“We’ll miss her,” she said.
She had not planned to saywe. It came out of its own accord, but she did not take it back.
William looked at the small sleeping face for a long moment.
“Yes.” His voice was very quiet. “We will.”
Neither of them moved for a while.
The fire burned down to its last warmth, and the baby breathed. Outside, the wind pressed against the glass.
Eventually, Cecily said goodnight, and he said it back. She left, he stayed, and the door closed softly between them.
* * *
“The thing about Horatio,” Letitia said as she tried to elegantly chew on her toast while talking with a full mouth, “is that he is fundamentally misunderstood.”
Isadora did not look up from her toast. “Horatio ate a glove. Cecily told us the story.”
“That’s what I mean. Everyone remembers the glove. Nobody considers the circumstances.”
“What circumstances?”
“He was left alone for four hours.”
“Dogs are frequently left alone for four hours.”
“Horatio,” Letitia said, with the patience of one defending an important principle, “is not a dog who manages solitude well. He is a dog with an inner life.”
William looked at his correspondence.
It was a Thursday morning in late November, which meant the light was thin and came in at the wrong angle and did his paperwork no favors. Letitia had been talking since before the toast arrived.
Cecily was across the table, reading something she had brought down from the library, which meant she had been awake early, which meant she had not slept well, which he noticed and was not going to remark on, because remarking on it would require explaining why he had noticed.
He returned to his correspondence.
“An inner life,” Isadora echoed.
“A rich one. Edward says so.”
“Edward is being diplomatic.”
“Edward,” Letitia opined, “let Horatio sleep on the drawing room sofa last month and told Beatrice it was because the dog looked cold, which is either compassion or an inner life by proxy, and I think either counts.”
“It counts as Edward avoiding an argument,” William commented, without looking up.
Letitia pointed at him. “You don’t know that.”
“I know Edward.”
“You know Edward in Parliament. That is a different Edward from Horatio’s Edward.”
Cecily made a sound akin to a snort from across the table. William glanced at her. She was back to looking at her book with the focused expression of someone who was not reading.
“Letitia, you have been discussing this dog for eleven minutes,” Isadora pointed out.
“I’ve been discussing his circumstances. There is a difference.”
