* * *
James arrived on Friday without sending prior notice, which was standard.
William heard his voice in the entrance hall at half past two, heard Mr. Prentiss directing him upstairs, heard the familiar footsteps in the corridor.
There was a pause outside the study door. The footsteps continued, checking the library, and continued again. James, who knew this house well enough to understand its geography, apparently expected to find him at his desk.
But William was in the nursery.
He had not decided to go. He had simply ended up there, as he had ended up there several times that week, standing at the empty crib with the stripped frame and the bare mattress and the absence that a room retained after something important had been in it and had left.
He was looking at the small wooden horse on the shelf. The worn paint, the smooth neck, the ears. Letitia had won it at a parish fair when she was two and had installed it here with great ceremony. Since then, it had lived on this shelf, through three nursemaids and two bouts of scarlet fever and everything else.
He thought about the night the baby’s fever had broken. About standing here in the two o’clock dark and the weight of that sleeping infant that had rearranged something within him. About the silence of walking back down the corridor afterward, which had not been empty silence, but a whole conversation conducted without a single word that he had turned over and over in every unoccupied moment since.
He did not hear James come in. Did not hear his name the first time, or the second, because what reached him was a hand on his shoulder. He turned to find James standing behind him.
“I called you twice,” James said.
“I know. I heard it the second time.” William looked back at the crib.
James was quiet. He looked around the room, saying nothing for a moment, then cleared his throat. “How long were you standing there?”
“I don’t know.” William shrugged. “A while.”
“Prentiss found me outside the study, looking for you.”
“I was thinking.”
“In the nursery?” James raised an eyebrow.
“It’s quiet.”
“Your study is quiet.”
“The study has the accounts in it.” William looked at the crib again. “This has…” He looked at the chair by the wall, where Cecily had sat the night the baby’s fever broke. “Do you know how she is doing?”
“I haven’t seen her. Beatrice manages the information carefully, which is her way of protecting both parties.” James looked at him. “I did hear from Pemberton’s wife, who heard from Lady Ashford that the Duchess of Blackmoor has been calling on several charitable establishments this week and is apparently proposing a coordinated funding model for foundling houses across the city.”
William looked at the window.
Of course, she is.
“William.”
“I know what you’re going to say.”
“Do you?” James said pleasantly.
William didn’t say anything.
“What I was going to tell you is that dismissing Harwood does not constitute a repaired marriage, and that the accounts being in order is not the same thing as anything else being in order, and that you drove her out of this house by saying something you should not have said. That is what I was going to say.” James pinched the bridge of his nose. “What you’ve done this week is necessary and right, and it should have been done a long time ago. But it does not constitute a resolution of what happened in your marriage.”
“Letitia has already covered most of this ground.”
“Letitia is wise beyond her years,” James said. He moved to stand beside William and looked at the bare mattress, the empty frame. “She left, William.”
“Yes, I know. She made a choice. She left because I told her the truth,” William sighed. “The arrangement was temporary. That was what we agreed on.”
