Chapter 12
Honora was in the kitchen before dawn.
The kitchen was dim and warm and still partly asleep, with the fire banked low and the first kettle beginning to whisper on the stove, the rest of Belgrave quiet overhead.
No footsteps in the hall, no demands from the nursery yet, no need to pretend she belonged anywhere except the chair nearest the table.
Martha had already put the tea down in front of her.
Honora wrapped both hands around the cup and looked into it as though it might answer questions she did not want to ask out loud.
Martha sat opposite her with her own cup and a face that said she had been awake long enough to decide not to be polite about anything important.
For a while neither of them spoke.
Then Martha said, “What are you running from?”
Honora went still.
It was the first time the question had been asked so plainly.
Not what had happened, not who she knew, not whether she was hiding something.
Honora stared at the steam rising from her tea.
Martha waited.
There was no pressure in it. No sharpened suspicion. Only the blunt patience of someone who had already decided not to be embarrassed by silence.
Honora kept her eyes on the cup. “I am not running from something.”
Martha said nothing.
Honora drew in a slow breath. “I am running toward something I already lost.”
That was the truest thing she had said in days.
The kitchen went quiet again.
Martha looked at her for a long moment and then reached for the kettle, poured a little more tea into both cups, and set the pot down with care.
“In my experience,” Martha said, “the people who stay at Belgrave are the ones who stop running long enough to notice it is not a bad place to stop.”
Honora looked up then.
Martha’s face did not change. She did not press for more, did not ask what Honora had lost or whether the loss had a name, and only sat there with her tea, letting the words settle between them.
Honora should have lied.
A cousin, a debt, a disappointment, anything ordinary.
Instead she sat in the warm kitchen while the house woke slowly around them and found that she could not quite bring herself to move past what Martha had said.
Not a bad place to stop.
The thought made her uneasy.
It also made her sad.
At length Martha took up her cup again and said, “If you are waiting for permission to breathe, you may have it.”
Honora gave a short, helpless breath that almost became a laugh.
Martha’s mouth twitched once, though she tried to hide it behind the rim of her cup.
The quiet did not break. It simply changed shape.
Soon after, the house began to stir.
A maid crossed the hall outside with a basket of linens. Footsteps sounded on the stairs. A door opened upstairs and closed again. Somewhere near the front of the house, a bell rang once and was answered by another. The day had begun to gather itself.
Martha stood first, then went to the stove. Honora was finishing her tea when Mrs. Pritchard passed the kitchen doorway with her usual efficient stride and Wilfred in tow, a folded letter in his hand.
Honora barely looked up at first.
Then she heard Mrs. Pritchard say, in the clear practical tone she used for matters that could not be delayed, “Her Grace has written to the Earl of Penmere about his daughter. The household should prepare for a guest before the month is out.”
Wilfred made a small sound of acknowledgment and tucked the letter under his arm.
Honora’s fingers tightened once around her cup.
Lady Isolde Carrington, then.
The thought came with a strange little stab of something she did not care to name.
Mrs. Pritchard had already gone on. “Make sure the west rooms are aired. The blue parlor as well. His lordship will not want things left until the last minute.”
“Yes, Mrs. Pritchard,” Wilfred said.
They moved away down the corridor, speaking in lower voices she could no longer hear.
Honora sat very still.
A guest before the month was out, a daughter of Penmere, a match being discussed in the quiet corners of the house while Cecily was still too small to know she was at the center of a life no one had yet explained to her.
Honora looked down into her tea.
She could not pretend she had not felt the sting of that conversation, even from the doorway. The dowager was arranging things. People. Futures. A respectable path for Leopold that did not include a foundling baby or a nursemaid who spoke too carefully.
Honora should have been relieved.
Instead she felt unsettled.
And not only because of Cecily.
By the time she reached the nursery, the morning light had grown stronger.
She had not expected Leopold to be there already.
He was.
Honora stopped in the doorway and looked in.
Cecily was on the floor with him, though “with him” was perhaps too gentle a description. The baby had managed, by some determined combination of balance and outrage, to pull herself up using Leopold’s arm and was now standing with the full weight of her tiny body braced against his wrist.
Leopold sat on the floor beside her with one leg bent and the other stretched out, looking unbothered by the entire arrangement.
He was listening to her.
Not to words, because Cecily had not yet mastered enough of those to make a coherent argument, but to her babbling, which she delivered with the seriousness of a government address. Leopold’s attention stayed on her face as though she had said something worth hearing.
Honora remained still for a moment in the doorway.
Cecily gave a triumphant little squeal and banged her free hand against Leopold’s sleeve.
Leopold answered as if she had made a point.
“Yes,” he said quietly, “that seems reasonable.”
Honora blinked once.
He looked up then and saw her.
“Good morning,” he said.
She stepped into the room. “Good morning, my lord.”
Cecily immediately shifted toward the sound of her voice, lost her balance, and began to topple sideways.
Leopold caught her at once with one hand under her back and the other at her side, the movement quick and easy.
He did not interrupt the conversation he was having with Honora to do it, because apparently he was capable of holding a child upright and continuing a discussion about the garden in the same breath.
Honora could not help staring.
Leopold noticed. “She is becoming more adventurous.”
Honora crossed the room slowly. “That is one way to put it.”
He lifted his brows. “You prefer another?”
“I prefer one in which she remains upright.”
Cecily, having recovered from her near-collapse, patted Leopold’s sleeve and resumed babbling as though the incident had been the fault of no one worth blaming.
Leopold glanced at her, then at Honora. “I was asking her about the garden.”
Honora frowned faintly. “The garden?”
“Yes.”
She looked from him to the child and back again. “Why?”
Leopold’s expression remained calm. “She was standing.”
That, apparently, was explanation enough for him.
Honora stared at him for a second and then turned the corner of her mouth down to keep from smiling.
He seemed to notice the near-smile anyway.
“Do you disagree?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “I am only surprised you are discussing the garden with a baby on the floor.”
“Why?”
“Because most men would assume she could not answer.”
Leopold looked down at Cecily, who had now gripped two fingers of his hand and was concentrating on them as though they might be a fascinating object of study. “She cannot,” he said.
Honora lifted a brow. “And yet.”
“So it seems,” he agreed.
He shifted, still seated on the floor, and Cecily promptly used his arm for support again. The baby was babbling now with great authority, one small hand flapping against his sleeve whenever the rhythm of her speech became more emphatic.
Leopold listened as if every sound mattered.
Honora looked at him and felt something in her chest shift in a way that made her suddenly and uncomfortably aware of the bag under her bed.
Northumberland.
Her aunt.
The plan she had carried for three weeks and done nothing with.
Take Cecily. Leave Belgrave. Go north before anyone guessed too much.
The station, the coach, the lane to her aunt’s house, the hope that her aunt would let her stay long enough to breathe and think and decide what to do next.
Now she looked at Leopold on the nursery floor with Cecily clinging to him and found herself unable to summon the same certainty.
A month ago, that baby would not have gone to anyone but her.
Even that felt less true now than it had a week before.
Cecily had started to trust the room, the staff, the house, Leopold.
Instead it made Honora feel as though she was considering taking something away from a place that had already given more than she expected.
She looked at Leopold again.
He had one arm braced on the floor, the other steady under Cecily’s back.
His coat was slightly rumpled from the child’s grip, his expression composed, though the attention he gave her was not half-hearted.
He was watching the baby as though this mattered, as though the babbling in front of him deserved to be heard.
Honora wondered, with a sudden and unwelcome clarity, whether her father had known this.
Not Leopold specifically, perhaps. But the sort of man Belgrave’s heir was.
Whether Gideon Bellamy had understood that the child he sent away might be cared for here.
That the house into which Cecily was sent would not be cold, that there was a duke on the floor with her now, listening to every sound she made as if it had meaning.
Honora’s throat tightened.
What had her father thought would happen?
Had he expected the baby to be passed to a servant and forgotten, or assumed the duke would take one look and send her away?
She could not tell which possibility made her angrier.
Leopold looked up at her. “You have gone quiet.”
Honora collected herself at once. “Have I?”
“Yes.”
“I was thinking.”
“Something unpleasant, I suspect.”
She looked down at Cecily, who had now decided Leopold’s cuff button was the most interesting thing in the room. “Perhaps.”