"But what if he's cold?"
"Marmalade," James began very patiently, "has never been cold a day in his life. He is a very resourceful cat."
"Cook doesn't like him in the kitchens," Hannah said.
"No," James agreed. "She doesn’t."
"She doesn't mind the others."
"The others do what they’re supposed to do."
Hannah considered this with the seriousness she brought to everything. Then she looked past her father at Cori, her expression shifting into something warmer and more curious. "You have pretty hair," she said.
"Thank you," Cori replied, completely aware that her voice was not steady but was doing her best to sound as composed as possible.
"It’s very long."
"It is."
"Mine is long too." Hannah seemed satisfied by this common ground. "Papa, may I say goodnight to Cori?"
"You may," he said.
Hannah crossed the room, deliberate and dignified. A five-year-old on a formal errand. She held out her hand and Cori took it. Hannah shook it once, with great seriousness. "Goodnight, Cori."
"Goodnight, Hannah." Cori squeezed the girl’s fingers gently. "Marmalade will be all right."
"I know," Hannah said, in a tone that suggested she had always known this. Then she turned and went back to her father and took his hand. James looked at Cori across the length of the room.
Whatever he might have said, he did not say it. Perhaps because Hannah was there. Perhaps because whatever had just happened between them was not something that could be addressed in a library doorway at midnight with a five-year-old holding his hand.
"Good evening, my dear," he said.
And then he turned and walked Hannah back down the corridor toward the nursery, and Cori was alone in the library with the fire and the candle and the book of sonnets and the feeling of his hand in her hair, and the memory of his lips on hers, and the last thing he had said to her still warm in her ears.
My dear.
Not Miss Corinna. Not Miss Beckett. Not even Cori.
My dear.
She sat back in the chair and held the book of sonnets in her lap and did not even try to read it.
The endearment had left James’ lips before he’d even realized what he’d said.
The corridor was dark and Hannah's hand was warm in his, her footsteps small and certain beside him. And all he could think was that he had just called Corinna Beckett my dear in the same tone he might have used if she’d already been his, as though his mouth had simply decided to say what was true and hadn’t consulted him on the matter.
He was a fool.
He was worse than a fool. He’d spent the entire day in careful reconstruction, from the moment he’d walked out of the great hall after the wedding breakfast to the last of the evening. He’d put everything back in its proper place and reinforced it. He'd been exactly what the day required of him, all day, until he wasn't.
And then he had gone to the library because he couldn’t sleep and because Hawkesworth's letter was sitting in his desk drawer like a coal in his chest, and she had been there, in the chair he thought of as Alice's chair, and she’d told him she cared, and he’d kissed her.
He had kissed her.
He hadn’t planned it. He hadn’t decided to do so. He’d simply run out of every reason not to at exactly the same moment she had put her hand against his face, and the result was that he’d kissed the youngest Beckett sister in his own library at midnight and called her ‘my dear’ on the way out, like a man with no more sense than?—
"Papa?" Hannah said.
