Chapter 17
Chapter Seventeen
Frances stared at him across the dining table, still breathing a little too quickly from the abrupt journey out of the nursery.
Her pride rose at once upon hearing his words. “You demand a great many things for a man who claims to want nothing from me.”
His gaze sharpened. “If you insist upon interfering, you will at least do it properly.”
“Interfering,” she echoed furiously.
“Yes. You will eat. You will rest. You will help Nurse Ellis, not replace her. And you will not exhaust yourself in an attempt to prove something neither the child nor I asked of you.”
Frances pushed back her chair. “I am not attempting to prove anything. She was crying.”
“She is an infant. Infants cry.”
“And decent people respond.”
“May I remind you that there were other decent people available, people whom I have hired for that exact reason.”
“She just wanted to be held.” Frances stood too quickly, her temper lending her more strength than her body possessed. “I will not ignore a crying child, rule or no rule.”
The room suddenly tilted. For one terrible instant, the candle flames blurred into gold streaks and the table slipped away from her grasp. Her knees softened.
Then Andrew was there. His arm came around her waist before she could fall, his other hand catching her elbow. Frances drew in a startled breath and found herself pressed near enough to feel the heat of him through his coat.
“Frances, are you all right?”
Her name sounded unlike a reprimand now.
She looked up. He was close enough for her to see the faint shadow beneath his eyes, the rigid line of his jaw, the pulse beating once at his throat. His hand stayed at her waist, and her own had somehow come to rest against his chest.
Neither of them moved.
“I… only stood too quickly,” she whispered, catching herself out of breath.
“You have not eaten properly for days.”
His eyes dipped briefly to her mouth. Frances felt the glance as if it were touch. Her breath faltered, and his fingers tightened once at her waist not enough to hurt, only enough to tell her he had felt the moment too.
Then, he stepped back. The loss of him was immediate.
“Please, sit down,” he urged again. “Eat something. Then rest for the night. Tomorrow you may continue with your duties.”
Frances lowered herself into the chair, partly because she chose to and partly because her legs had not yet entirely recovered.
“Do those duties include the child?” she asked.
Andrew paused.
His expression closed, then softened by the smallest degree. “If you wish them to.”
Relief moved through her before she could hide it.
“But not as you did today,” he added. “You may help Nurse Ellis. Help, Frances. You will not make yourself the child’s sole caretaker. You will not miss meals, lose sleep, and wear yourself to pieces because you believe affection requires sacrifice.”
She looked down at the broth steaming before her.
“I do not believe that.”
His silence suggested he did not believe her.
After a moment, Frances took up her spoon. “Very well. I will help Nurse Ellis.”
“And eat regular meals,” he reminded her.
She resisted the urge to smile. “I will attempt to remember I possess a body as well as a conscience.”
“That will be sufficient for the moment.”
“How graciously low your expectations are.”
“They are practical.”
“They are ducal.”
“They are often the same thing.”
Despite herself, she took a small bite. Andrew watched as though she had just performed some act of great diplomacy. His shoulders eased, barely, but she saw it.
Concern, she thought to herself.
And perhaps concern, if tended too long, could become something neither of them was prepared to name.
She lowered her eyes to the bowl and ate because she had promised, because she was hungry, and because tomorrow, the baby would need her again.
Later that night, Frances woke to the sound of crying.
For a moment she lay still, caught between sleep and uncertainty, listening through the dark. Sinclair House had its own nocturnal language: the settling of old wood, the sigh of wind against glass, the faint crack of dying embers in the grate.
Then, the cry came again. It was thin, wounded and painfully insistent.
Frances was out of bed before she had properly decided to move.
She drew on her robe, pushed her feet into slippers, and opened her chamber door with care.
The corridor beyond was dim, lit only by a single lamp burning low in its bracket.
The house felt vast at night, its portraits rendered into shadows.
She told herself Nurse Ellis would already be awake, having heard the cry herself. She told herself it was not necessary for her to come.
She went anyway.
The nursery door was half open when she arrived. The baby lay in her cradle, with her face red and furious, and her little fists batting at the blanket as though fighting some private war against linen. Nurse Ellis was nowhere in sight, though a faint sound came from the adjoining room.
“Hush,” Frances whispered, moving quickly to the cradle. “You will wake the entire house and then we shall both be scolded.”
The baby cried harder.
“Yes, I see. The idea of being scolded holds no terror for you.”
Frances lifted her with careful hands. It was done less awkwardly than before, though still not gracefully. The baby’s body was warm and rigid with displeasure. Frances settled her against her shoulder and began the slow, uneven sway she had been practicing.
“There now,” she murmured. “I am here. It is only dark, and darkness is not nearly so frightening once one has properly scolded it.”
The crying softened to a hiccup. Frances walked with her from hearth to window, then back again.
Her own eyes burned with sleep, and the chill of the floor crept through her slippers, but the small weight against her shoulder steadied by degrees.
The baby’s breath changed first. Then her fist loosened against Frances’s robe.
At last, she fell back asleep. Frances held her a moment longer, not because it was necessary, she assured herself, but because putting her down too soon might undo all their effort.
When she lowered the child into the cradle, she did it slowly, with one hand lingering beneath the tiny head until the last possible second.
The baby did not wake. Frances released a breath she had not realized she was holding.
“There,” she whispered. “A triumph for us both.”
She tiptoed from the nursery and closed the door almost entirely behind her. Then she turned and nearly walked into Andrew. She stopped so abruptly that one hand flew to her chest.
“Oh!” she gasped.
He was standing in the corridor only a few feet away, dressed not in coat or waistcoat, but in shirtsleeves, with his cravat loosened at his throat.
The sight disordered her more effectively than any rebuke could have done.
He looked less like the Duke of Sinclair and more like a man dragged from sleep by the same cry that had summoned her.
His hair was slightly mussed. His eyes were alert, and fixed upon her. He inhaled deeply before addressing her.
“You continue to ignore my rules,” he told her.
Frances gathered her robe more tightly around herself, suddenly aware of the thin nightclothes beneath it, of her loose hair and of the hour. “The baby was crying.”
“I heard.”
“Then you understand.”
“I understand that you were told to rest,” he reminded her.
“And I did… until she cried.”
His mouth tightened, though not quite in anger. A pause settled between them, made stranger by the darkness and the hush of the sleeping house. Neither seemed entirely dressed for argument, though both had arrived at it anyway.
At last Andrew exhaled. “Very well. I will have a servant posted nearby during the night so that you need not come yourself.”
Frances nodded. “Yes, well… that is a sensible arrangement.”
His eyes narrowed slightly, as though he heard the false obedience beneath it. He probably did.
She would still go. If the baby cried and Frances heard it, she would go. A servant might be posted in every doorway of Sinclair House, and still she knew her own feet would find the nursery before her mind had finished objecting. Andrew seemed to know it, too, but he said nothing.
“Good night, Andrew,” she said softly; then, she turned to leave.
“Frances.”
His voice stopped her. She looked back. He was standing very still in the low lamplight, with one hand braced against the wall near him as though he had intended to move and then thought better of it.
The loosened cravat left his throat bare enough that she could see the movement of his Adam’s apple.
“You… managed the child well.”
The words were simple, almost plain. Yet, they surprised her more than praise ought to have done.
Frances blinked once. “I only did what was needed.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “You did.”
There was nothing extravagant in his tone, and there was no warmth he would admit to. Still, the approval, quiet and reluctant as it was, touched her in some foolish, unprotected place.
She smiled before she could stop herself, revealing a small, tired smile in the middle of the night.
“Good night,” she said again.
Then, she walked back to her chamber, feeling his gaze follow her until the turn of the corridor took her from sight. Once inside, Frances shut the door and leaned against it for a moment.
It was nothing, she told herself. Just a few words in a corridor.
It was nothing but a tired man offering a practical acknowledgment, a husband who still disapproved of her actions, even if he had conceded their result. It was truly nothing at all.
She returned to bed, slipped beneath the cool sheets, and stared into the darkness, but Andrew’s voice remained with her.
You managed the child well.
Frances closed her eyes.
She tried to set the moment aside as one might set a candle safely away from the bed curtains.
Instead, it burned on.