Page 24

“I have had thirty years of practice, Your Grace. One learns to read a household the way a sailor learns to read weather.” He inclined his head, the small warmth already retreating back into his customary composed formality. “Will there be anything else?”

“No. Thank you.” She hesitated, then added, because it seemed, suddenly, important to say: “I am glad of your service here, Drummons. I hope you know that.”

“That is very good of you to say, Your Grace,” he said, and this time the smile, brief as it was, reached all the way to his eyes before he collected himself and went on about his morning duties, leaving Phillipa standing in the hall with a small, unexpected warmth of her own settling somewhere beneath her ribs.

It happened only once, in those first days, before the pattern of avoidance had fully set itself into habit.

Phillipa had been sitting on the nursery floor with the baby propped against her knee, working through the small ritual they had already, in a matter of days, built together without either of them quite meaning to: a slow, repetitive game of peekaboo that never failed to reduce him to helpless, hiccupping delight, however many times it was repeated. She had not heard the door. She became aware of Gregory only when she glanced up, mid-game, and found him standing in the doorway with an expression she could not immediately place, something caught between longing and a kind of wary uncertainty, as though he had wandered somewhere he was not entirely sure he was permitted to be.

“Forgive me,” he said, already half-turning to go. “I did not mean to intrude.”

“You are not intruding. This is your house, and your nursery, and your nephew, in case any of the three had slipped your mind.” She kept her voice light, deliberately so, not wanting to startle whatever fragile impulse had brought him to the doorway in the first place. “Would you like to try? He is rather forgiving of poor technique. I have been assured by Martha that I was quite terrible at this myself, only a week ago.”

He hesitated, visibly, in the doorway, and for a moment she thought he would decline and retreat, as he had retreated from every such invitation since. But then, slowly, he crossed the room and lowered himself onto the floor beside her, with rather less grace than she had ever seen him manage in a ballroom, and looked down at his nephew with an expression of such careful, guarded hope that something in her chest ached to see it.

“I do not know how it is played,” he admitted.

“It requires no great skill. You hide your face. You reveal it again. He finds this endlessly, inexplicably delightful, for reasons no philosopher has yet satisfactorily explained.” She demonstrated, and the baby shrieked with his usual enthusiasm, and Gregory watched the whole performance with an intensity that suggested he was studying it rather more seriously than the simplicity of the game warranted.

He tried it himself, tentatively, covering his own face with both large hands and then drawing them away with an expression of exaggerated surprise that Phillipa suspected, from the stiffness of it, cost him rather more effort than he would ever have admitted. The baby stared at him for a long moment, solemn and assessing, the way he regarded all new information, and then burst into a peal of delighted laughter that seemed to startle Gregory nearly as much as it delighted him.

“He laughed,” Gregory said, and there was something in his voice, unguarded and astonished, that undid Phillipa rather more than she was prepared for.

“You have a gift for it, evidently.”

“I have never made anyone laugh so easily in my life. I generally have to work a great deal harder for it, and with considerably less satisfying results.” He tried the game again, and again, apparently unable to quite believe his own success, and the baby rewarded each attempt with the same unrestrained delight, until the nursery was filled with the small, ordinary music of a baby’s laughter and a father’s astonished, growing joy.

They stayed like that a good while, the three of them on the floor together, moving from peekaboo to a battered set of wooden blocks that the baby seemed chiefly interested in throwing rather than stacking, and Phillipa found herself watching Gregory rather more than the baby, unable to look away from the sight of him: sleeves pushed back, hair coming loose from its careful arrangement, laughing at something entirely uncomplicated for what felt, watching him, like the first time in a very long while.

“I did not expect this,” he said, eventually, quietly, when the baby had at last begun to droop with the particular suddenness of very small children, his small fists losing their grip on a block mid-throw. “Any of it. I do not think I have laughed so freely since I was a boy myself.”

“Perhaps that is precisely what he is for,” Phillipa said, gently. “Not merely a duty to be managed, or a guilt to be carried, but a person who might, in time, teach you how to be lighter again.”

Something crossed his face at that, beneath it a flicker of the old wariness, already beginning to reassert itself, as though the evening’s ease had been a door he had not quite meant to open so wide, and was already, reluctantly, beginning to close again.

He rose from his place.

“Thank you,” he said, “for letting me stay.”

“You need not thank me for being welcome in your own nursery.”

“I know.” He paused at the door, looking back at the two of them. The baby already drooping toward sleep against her shoulder, Phillipa herself flushed and easy in the lamplight “I am not certain I entirely believe it yet, some days. But I am glad of this evening regardless.”

He left before she could answer, and Phillipa sat a while longer on the nursery floor with a sleeping child against her shoulder, turning the evening over with a mixture of hope and quiet frustration, understanding, even then, that whatever door had opened tonight would not stay open on its own. It would take a great deal more evenings like this one, she suspected, patiently offered and patiently repeated, before her husband learned to trust that the warmth he had found tonight was not a fluke to be guarded against, but simply, plainly, the truth of what this small, strange family of theirs might become, if only he let himself believe it.

She could not have known, sitting there in the lamplight with her heart full and hopeful, how many weeks of careful, halting effort still lay ahead of them both before that particular evening’s ease became anything like a settled habit. But she found, rocking the baby gently toward his cradle a little while later, that she did not mind the distance nearly so much as she might once have. She had glimpsed, tonight, exactly what they were building toward. She found herself entirely willing to be patient for it.

“You will be watched very closely, you understand,” said Lady Creighton, adjusting the set of Phillipa’s bonnet with rather more fussing than the bonnet strictly required. “Your first appearance in society as a married woman. Every eye in that church will be upon you, cataloguing every detail to be repeated over tea before the sermon is even properly digested.”

“I am aware.”

“I only say it so that you are prepared. You must not seem anxious, not overly happy, either, or they will say the marriage was a love match got up in scandalous haste, which will only feed the gossip further. A pleasant, composed serenity is what is wanted. Can you manage pleasant, composed serenity?”

“I believe I have had a great deal of practice at exactly that particular expression over a good many years.”

Lady Creighton had the grace to look faintly abashed at that, and said nothing further on the subject, though she did not entirely cease her fussing until the carriage had actually pulled away from Hewes Manor toward the church, with Gregory beside her rather than her mother, which Phillipa found, on the whole, considerably more steadying.

“Your mother has coached you thoroughly, I take it,” Gregory observed, watching her profile with some amusement as the carriage rattled over the cobbles.