“The difference being–”
“Good morning.”
Both girls straightened.
Cecily looked up.
William stood in the doorway. He was dressed for the day, coat settled with the ease of a man who wore good clothes the way other men wore their own skin. His gaze moved across the table in a single sweep that took in the slightly tilted cream dish, the scattered toast crumbs around Letitia’s plate, and the general atmospheric evidence of a conversation that had been considerably louder than the room strictly required.
“Good morning,” Cecily greeted.
He inclined his head and moved to his chair at the head of the table.
A footman materialized with coffee. William accepted it without looking and opened the first of the letters beside his plate with practised efficiency.
Cecily suspected he treated breakfast as a continuation of work rather than a pause from it.
For approximately thirty seconds, the room conducted itself with perfect propriety. Then Letitia, who had been holding the remainder of her cat story in visible tension, leaned toward Cecily and said, at a volume that was perhaps sixty percent of the one she had been using before, “She made the cat sleep in the stables, which I thought was excessive–”
“Letitia.” William did not look up from the letter.
Letitia closed her mouth.
“You are not in Brighton,” he scolded, turning a page with the same calm attention, “and you are not in the nursery. You are at the breakfast table, and you will conduct yourself accordingly.”
The silence that followed was heavy.
Cecily set down her teacup. “I believe,” she said pleasantly, “that we were discussing a cat.”
William looked up and pinned her with a look akin to a question. “We were,” he agreed.
“Yes. Which is, I would argue, an entirely appropriate breakfast topic.” She reached for the toast. “Laughter at breakfast can hardly endanger the estate.”
“Discipline has never ruined anyone.” His voice held the mild certainty of someone quoting a principle he has never had cause to question.
“Neither has warmth,” she argued evenly, meeting his gaze over the butter dish. “And one of them makes for considerably better company at eight in the morning.”
Isadora made a small sound that she covered with a cough.
William held Cecily’s gaze for a moment with the expression of a man who was deciding something. Then he returned to his letter with composed finality, as if he had decided to let it go for now, which was in itself a kind of answer.
Letitia, reading the room, gave Cecily a look of undisguised admiration across the table. Cecily refrained from acknowledging it because encouraging Letitia seemed like the kind of decision that gathered momentum quickly.
Instead, she looked at Isadora, who was eating her toast with the careful attention of someone who was very much listening to everything and visibly calculating whether it was safe to participate.
“What are you reading at the moment?” she asked her.
Isadora’s eyes flicked, briefly and almost imperceptibly, to her brother. The movement was small enough that it might have been nothing, but Cecily had been watching, and she saw it.
Something quiet settled in her chest, like a stone dropping into still water.
She is asking permission.Not out loud. Not even consciously, perhaps. But she is checking first.
“Poetry,” Isadora answered, after the briefest pause. “And history. I’ve been reading about the campaigns in the Peninsula. The strategy interests me more than I expected.”
“The strategy?” Cecily said, with genuine interest. “Not the romance?”
“The romance of military history,” Isadora said, with the dry precision of a girl who had clearly thought about this, “tends to be written by people who were not present for the actual conditions. I find the logistics more honest.”
