She stared for a long moment. “Are you thinking about Sandra’s first year? We were both a mess,” she cried. “We had new parent anxiety and a lot of sleep deprivation, and trying to manage Pemberley and a baby and our marriage. It was so hard. One downside to not having an army of servants around anymore,” she said to make him smile.
He gave her a long look. “You know that is not the full truth. Every common child-rearing task was completely unknown to me. No advice book, no parenting blog could prepare me.”
“Every new father says that.”
There was pain in his eyes when he said, “You saw fathers parent even if you did not have one yourself. Your friends. Books. Television. Men who soothed their crying children, who were their primary caretaker, it was around you. And whilst I prefer parenting here over the way Georgiana and I were raised, I did not have a culture where men had much to do with child-rearing—and you and Sandra paid a price for that.”
Part of that was true. He had not been as helpful as she had assumed he would be, given how dedicated he was in every other facet of his life. But as the months went by, through the frustration, she realised she was being disappointed by things that Darcy hadn’t even known to do.
“Time, patience, and practice solved our issues.” By the time Sandra was walking, those memories about how hard things had been faded. “Not everyone adjusts easily to parenthood, no matter what century they were born in.”
“It was more than new parenting anxieties,” he said wearily, “which I must assume are common to everyone. What it meant to be a father in 1812 was not even close to the requirements of this century. It is not enough to discipline, to protect, and provide. I had never felt so out of my time in any other moment since I came here.”
“Most parents of a screaming infant feel more lost than you do two hundred years out of your time.”
He gave a wan smile, and she added, “I never had a father, so I had strong opinions on how involved you should be. I should’ve known much sooner that I just had to tell you what I needed.”
“I adapted so well to everything else…” He shook his head as though disappointed with himself. “I took too long to know what fatherhood meant in the twenty-first century.”
“Oh, Fitzwilliam.” She put her arms around him and he clung to her. “You were a good dad from day one. I wouldn’t have had a child with you if I didn’t think you would be a great father. You adjusted to other things here so well it didn’t occur to me that we had different pictures of what ‘good father’ meant.”
“The hardest thing about living in this century has not been my ignorance of the two hundred years of history or the sometimes-unrelatable social mores. It was how to be a father here when I had no model for what that looked like.”
“I’m sorry I made you feel that way,” she whispered in his ear. Her throat closed, and her chest felt tight. “I should have helped you more.”
“It was never your job to be responsible for how I adapt here,” he said in a tone of surprise. “Helping me as much as you do is already an unfair burden on you.”
“Explaining this world to you is never a burden,” she insisted. “Don’t we do life together? And I would do all that and more to have you here with me.” She squeezed him tighter. “You’re a good dad.”
She felt the tension in his shoulders ease, and he settled into her hug, pressing a kiss to her cheek. “I have not been sensible, have I?”
She pulled back and took his face in her hands. “I felt guilty for all the things you sacrificed to be here with me, and you felt guilty that you didn’t instantly know how to take care of a child? No, that’s not sensible at all, not when we’re so happy together.”
He kissed her, then smiled and tapped the edge of the hot tub behind her and said, “Then you won’t mind telling me what is the purpose of this. I can tell multiple people sit in it, but why? Public bathing is no longer in fashion. This century is all about privacy.”
“You never soaked in a hot tub?” Had they never used one on any holiday they had been on? It certainly wasn’t the sort of thing to install in a four-hundred-year-old mansion maintained to look as much as possible as it had in the nineteenth century.
“I think you know every modern experience I have ever had,” he said drily. “Is the point medicinal or recreational?”
“More recreational in a setting like this,” she said, pointing to the view over the garden with Lake Windemere in the distance. “You’d sit here with friends in your bathing suits with drinks to relax together.”
“How does it work?”
“Um, there’s a heater to warm up the water and a pressure system to force in the water through the jets. And…um…a suction and filtration system to return the water, I guess?” Being with Darcy always forced her to think more carefully about so many things.
“Quite a luxury to have in one’s home. I would have had to travel half a day in a carriage to Buxton or Matlock to use the mineral baths. And the spring in Matlock was only sixty-eight degrees.”
Darcy walked to the control panel and turned it on. There was something about his satisfied smile that caught her attention.
“Are you teasing me?” she cried. “You knew what it was!”
His smile broadened. “I presumed, but I wanted to know if I was right. And I was.”
She slipped her arms around his waist and pressed herself against him. “Can you guess the best way to use it?”
“I can guessthatway will be impossible with four other people here, your seven-year-old included.”
He said no, but she felt the idea interested him. “I am cheating you out of a splendid modern experience if I can’t seduce you in a hot tub.”
