Cecily looked around.
Three of the four cribs were occupied. The babies were small. Two of them were sleeping, curled under thin blankets with the dense sleep of infants who had exhausted themselves, and a third in the crib nearest the window was lying awake on her back and looking at the ceiling. It was this one that stopped Cecily.
She crossed to the crib.
The baby was tiny. Not the ordinary smallness of infancy, but something more specific, a smallness that spoke of difficult beginnings and not quite enough of everything since.
She lay still with her eyes open, not distressed, not reaching or kicking the way babies did when they had energy to spare. Just still. Just there. Waiting in the patient, wordless way of someone very young who had already learned that waiting was what they did.
Cecily frowned.
“How old?” she questioned.
“Six weeks, Your Grace,” Mrs. Peel answered. “Her mother–” A pause. “She came to us a fortnight ago.”
“Is she unwell?”
“She is not thriving as we would wish,” Mrs. Peel said, with the careful honesty of someone who had thought about this word choice. “She feeds, but not well. She sleeps a great deal. The doctor has seen her once. He said she requires warmth, regular feeding, and time.” Another pause. “We do our best.”
“I’m sure you do.” Cecily meant it.
She looked at the baby, who had turned her head slightly at the sound of voices and was looking now in the general direction of Cecily’s face with unfocused, effortful attention. Then she made a sound. Small, thin, the sound of a child deciding whether to cry, the kind that could go either way.
It went toward crying.
Not loudly—she didn’t have the strength for loud—but with a persistent, exhausted quality that was somehow more touching than noise would have been.
Cecily reached into the crib instinctively and then stopped, uncertain, aware that she had no idea what she was doing.
William stepped forward.
He moved past her without haste and reached into the crib. He lifted the baby with both hands, one beneath her head, one supporting her back. He brought her against his shoulder, adjusting her position once with the automatic ease of long practice.
The crying faded into small hiccups. Then quiet.
William stood with his hand against the baby’s back, the same slow, rhythmic movement Cecily had watched Beatrice use that afternoon, and looked at the window with the expression of a man thinking about something else entirely, which she understood after a moment was not indifference but focused calm.
She watched him.
She watched the steadiness of him—the lack of awkwardness, the absence of that particular stiff uncertainty that men usually displayed when handed infants, the careful overhandling of something they were afraid of dropping. There was none of that. He held the baby as though it were simply what his hands were made for.
“You know what you’re doing,” she noted.
He glanced at her briefly. “She needed someone to pick her up.”
“That’s not what I mean.” She kept her voice quiet. “Most men haven’t the slightest idea how to hold a baby.”
He looked at the baby. “Letitia was four when my parents died,” he said. “Four-year-olds need to be carried frequently. Isadora was six and had decided she was too old for it, which was not true, but was important to her dignity, so I respected that.” Thecorner of his mouth twitched faintly. “Letitia had no such dignity to protect. She required carrying for at least another year.”
Cecily said nothing, waiting for more.
“There was a period,” William continued, more quietly, “shortly after, when they both slept poorly. Letitia, particularly. She would wake up in the night and cry .” He stopped and adjusted the baby slightly. “The staff did what they could. But a frightened child wants family, not a housemaid. So I learned what was needed.”
“You had to,” Cecily said softly.
He looked at her.
“Yes,” he said simply. “Someone had to.”
