He paused. “I came home. The girls were with the housekeeper. Isadora had understood that something was wrong but hadn’t said anything. She was six, and she was sitting at the breakfast table with her hands folded in front of her, waiting.” He looked at the horse. “Letitia asked me where Mama was. Three times. Quite cheerfully the first time, less so the second.”
Cecily felt grief and pity coil in her chest.
“What did you do?” she asked softly.
“I answered her,” he said simply. “And then I sat down at the table with them, and we had breakfast because it was half past eight and they hadn’t eaten, and that seemed like the most concrete thing available.” He was quiet for a moment. “After that, it was just… days. One after the next. The solicitor, the accounts, the staff, the tenants. Isadora needed a new governess. Letitia had decided she was afraid of the dark, which she hadn’t been before. I learned to braid hair that winter. Sat through enough lessons that I could have taken them myself.” Something that was almost wry flashed across his face. “I knew considerably more about French verbs and watercolor techniques than any nineteen-year-old boy should reasonably need.”
Cecily looked at him. “Did anyone help you?”
“James came for a fortnight in December.” He considered. “He was not helpful in any practical sense. He was simply there. Which was its own thing.”
“Yes, it is.”
He set the horse on the windowsill beside him and looked at it with emotion in his eyes.
“I used to lie awake calculating,” he murmured. “Isadora would debut. She would have a Season in what, six years? Seven? And Letitia, two years after that. The estate had debts that would take three years to clear at the rate I was managing them. The north tenant cottages needed rebuilding. The roof of the east wing was near collapse.” He paused. “I did the arithmetic obsessively. For months. If I could see the numbers, I could see the shape of whatneeded doing. And if I could see the shape, I could manage it. And if I could manage it, then nothing terrible would–” He broke off.
“Happen,” Cecily finished.
“Yes.”
The word landed between them quietly.
She looked at his profile in the grey light—the line of his jaw, the slight tension in it that she had learned was not composure but the effort of composure, which was a different thing.
She thought about a boy of nineteen at a breakfast table with two small frightened girls and an arithmetic problem where the stakes were everything, and she thought she understood, for the first time, why he assessed every room before walking into it.
He looked at her. “You cannot afford to fail them.”
“Is that what you’re afraid of? Still?”
A pause.
“It is what I am careful about. Still.”
She stepped closer without deciding to.
“William,” she said.
He looked at her. She had his full attention now.
“They are not afraid,” she assured him. “Not anymore. Isadora walks into a room and thinks before she speaks because she is measured, not because she is frightened. Letitia argues with you at breakfast because she trusts that you will still be there when she’s done arguing.” She held his gaze. “You did that. Whatever it cost you, however you did the arithmetic, you did that.”
Something moved through his expression. He looked at her in a way that was different from all the previous ways he had looked at her.
He opened his mouth.
Say it. Whatever it is, say it.
He closed it.
He reached for the wooden horse, turned it once in his hand, and set it back on the windowsill with the deliberate movement of a man replacing something in its proper place. He straightened.
“The ball is tomorrow,” he said. “You should rest.”
He walked past her and out the door. She heard his footsteps in the corridor, steady and unhurried, growing quieter, and then the house was still.
She stood in the empty nursery, with the grey light filtering through the half-drawn curtains and the bare crib in the corner and the small wooden horse on the windowsill, and felt the shape of what had almost been said fill the room like a held breath.
