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“Would you,” he said, when he could trust himself, “care for something else? Sherry?”

She shook her head and held the glass out, empty, then thought better of it and, with a certain grim firmness, took the decanter from his hand and poured another.

He watched her down that one too. So, he thought. Serious, then.

He sat down beside her. Not close. He was quite careful about that. He set his elbows on his knees and looked at her sidelong, and said, in the quiet, “What is wrong?”

She seemed on the point of telling him. She had that look, the look of a swimmer at the very edge of the water. Her lips parted, and her eyes came up to his, and for a moment there was something in them so open and unguarded that he forgot to breathe.

Someone knocked on the door.

“Your Grace?” Martha stood in the doorway in her wrapper, with a candle in one hand and a baby in the other, a very awake baby, who regarded the assembled company with the round and speculative eyes of a man who has been dragged from a perfectly good dream. “He was already stirring, Your Grace. I thought…I thought perhaps…”

Phillipa was on her feet before the maid had finished. She crossed the room like a woman drawn on a string. Martha put him into her arms without a word, and the baby, who had looked ready to howl, considered her for a moment, and put a very small hand to her cheek.

Gregory watched.

He watched all of the tension go out of her at once. It was the most remarkable thing. Her shoulders came down and her jaw unclenched and her whole face, which had been drawn like a bowstring since the moment she came through the door, simply quieted, like a lake when the wind drops. She bent her head and pressed her cheek against the baby’s hair. She closed her eyes.

He thought: I have never in my life seen anyone look like that.

“You thought,” he said, lightly, because he was afraid of what his voice would do otherwise, “that I had invented him?”

A laugh escaped her, huffed, damp, entirely helpless. She opened her eyes. “No. I just....I needed to know.” She looked down at the child. “It was not that I doubted he was real. but was that I needed to be sure of something,” she admitted, her cheeks stained red again.

“Which was?” he couldn’t help but show his curiosity.

“How I felt.” Her voice was very quiet. “I needed to be sure of that, so that I could go ahead with it.”

He understood. He realized only afterward that he had known perfectly well, from the moment he saw her on the step. “The wedding,” he said.

She nodded.

“Binding myself to a man I do not love,” said Phillipa, gently, without looking up. “I have already avoided that mistake once, Your Grace. I wanted to be quite certain that I was not repeating it for nothing.”

It was nothing. It was a simple, reasonable, honest remark, made with kindness, and it struck Gregory exactly beneath the breastbone. He kept his face very still. He had been told, in the course of a long life, a number of unpleasant things about himself, and he had held up under all of them with a decent charm, but nobody had ever before said one to him so very gently. I do not love you. Of course she did not. Why should she? It was perfectly natural, and he had proposed it himself, on a garden bench, in good faith. It was only that he had not realized, until this moment, that he had been wanting her to.

Do not be a fool, he told himself. It was never that kind of bargain.

“I will admit that your methods are rather unconventional,” he said after a moment. “I don’t know many women who would turn up like this in the middle of the night to get answer to a question like you have.”

“It might be the most important question of my life,” he heard her say under her breath, and it elicited a strange sort of response from him. Empathy? No, that would be putting it too simply.

He decided to direct his attention elsewhere, and naturally his mind went to the boy.

“He will need a name,” he said abruptly.

Phillipa looked up, startled.

“The little one. It is time somebody gave him one. I cannot go on calling him the boy.”

“No,” she said slowly. She was watching him, he thought, with some surprise, but she let the change of subject stand. She turned the baby a little in her arms. “Well, there is a custom. Many families name a boy for his grandfather. What was your father’s name? It might do, for a beginning.”

“No.”

It was out before he had thought. It came out flat and quick, and the child jumped, and Phillipa’s brows drew together. “I only meant that..”

“I know what you meant.” He passed a hand over his face. “Forgive me. It will not do. That is all.”