The evening had fallen properly while they were inside, the street dark and cool, the carriage lamp lit. William helped Cecily up without a word and followed, before the door closed and London moved past the windows in the cold dark.
They were quiet for a moment.
“She’ll be all right,” William said, after a moment.
Cecily looked at him. “The baby?”
“Yes.” He was looking at the window. “She’s small, and she’s had a difficult start, but she will be all right.” He said it with the quiet certainty of someone who needed it to be true and had decided it was.
“Yes,” Cecily murmured. “She will be.”
The carriage turned a corner, and the city shifted around them. Neither of them spoke again for some time.
The silence between them was not the silence of people who had nothing to say, but of people who had said enough for one evening and were sitting with the weight of it together.
She thought about small fists and thin blankets and a man who had learned to carry children through the night because someone had to.
She looked at the window and felt the quiet, serious trouble of it settle in her chest, where it intended to stay.
CHAPTER 17
“The Ashfords,” Letitia had said at breakfast three days prior, with the gravity of delivering a medical diagnosis, “are the dullest people in London.”
She had not been wrong.
The dining room seated sixteen and was decorated with the enthusiasm of a household that had been acquiring things for forty years without ever discussing what it was acquiring or why.
The candelabras were magnificent and too excessive. The portraits on the walls depicted a succession of Ashford ancestors, each wearing an expression of mild reproach. Cecily suspected they, too, had been expecting a more interesting evening.
She was seated four places from William on the opposite side of the table, between Lord Reeves, who kept going on and on about the autumn hunting season, and Lady Caldwell, who would notstop talking. Across from her sat Mr. Fenwick, who appeared to have been placed there by accident and had accepted it philosophically.
“The thing about a good covert,” Lord Reeves was saying, “is the approach. Most men don’t think about the approach. They think about the horse, they think about the weather, they think about the terrain. But the approach… now that’s where it’s decided before it’s begun.”
“Is it?” Cecily muttered.
“Every time. Ask any man who knows what he’s doing, and he’ll tell you the approach is everything.”
“I imagine that’s true of a great many things.”
“Ha.” He pointed at her with his fish fork, appeared to think better of it, and then set it down. “Exactly right. Exactly right. You hunt, Your Grace?”
“I ride,” Cecily replied. “I’ve never hunted.”
“You should. Fine sport for a duchess. Lady Pembury hunts. Terrifying woman. Wonderful seat.”
At this point, she became aware of Mr. Fenwick attempting to communicate something with his expression. She looked at him.
“The pheasant is very good,” he said, which she understood immediately was not about the pheasant.
She turned back to her plate and discovered he was correct. The pheasant was very good. She ate some of it and let Lord Reeves continue voicing his thoughts on the approach, which had now expanded to include a specific incident in Leicestershire that he described as the finest morning of his adult life.
Further down the table, William was speaking to Lord Ashford about something she could not hear. She did not try to hear it. She had decided on the ride over that she was going to be entirely, credibly normal this evening—that she was not going to track his movements or monitor his conversations or notice every particular thing he said and how he said it—and she was keeping to this with moderate success.
She took a sip of wine.
Lord Reeves said something.
“Forgive me,” she said. “The pheasant.”
