David continued screaming at full volume directly into Julian’s ear which was clarifying in various ways. Julian settled the baby against his chest and began the slow shifting of weight from side to side the way that that Mrs. Webb, their governess, had demonstrated when Arabella was still a baby and his uncle had brought her for a visit.
David’s screaming reduced to crying. Then to hiccupping protests. Then, at last, glorious silence.
“You have done this before,” Clara said.
“Arabella,” he said. “When she was an infant. Her governess showed me. I was only a child then, but I have not forgotten.”
They were quiet for a moment. David’s eyes were open and fixed on Julian’s face. Did he recognize the family resemblance to his mother? Probably not. It would be quite ridiculous to think so. Yet, the way he stared at him had something alarming to it.
“I should have seen it sooner,” Julian said. He had not planned to say it. It came out anyway. “That something was wrong with Arabella. The letters were not right. I noticed and told myself I was imagining things.”
“She would have made it easy to believe,” Clara said. “She could convince you the ceiling was fine while it was coming down around her ears.”
“I know that.” He shifted his weight. “It is not an excuse.”
“No. But if she had wanted you to know, she would have told you. She sent the baby to me because she did not want you involved—not because she did not trust you but because she knew what you would do.” A pause. “She was right about that as it turns out.”
Julian looked at her across the dark carriage. She met his gaze steadily without any pretense, and he thought that this was perhaps the most honest conversation he’d had with another person in several years.
If my parents could see me now, what would they think? They’d think me insane, I am sure.
“She used to sit outside my study door and wait for me when my father first passed, and I took over the estate,” he said. “Every morning for about a year. I used to trip over her.” He looked down at David, who had fallen asleep again, heavy and warm against his chest. “She was ten, and I was nineteen. Her parents had died some years before, and my father had just passed. My mother was still living, but we both knew she did not have long. She…”
“The lungs. I remember.”
He nodded, remembering the awful diagnosis of consumption that would snatch his mother away in months just before the anniversary of his father’s death.
“I remember taking her to the kitchen and giving her marzipan and biscuits.”
“Once or twice, you took me down there, too. That’s when she’d talk the most, dipping her biscuits into milk.”
“Incessantly,” he confirmed.
“She still does,” Clara said.
“Yes. Although not the last time I saw her.”
The carriage rolled on. David slept. Clara leaned her head back against the seat and closed her eyes. Julian sat with the baby’s weight against his chest. He looked out at the dark countryside moving past and felt something he did not immediately have a name for.
He looked down at David.
David, for his part, appeared entirely unconcerned. “Sensible,” Julian told him quietly. “At least one of us should be.”
He looked back out of the window. Clara was asleep.
He looked at the ceiling instead. Clara understood him at a level almost nobody else could. She knew what he felt about Arabella, that fear and exasperation woven into one.
CHAPTER 11
Clara woke when the carriage stopped. She had not meant to sleep. She had closed her eyes for a few minutes while Julian had taken care of David. She’d intended it to last no more than that, but when she woke up again, she glanced at the pocket watch she kept in her reticule and saw that two hours had passed.
They had stopped in a yard, and Julian was standing outside the carriage door, David still in his arms. She hadn’t realized how comfortable he was with the little boy. He stood there as if he’d always held him, as if he was truly his own flesh and blood.
Well, in a way he is. I must not forget that David is more related to Julian than he ever will be to me.
She blinked at him through the window. He looked back at her with the faint, dry patience she was beginning to recognize as his version of amusement.
She straightened, smoothed her skirt as best she could, and descended from the carriage with as much dignity as the situation allowed, which was not a great deal. Julian said nothing about the fact that she had been asleep for the better part of two hours after claiming she was not tired. She appreciated this more than she would ever tell him.
