They both looked.
Mrs. Plum was holding the stick aloft, keeping Violet from putting it into her mouth. Violet turned to look at James with expectation.
He cleared his throat. “That’s nice.” His voice was level.
Isadora looked at the path. “She can keep it.” Her voice was also level.
I ambecoming far too practiced at this.
They walked back to the house, and the stick was dropped, and Mrs. Plum chattered about the flowers, and neither of them said anything at all about the fraction of an inch that had existed briefly between them on the lake path and had been mercifully interrupted.
CHAPTER 16
“She’s been crying for twenty minutes.”
Isadora said it to nobody in particular, standing in the nursery doorway in her nightgown with a shawl pulled hastily around her shoulders, her hair down, her feet in her slippers, having been woken by Violet’s cries at the precise moment sleep had arrived.
Mrs. Plum was already standing over the cradle, her cap slightly askew, her expression the professional blend of competence and exhaustion that Isadora had come to recognize as her working face after midnight.
“It’s the storm, Your Grace,” Mrs. Plum said over the baby’s cries. “She woke the moment the thunder started. I cannot settle her.”
Outside, the rain was doing everything at once, hitting the windows in gusts, retreating, returning with more conviction.Lightning had flashed twice since Isadora left her room, the kind that lit the whole sky before plunging everything back into darkness.
August had turned sharp overnight, and the nursery was not warm enough for what Violet was feeling, which was not cold but frightened.
Isadora crossed to the cradle. “Here.”
She lifted the baby before Mrs. Plum could object, and Violet’s cries hitched immediately, suspended for a second.
“I know,” she soothed. “I know. It’s very loud.”
Violet wailed, stretching her arms.
“It will not last,” Isadora murmured. “Storms always stop.”
“Isadora.”
She turned to find James standing in the doorway.
He had clearly come straight from bed. His dark hair was disheveled, his feet bare on the floor, and he was wearing his shirt loose and open at the collar, the sleeves not properly fastened. He had his coat over one arm, apparently grabbed as an afterthought against the cold, and was holding it to his chest.
His eyes roved down her body, and she remembered she was in her nightgown. It was modest—made of cotton, high-necked, the shawl thrown over it—but it was a nightgown nonetheless. She felt a tickle at her neck and remembered that her hair was also down, falling past her shoulders.
“She woke me,” James said by way of explanation.
“She woke us all,” Mrs. Plum called from the window.
“Is she alright?”
“The storm,” Isadora said. “She’s frightened.”
James nodded.
He came into the room, and Mrs. Plum bowed her head and stepped out.
Isadora found herself standing in the center with Violet in her arms and James at a closer proximity than the hour and her state of dress warranted.
She looked down at Violet.
