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When they went to bed, she asked him to leave the candle burning while she finished a paragraph. He lay watching her read. Her hair fell over one shoulder, her nightgown had slipped, and the candlelight lay gold along her collarbone. After a while he drew one finger slowly down her bare arm from shoulder to wrist. She turned a page. He did it again. She turned another page without reading it.

“You are interrupting my paragraph,” she said, without looking up.

“I know.”

She closed the book. She did not finish the paragraph that night, or the chapter, and a long while passed before either of them thought to put out the candle. Afterward he slept with his face against her shoulder. Waking briefly in the small hours, he found her awake beside him, watching him in the dark. She ran her fingers gently in his hair.. He kept his eyes closed and held the small kindness without making her explain it.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Sebastian and Amelia arrived on the first fine morning of September with their infant son, a nurse, and more luggage than two adults could reasonably need. Tristan stood on the steps and watched a footman lift down a hamper, a cradle, two trunks, a hatbox, and a covered basket that held nothing but clean cloths. Sebastian came down last and offered his hand, then found one of the cloths tucked inside his cuff.

“I have stopped attempting explanations,” he said.

“That never stopped you supplying one before.”

“Fatherhood has made me economical.”

Amelia passed them with the baby on her shoulder, a small, quick woman with dark curls escaping her bonnet and the air of someone who knew a good joke about everybody present and it was deciding whether to share it. “It has made him forgetful. He left his hat at the last posting inn and tried to persuade me he meant to.”

Lydia came down the steps to meet her. Tristan watched the duchess of six weeks and the duchess of a year take each other’s measure, quickly, and quickly warm to one another. Amelia shifted the baby to free a hand and took Lydia’s.

“You are the botanist,” she said. “Sebastian tells me you have made Tristan carry furniture.”

“Staging,” said Lydia. “And only some of it.”

“I should like to see that. I have never seen him carry anything heavier than a grudge.”

Lydia laughed and took her upstairs. Mrs. Bell had opened a room near the old nursery for the nurse and the child without asking Tristan to inspect it. He felt grateful that Lydia had seen to the details, then uneasy at his own relief. The nursery stood in this house whether or not he went into it. Someone had painted it yellow for a son who lived less than an hour, and he had not opened its door in five years.

Lydia insisted they eat in the conservatory. The footmen carried out a table and chairs and set them among the young citrus trees, with the doors open to the September air. Sunlight came through the clean panes and lay warm across the cloth, and the brick held the heat as she had promised. Her drawings hung along the shelves in narrow frames that Samuel’s nephew had made. They depicted careful leaves and stems and the white flower from the wood, and Amelia studied them one by one with her hands clasped behind her back, like a man at an exhibition.

“These are good,” she said. “I mean it. These are more than mere accomplishments, Lydia. This is serious work.”

Lydia colored. “They are only studies.”

“Sebastian. Come and tell your friend’s wife she deserves a husband who knows a dock leaf from a rose.”

“I know a dock leaf from a rose,” said Tristan.

“Name one thing on that bench.”

He studied the bench. “Apple mint.”

“That is a guess.”

“It is not a guess. Someone has described it to me at great length.” He met Lydia’s eyes across the table. “Several times.”

Lydia bit her lip. Amelia glanced from one to the other and said nothing, which in Amelia showed remarkable restraint.

The nurse settled the baby on a blanket on the warm tiles near Amelia’s chair. He could sit now if propped, and he stared at everything with enormous interest and put whatever he could reach in his mouth. He had his mother’s dark curls and his father’s frown. He frowned at a lemon tree. He frowned at Tristan’s boots. Then he found Tristan’s watch chain, which hung within reach where Tristan had leaned to pass Amelia the bread, and the frown vanished, and a small fat fist shot out and closed on the gold.

Tristan looked down at it.

“You have expensive tastes,” he told the baby.

“He is his father’s son,” Amelia said.

The child pulled. The chain held. He pulled harder, and his face began to crumple with outrage, and Sebastian half rose to intervene. Tristan could have unhooked the chain, smiled, and gone back to the conversation. Every instinct he had told him to. His hands went out instead.