I cannot unsee this.
Not the baby, not her grip. But all of it. Every evening in this room, every quiet exchange across the water basin, every moment he had thought she wasn’t watching and had been entirely, unguardedly himself.
She could not unsee any of it.
“If she’s both restless and warm, call Doris,” William said, answering Isadora with the practical calm of someone returning to ground they knew. “If she’s only restless, she may simply be unsettled. At this age, the two can look similar.” He looked at the notes. “What else does the physician say about the second week?”
Isadora read aloud. William listened. Letitia had resumed her conversation with the rabbit.
Cecily looked at her book. The words on the page meant nothing. They had meant nothing for four days, and she did not expect them to start meaning something now.
She turned a page anyway, for the appearance of it, and sat in the warm nursery while the evening settled around her. She did not look at her husband again.
She was, she had concluded, doing very badly at not looking at him.
CHAPTER 19
“Your Grace.”
William looked up.
Mr. Prentiss stood in the study doorway with his hands folded behind his back.
“The nursery lamp was lit at five this morning, Your Grace. I thought you should know the servants are aware.”
“Thank you, Prentiss.”
“Of course.” A pause. “Doris says the baby took a full feeding.”
“Good. That is very good.”
“Yes, Your Grace.” Mr. Prentiss withdrew.
William looked back at the document in front of him. The same document he had been looking at for twenty minutes. The same paragraph he had read four times and retained nothing of.
He put down his quill.
He had been in the nursery at five because he had woken at four-thirty and lain in the dark for a few minutes and then stopped pretending he was going to sleep again.
That was the honest version. The version he would give anyone who asked was that he wanted to check the baby’s breathing before Doris arrived.
Both were true. One was more complete than the other.
The baby had been awake when he came in. Not distressed, simply awake, looking at whatever the low light offered her. He had stood at the side of the crib for a while. She had found his face and stilled.
He had given her his finger. She had taken it immediately, with the same grip as the night before.
He had stood there for twenty minutes and let her hold it and thought about nothing in particular.
Perhaps she knows she’s safe.
He picked up the quill. Set it down.
The thing about Cecily was that she said things like that—simple, direct, with the full weight of what she meant behind them and no performance of meaning—and he had learned over the past weeks that his defenses against the deliberate version of her were considerably more functional than his defenses against that version. The unguarded one. The one that appeared at three in the morning in a wrapper with her hair loose, that sat in the nursery chair with a book she was not reading and did not pretend she was reading it.
He had not been prepared for the unguarded version.
He had not been prepared for the way she looked at him sometimes. Not with intent. Not even with awareness, half the time. Simply looked, the way she looked at everything she was actually seeing rather than looking at.
