Chapter 2
Honora Bellamy woke with her hand already reaching.
For one foolish second, before the room and the bed and the pale strip of morning all settled around her, she believed she could still feel her sister’s arm beneath her fingers.
She turned her head on the pillow and found only the sheet, cool where a body should have been.
The dream clung to her in pieces.
The garden at home. The narrow path along the roses. Celestine sitting beside her with the kind of stillness she only ever had when she was braiding hair.
Honora could hear birds somewhere beyond the wall. She could hear Celestine’s voice, too, soft and amused, saying something that mattered terribly in the dream and had already begun to blur at the edges.
Then it was gone.
Honora lay staring at the ceiling.
Three months.
It had been three months since the coach went over on the Salisbury Road, since the driver shouted from the gate, since the men carried Tobias Ainsworth’s body in one direction and his wife Celestine’s in another and told her to sit down before she fainted.
She had not fainted.
She had held Cecily instead.
Cecily had survived because she had been home with Honora that evening, asleep in her cradle, pink and warm and entirely unaware that the world had split in half.
Honora closed her eyes for one brief moment and then opened them again before the grief could take hold of her properly.
It was easier that way.
Or perhaps it was not easier. It was simply what she had become good at.
She sat up, rubbed her eyes with the heel of one hand, and looked toward the cradle in the corner of the room.
Empty.
That was the first thing her mind found now, every morning.
The cradle where Cecily often ended up when she had restless nights in her nursery.
The little bundle beneath the small blanket.
The place where Cecily should have been, as she always was, making small, impatient sounds and demanding to be lifted.
Perhaps a maid heard her fussing in the night and put her back to sleep in the nursery, she thought.
Honora swung her feet to the floor and stood. The room was cold, the sort of chill that settled into the bones and made all grief feel older than it was. She crossed to the basin, washed her face, and caught sight of herself in the mirror.
Twenty-six. Pale. Hair pinned badly because she had pinned it in the dark. Eyes that looked as if they had not slept since the coach accident, which in truth was not far from the reality.
She had not slept a full night since.
She rose, fed herself whatever she could manage, fed Cecily, walked in the garden if the weather allowed, wrote lists she did not need, and tried not to think too long about any one thing at a time.
By the time night came she was so weary she could scarcely keep her head up.
Then Cecily slept in the cradle beside her bed, and Honora slept in scraps around her, waking at every little sound.
This was the shape of her days now.
She dressed quickly, buttoning her plain morning gown with fingers that still felt stiff from sleep, and left her room.
The house was quiet. Too quiet. The kind of quiet that made every floorboard seem to creak. She crossed the hall and turned toward the nursery.
Even before she reached the door, she knew something was wrong.
The door stood open. The door was never open when Cecily was inside, to prevent the noises of the house from disturbing her when she slept. Suddenly wide awake and completely alert, Honora stepped inside.
The nursery itself looked wrong in a way that took her mind one second too long to understand. The crib was empty.
Honora stopped dead.
The blanket was gone.
The little wool shawl Celestine had insisted on making for Cecily was gone too.
The wooden rattle Celestine had bought before Cecily was born, the one Cecily liked to chew on when her gums hurt, was gone from the side table.
The extra clothes, the folded muslin, the small stack of toys, the basket of laundry, all of it.
Gone.
For one heartbeat, Honora could not breathe.
Then she crossed the room in three quick steps and stared at the bare mattress as if she might somehow make the baby reappear by looking hard enough.
“Cecily?” she said.
Nothing.
Her pulse began to hammer.
She turned toward the door and found her father standing in the corridor outside.
Gideon Bellamy had the expression of a man who had already done what he came to do and had no intention of apologizing.
He was dressed neatly, as always, coat buttoned, hands clasped behind his back, with no sign that he had just emptied a nursery of a child. Yet Honora suddenly knew that was precisely what had happened, even though she could not fathom why he would do such a thing.
Honora stared at him. “Where is she?”
Gideon’s gaze stayed on her face for a moment, then shifted past her into the room. “Somewhere safe.”
Her mouth went dry. “Bring her back.”
“No.”
The answer was so flat she almost did not understand it at first.
She took one step toward him. “What have you done?”
“What was necessary.”
Her hand curled at her side. “That is not an answer.”
“It is the only one you are going to receive.”
Honora looked past him at the empty nursery again, and something cold and hard moved through her chest. “You took Cecily from me.”
Gideon’s expression did not change. “She is not yours.”
The words struck so sharply she felt them physically.
Honora stared at him. “She is more mine than she is anyone else’s now that Celestine is gone ”
His jaw clenched. “You are twenty-six years old, unmarried, and a baby that is not yours will keep you that way if you let it. I have made sure it will not.”
Honora’s hand curled so tightly at her side that her nails dug into her palm.
The corridor seemed to narrow around her.
Her father said it as if he were discussing linens, or drainage on a field, as if Cecily were no more than a complication removed from the house so his life could continue undisturbed.
“You had no right,” she said.
“I had every right.”
“Cecily is my niece.”
“She is a burden.”
Honora’s head snapped up. “Do not call her that.”
Gideon’s face had gone harder now, as if her anger were merely proving something to him. “I am telling you what you will not allow yourself to think. You cannot keep her. You cannot support her. You cannot make a future for her by clinging to sentiment and pretending it is the same as reason.”
Honora could feel the heat rising behind her eyes, but she would not cry in front of him. Not here. Not over an empty nursery with the bed still unmade and the little blanket gone.
“Where did you send her?” she demanded.
“She is safe.”
“Where?”
He looked at her for a long moment and then said, “To a family who can manage her properly.”
The warmth drained from Honora’s fingers until she could hardly feel them.
“Who?”
Gideon did not answer.
She took a step closer. “Who, Father?”
He drew himself up a fraction, as though he meant to remind her of his authority by posture alone. “This conversation is over.”
“Where did you send her?”
He looked at her with faint impatience now, and that impatience was worse than anger. “You may thank me later.”
Honora stared at him.
He gave her one last unyielding look and then said, “You will understand in time why this is better. You are to stop this foolishness and behave as a woman of your station should.”
“A woman of my station,” Honora repeated, very quietly. “You mean the daughter of a wealthy businessman who does not even possess a title.”
“You are a proper lady, nonetheless.”
Honora seethed.
“A woman of my station, as you say, does not have the child she has cared for taken from her without warning.”
Gideon’s voice sharpened. “A woman of your station does not bring scandal on the family either, but here we are.”
Honora felt the insult like a slap.
He turned before she could answer and started down the corridor.
“Father.”
He stopped but did not turn.
Honora’s voice had gone tight. “If you have harmed her—”
“She is not harmed.”
“You do not know that.”
He faced her at last, and there was something in his expression now that made her stomach clench. Not guilt. Never guilt. Something like certainty.
“She is better off where she is.”
Then he turned and went down the stairs to his study.
Honora stood in the nursery doorway long after he had gone.
The room was empty around her. Too tidy. Too bare. The air still held a faint trace of milk and soap and the baby powder she used sparingly because Cecily sneezed if she used too much. Her eyes moved over the stripped room one unbearable inch at a time.
Blanket gone.
Rattle gone.
Shawl gone.
Cecily gone.
She shut her eyes once, hard.
When she opened them again, her father’s voice was still in her ears.
A burden.
She turned away before she could scream and went to find the kitchen maid.
The day dragged after that.
Honora went through the motions of it because the body knew how to move even when the mind had stopped making sense. She ate little. She answered questions poorly. She went upstairs twice and came back down again without knowing why.
She could not have told anyone what she had done between breakfast and dusk. The house seemed to pass around her in long, disjointed pieces: a footman opening a door, a kettle singing, the clock in the hall striking the hour.
By evening, the facts had begun to gather in her head like storm clouds.
Cecily had been taken in the night.
Her father had done it himself. Or at the very least, he ensured the arrangements were made.
He had known where.
He had been prepared to be obeyed.
Honora sat in the kitchen long after the rest of the household had gone quiet, and the lamps had been trimmed low. The kitchen maid, a young woman with hands red from scrubbing, hovered near the stove and tried not to look nervous.
Honora had asked for her by name, remembering only that the girl had once been kind to Cecily and had a habit of speaking without thinking—useful in a house where everyone else had learned to measure every word.