It had been six days since she first held him in the parlor. Six days, and his face had changed. His cheeks were fuller. His fists gripped with more purpose.
“They do that, Your Grace.” Mrs. Bridwell smiled. “Blink, and you’ll miss it.”
Mary settled into the rocking chair and held Tommy against her chest. He made a soft sound, something between a sigh and a hiccup, and turned his face into the warmth of her neck. She closed her eyes and rocked.
This was the part of her new life that made sense. Not the vast, echoing dining room. Not the bed that remained half empty. Not the husband who spoke to her as though she were a tenant presenting a complaint. This. The weight of this child in her arms, the rise and fall of his breathing, the smell of milk and clean linen.
She spent the morning in the nursery. She fed Tommy his next bottle when the time came, holding him upright against her shoulder afterward.
“Higher on the shoulder, Your Grace. Yes, just there. Now tip him forward a touch.”
Mary adjusted her grip, and Tommy burped with a force that startled them both. Mrs. Bridwell laughed. “There. You’re a natural.”
“I am covered in milk.”
“That is what natural looks like with a newborn.”
Mary wiped her shoulder with the cloth and settled Tommy back into the crook of her arm. His eyes were open, tracking her face with the unfocused intensity of a baby still learning what faces were.
“The pins,” Mary said, nodding toward the changing table. “Show me again. I made a mess of it this morning.”
Mrs. Bridwell laid out a fresh cloth and talked her through it a second time, patient and unhurried, correcting the angle of Mary’s hands without making her feel foolish. Tommy kicked through the whole business and screamed when the cold air hit his skin, and Mary fumbled the pin twice before getting it right.
“Better,” Mrs. Bridwell said. “By next week you won’t need me standing over you.”
“I will always need you standing over me.” Mary lifted Tommy against her chest and felt his screaming taper into hiccups. “Charlotte would have known all this already. Our mother taught her. I was the one reading in the garden while Charlotte practiced swaddling the cat.”
Mrs. Bridwell smiled. “Cats and babies are nothing alike, Your Grace.”
“The cat didn’t cry, though.”
Tommy hiccupped once more, then settled. Mary rocked him and hummed a melody she hadn’t thought of in years,something her mother had sung to Charlotte when Charlotte was small enough to be held this way. The second verse caught in her throat, and she stopped.
Charlotte should have been here. Charlotte should have been the one holding this baby, learning his sounds, memorizing the pattern of his breathing. Instead, Charlotte was somewhere beyond London, beyond reach, and Mary stood in her place, falling in love with a child who was not hers.
She thought of the Duke’s words.
Our arrangement.
She thought of Lord Grentport shoving her father to the ground. She thought of the vestibule and the whispers and the long ride to Blackholm House in a wedding dress.
She had always wanted a family. A husband who looked at her with warmth. Children of her own. A household built on affection, not obligation. She had accepted Grentport because her father needed her to, and she had accepted the Duke for the same reason, and neither man had asked her what she wanted because neither man had thought to.
Tommy stirred in his crib and fussed. Mary lifted him and settled him against her shoulder, and his fussing stopped, and the ache in her chest deepened into something she could not name.
At least she had this.
For now, she had this.
“You’re back.”
The Duke looked up from his desk.
His study was a dark-paneled room at the far end of the ground floor, lined with ledgers and correspondence. A lamp burned at his elbow. His coat was draped over the back of his chair, his cravat loosened, and there were ink stains on his fingers.
He looked as though he had been sitting there since he returned, and the shadows beneath his eyes said the day had not been kind.
“You needed something?” he asked.
