“How is he?” Isadora asked, then regretted the quickness of it.
William glanced at her briefly. “Managing. The estate is in a bit of disarray. The former Duke’s affairs were not… He did not leave things particularly organized, and James would like to remain there for the time being.” He set his cup down. “The more pressing matter, it seems, is the child.”
“The baby,” said Letitia, who had been listening despite every appearance of focused toast-cutting.
“Her nurse is overwhelmed. The household is unsettled. James writes that the child has been fretful for days.” William paused. “He has asked whether Cecily and I might stop at Ashbourne on our way to Buxton. Briefly. He thinks that Cecily’s experience at the orphanage?—”
“I’ll go,” Isadora blurted.
The table fell quiet in the way tables did when something had been said faster than anyone expected.
William looked at her. “The original plan was only for Cecily and me to go,” he said carefully.
“I know.”
“Ashbourne is not… It is not a social call, Isadora. The household is in disarray, and James is under considerable strain. It is not?—”
“I understand that.”
“You do not know James particularly well in these circumstances. He is not—” He stopped, reconsidering. “He is not at his easiest when he is dealing with difficulty.”
“I am aware of that.” She held his gaze steadily. “I was there on the terrace, William.”
William looked at her, thinking for a moment.
“You barely know the child,” he said more quietly.
“I do not know her at all. But that is not my reason.”
“Then what is?”
Isadora considered the question.
“He asked for help,” she began. “And a baby is crying, and I have nothing more pressing to do than read about swallows. Besides, Cecily will need my help.” She looked at him evenly. “Let me go with you.”
William said nothing for a moment. He turned his coffee cup, once, in his hand, looking at the table. Cecily, sitting across from him, was looking at Isadora with an expression that was not quite a smile but was adjacent to one.
“Letitia stays here,” he said finally.
“That is profoundly unfair,” Letitia protested.
“You are in your first Season. A household dealing with a bereavement and an unsettled baby is not?—”
“I am wonderful with babies?—”
“Letitia.”
Letitia subsided; she knew she had lost the immediate battle and was already planning the longer campaign.
William looked back at Isadora. Something moved through his expression. Not quite reluctance, not quite acceptance, but thesettling of a man who had made a decision and intended to stick to it.
“You come, you help where you can, and you do not stand in James’s way.”
“When am I ever in anyone’s way?”
CHAPTER 3
“If you have come to laugh at me,” James said, his voice dry and precise in the way it got when he was covering something else entirely, “I assure you I have already suffered enough humiliation for one morning.”
