she did not turn away.
Evander nodded to Richard. “Go to him.”
Richard crossed the nursery. His steps were cautious, as though the floor might give way, and he stopped beside the rocking chair and looked down at Tommy. The baby stared up at the new face with curiosity.
“Hello, Tommy.” Richard’s voice cracked. He crouched beside the chair, bringing himself to the baby’s level. “You’ve grown. Last time I held you, you fit in my palm.” His hand hovered near Tommy’s cheek, trembling, and he pulled it back. “You’re a handsome lad. Charlotte would be proud.”
The words were gentle and warm. But Evander heard what was missing. Richard spoke to Tommy with tenderness, with genuine affection, but not with the raw, consuming gravity of a father meeting his child.
Evander filed that away.
“Hold him,” Evander said.
Mary’s head snapped up. “No.”
“Mary.”
“He does not know how to hold a baby. He will drop him.”
“He will not drop him. I am right here. And I am asking you to trust me.”
The nursery went quiet. Tommy made a soft sound, his fist tightening on Mary’s thumb, oblivious to the negotiation happening above his head.
Mary looked at Evander, and the resistance in her eyes warred with something else. Trust, fragile and hard-won, built over fox stories and bandaged wounds and a corridor kiss that still hung between them.
She exhaled. Slowly, with the care of a woman surrendering something precious, she shifted Tommy toward Richard.
“Support his head,” she said. The instruction came out sharp. “Both hands. No, not like that. Under his neck. Richard, his head.”
Richard took the baby and immediately got it wrong. His arms were stiff. His grip was too loose. Tommy’s head lolled backward, and Mary lunged forward, but Evander was already there.
“Here.” Evander stepped beside his brother and adjusted Richard’s arm, tilting the elbow up, shifting Tommy’s weight into the crook. “His head goes here. Support the neck. No, not with your wrist, with your forearm. Like this.”
He repositioned Richard’s hands, one beneath Tommy’s back, the other cradling the base of his skull. The same hold Mary had taught him without knowing she was teaching it, through all those nursery doorways and corridor observations.
“Good God, Richard, you are holding him like a sack of potatoes.” Evander moved his brother’s elbow another inch. “Closer to your chest. He needs to feel your heartbeat. Babies settle when they can hear one.”
Mary stared at Evander. He felt her gaze on the side of his face, sharp with surprise, and he realized what he had just done. He had corrected his brother’s hold on a baby with the confident specificity of a man who knew exactly how to hold one.
Six weeks ago, he could not have done this. Six weeks ago, he had stood over a screaming infant in a dark corridor and tried patting a blanket.
Richard looked down at Tommy, now properly settled against his chest. The baby blinked up at him, calm and curious, his fist finding the collar of Richard’s shirt and gripping it.
“He does that,” Evander said. “The gripping. Mrs. Bridwell calls him the dock worker.”
Richard laughed. The sound was wet and unsteady, and his eyes glistened, and Evander watched his brother hold a baby who was not his son.
“He’s beautiful,” Richard said.