“Your father’s house is very fine.”
Thomas considered this. “Ours has a dog.”
“Ours has a baby,” James said.
Thomas’s eyes went wide. “Where?”
“Inside.”
Thomas turned toward the door with the immediate purposefulness as if his priorities had just been entirely reorganized.
“Slowly,” Cecily warned without looking.
Thomas slowed to what he clearly felt was a reasonable compromise between slowly and his current objective.
Eleanor, who had been standing beside her mother with a composed, watchful expression she had inherited entirely from William, looked up at Isadora.
“Is the baby nice?” she asked.
“She is very nice,” Isadora replied.
“Does she pull hair?”
“Occasionally.”
Eleanor accepted that with a nod. “I do not mind,” she decided. “I’ll be careful.”
“She’ll like you,” Isadora assured her.
Eleanor looked pleased by that.
“Right,” Letitia said, materializing beside Isadora again as though she had been circling and had just returned. “Tea. Now. I have been stuck in a carriage since nine o’clock this morning, and Thomas has been singing the same song for the last two hours. The same song, Izzy. Every word, every verse, and then back to the beginning without pause.”
“I like the song,” Thomas said, pulling away from his nurse.
“We know you like the song, sweetheart,” Cecily interjected.
“I can sing it again.”
“Perhaps later,” William suggested with a pained smile as he walked with James to the door.
“Now?”
“Later,” three adults said simultaneously.
Thomas seemed to file that away as a negotiating position rather than a conclusion.
“So, I need tea, and I need you to tell me everything, and I need them in that order.”
“There is nothing to tell.”
Letitia made a sound of comprehensive disagreement. “Isadora Margaret Whitmore?—”
“Harcliffe,” James corrected mildly from where he was holding the door.
Everyone looked at him, but he seemed entirely untroubled by the attention.
Letitia turned back to Isadora with an expression that had gone from interested to fascinated in approximately one second. “Harcliffe,” she repeated with great care.
