“And William’s brow.” Charlotte traced her finger across Tommy’s forehead, light and reverent. “I saw it the moment he was born. William’s brow and William’s chin and our mother’s mouth.” She kissed the top of Tommy’s head. “All the people he came from, right there in his face.”
Tommy’s eyes drifted closed. His grip on Charlotte’s collar relaxed, and his breathing deepened, and the nursery settled around the three of them in the warm light of early evening.
Mary stood beside her sister and watched Charlotte hold the baby she had given up, and the jealousy she expected to feel did not arrive.
What arrived instead was relief.
Bone-deep, exhausting relief, the kind that came from setting down a weight she had been carrying for so long she had forgotten it was there.
Charlotte was here. Tommy had his mother. And somewhere in London, Evander was searching for the man whose brow Tommy wore, and the tangled, impossible knot that had brought all of them to this house was beginning, at last, to loosen.
Mary reached into the crib and picked up the wool blanket and draped it across Charlotte’s arm, tucking the edge around Tommy the way she had done every night for weeks.
“He likes to be covered to the chest,” she said. “Not higher. He kicks it off if it touches his chin.”
Charlotte smiled. Mary smiled back. And the nursery held them both, two sisters and a sleeping child, and the silence between them was not the silence of distance or secrecy or shame; it was the silence of things restored.
Imperfectly. Incompletely.
But restored.
CHAPTER 27
“Where is she?”
William Harcourt stood in the entrance hall of Blackholm House with his coat unbuttoned, his satchel hanging from one shoulder, and the same tremor in his hands Evander remembered from the study visit three weeks ago.
The young scholar’s eyes were wide and searching, moving from Evander to the staircase to the corridor beyond, and every line of his body strained toward a door he had not yet been shown.
“She is upstairs,” Evander said. “With Mary and the baby.”
William’s face crumpled. He pressed his fist against his mouth and closed his eyes, and for a moment, Evander thought the man might collapse right there in the entrance hall.
He did not.
He drew a breath, opened his eyes, and straightened.
“Take me to her. Please.”
Evander led him upstairs. At the nursery door, he paused. Inside, Charlotte sat in the rocking chair with Tommy asleep against her chest. Mary stood beside the window, and Richard leaned against the far wall. Three people and a baby, waiting.
William stepped through the doorway. Charlotte looked up.
The sound she made was not a word. It was closer to the sound Tommy made when he woke from a nightmare and found arms around him, the desperate, animal relief of someone who had been alone too long and suddenly was not.
Charlotte rose from the chair, Tommy still pressed against her shoulder, and William crossed the room in three strides and wrapped his arms around both of them.
Charlotte buried her face against his neck. William’s hand came up and cradled the back of her head, and his other arm enclosed the baby between their bodies, and the three of them stood in the nursery in a tangle of arms and tears and months of silence, collapsing at once.
“I’m sorry.” William’s voice broke on the first word. “Charlotte. I am so sorry. I looked for you. I came back, and you were gone, and no one knew where you were, and I searched every?—”
“Where did you go?” Charlotte pulled back far enough to see his face. Tears ran freely, and her grip on his coat was white-knuckled. “You vanished. I went to your rooms, and the landlady said?—”
“The landlady turned me out. I had missed two months’ rent. I had nothing, Charlotte. No savings. No family in London. I went back to my father’s village and worked in the fields for three months to earn enough to return.” William’s voice was ragged. “By the time I came back to London, you were gone. Then I heard that you’d disappeared, and no one knew where you’d gone. But I also heard that… that you’d had a baby, and you’d left him at the Duke’s house.”
“You came here.” Charlotte gripped his face between her hands. “Evander told me.”
“I came for the manuscript because it was the only excuse I could invent to get through the door. I thought if I could see the house, see where the baby was, I might find some way to reach you.” William’s eyes moved to Tommy, sleeping undisturbed between their bodies. “I saw nothing. I heard nothing. And I was too much of a coward to ask.”
