“You love him,” Beatrice said. It was not a question.
Cecily looked back at her sister. “I was beginning to.” Which was not the same as admitting it, but was near enough to the truth to satisfy her conscience. “Yes.”
Beatrice exhaled. She looked at the fire for a moment.
“I know he is afraid,” Cecily said, after a while. “I know that is what it is. I have known it since the beginning, since he stood at the window with Letitia’s wooden horse and told me about a loud house and two frightened children. I understand why he is afraid.” She looked down at her hands. “But understanding why someone is causing you pain does not make the pain smaller. It only makes it more complicated.”
“No,” Beatrice agreed. “It doesn’t.”
“And I will not…” Cecily tried to swallow past the lump in her throat. “I will not stay where I am an obligation. I spent twenty-three years waiting to matter to someone. I am not going to spend the next twenty-three being managed by one.”
Beatrice put her arm around her and said nothing, because there was nothing to say, and because sometimes the only thing available was the warmth of another person who loved you and understood the distance between what you had hoped for and what you had.
Cecily let herself be held for a moment. Then she sat up, reached for her tea, and took a sip with the composure of a woman who had decided she had said enough and was going to stop now before she lost what remained of herself.
“Is the blue room available?” she asked.
“It’s already being made up,” Beatrice replied. “Collins sent the maids to see to it.”
“He is very good.”
“Edward keeps trying to give him a raise. He refuses it every year on principle.” A pause. “You will stay as long as you need.”
“Thank you.”
“You do not need to thank me for that.”
“I know.”
Cecily could not sleep at night. She had known she wouldn’t be able to—had known it in the carriage, had known it as shechanged and lay down in the blue room, with its familiar yellow quilt and the view of the street she had looked at from this window a hundred times in her life.
She lay in the dark and stared at the ceiling, letting the evening settle around her into silence. She thought about nothing in particular for as long as she could manage, which was not very long.
At some point past midnight, she got up, put on her wrapper, and went down the corridor to the nursery.
The baby was asleep.
Beatrice’s boy, five months old and entirely committed to his own schedule, had apparently decided tonight was a peaceful one. He lay in his crib with the profound stillness of a well-fed infant at rest, his small face entirely smooth, his breathing the deep, unhurried rhythm that Cecily had sat beside for two weeks in another nursery and had learned to find reassuring.
She sat in the chair by the crib and looked at him, feeling the quiet of the room wrap around her.
She had not let herself cry at Beatrice’s. She had not let herself cry in the carriage. She had not let herself cry when Letitia had hugged her with the full, unceremonious conviction of someone who understood that physical presence was the only adequate response, and she had not let herself cry on the stairs at Blackmoor House, or in the entrance hall, or at any point during the ten minutes it had taken to walk out of the study andorganize her departure and come down the front steps and get into the carriage.
She let herself cry now. Not loudly—the baby was sleeping, and she was not going to wake him—but quietly, in the dark, in the chair beside the crib, with her hands folded in her lap. She clapped a hand over her mouth to keep from making any sound.
She thought about the baby girl from the orphanage. Her small fist around William’s finger. The way she had settled in his arms with total abandon. The deep, slow breathing of a child who had found a safe place and recognized it.
Cecily had stood at the crib and felt the grief of the guardianship conversation move through her like a current, the understanding that this was not hers to keep, that she had agreed to terms that made it impossible, that the baby was going back to Granger Street, and Cecily was going back to being the duchess of a house that she was in temporarily.
She had thought—she had allowed herself to think—that it could be different. That the arrangement could become something it had not started as. That a household could be built, slowly and without announcement, out of the accumulated weight of warm conversations at the breakfast table and maybe even coincidental meetings in libraries at night, and all the small, specific, unremarkable things that constituted an actual life shared with actual people.
She had thought the baby could be part of it.
She had thought William could be part of it.
She pressed the back of her hand briefly against her mouth and sobbed even harder.
She had been foolish. She had known the terms and had agreed to them, and somewhere between agreeing and the garden, she had simply forgotten to keep the distance. Had let it collapse, piece by piece, evening by evening, until she was sitting in a study this afternoon with three pages of evidence in her hand and the word responsibility in her chest and nothing between her and the full understanding of what she had allowed herself to hope for and how wrong she had been to hope for it.
