Page 76

“Will he allow it?”

Sebastian studied him a moment. Then he lifted the boy and passed him over, carefully, showing him where the weight should rest.

Tristan settled the child against his arm.

For a second his hands did not know what to do. He remembered the weight of another child, too little and too still, in a shawl someone had pushed into his arms in a corridor while a door shut behind him. His breath went short. His arms went rigid. Then this child kicked him in the stomach, hard, and seized the watch chain again, and grunted at its refusal to come away, and Tristan could no longer confuse the child in his arms with the memory of the one he had lost. This one was heavy and warm and furious and alive. This one smelled of milk and biscuits. This one was trying, with great determination, to eat his waistcoat button.

“A determined fellow,” he said. His voice shook a little.

“You are encouraging him,” Sebastian said.

“He has not yet refused to hear me.”

The baby took the button out of his mouth and considered Tristan with round dark eyes. Then, for no reason anyone could see, he smiled, a vast, wet, toothless smile that took up his whole face, and Tristan felt it go into him like a blade.

He lost track of time. He made a face at the child, and the child laughed, a sudden hiccuping chuckle, and he made it again. He bounced him on his knee, and the child shrieked with joy, and Amelia said something about having just fed him, and Tristan did not hear her. He knew nothing but the small warm weight in his arms and the fist in his cravat and the helpless delight in the child’s face, and something cracking open in his own chest that he had kept shut for five years.

Then he looked up and found Lydia watching him.

She sat across the table with her hands in her lap. She was not smiling. Her face was still and soft, her eyes bright, and she watched him as if she were seeing a part of him that he had kept hidden even from himself. He braced himself for hope in her face, for the question she had every right to ask.

It did not come. She held his eyes one moment longer. Then she turned to Amelia and asked whether the journey from Ravensmere had been difficult and left him with the child.

The restraint was kinder than any attempt to reassure him. It also left him nothing to push against, and he sat in the warm conservatory with Sebastian’s son asleep against his chest and felt something shift inside him.

The nurse came for the boy at three. Tristan gave him up carefully and watched the small sleeping face until the woman carried him out toward the house. Amelia and Lydia went with her, deep in a debate about whether a child should sleep in a draft. Sebastian stayed.

They stood together in the conservatory doorway. Tristan brushed a damp mark from his cuff and only spread it.

“You have exchanged your elegance for a remarkable amount of laundry,” he said.

“Amelia informs me that elegance was never my strongest quality.”

“I remember you disputing that.”

“I was younger.” Sebastian glanced toward the house. “And usually alone when I disputed it.”

Tristan followed the glance. The nurse had reached the terrace. He could just see the white of the child’s cap against her shoulder.

“I thought I would not be able to hold him,” he said.

Sebastian waited.

“I have not held a child since… I did not think I could.” He studied his hands. “And then he bit my waistcoat.”

“He does that.”

“For five years I have told myself I did not want one. That wanting it killed her, and if I never wanted it again, nothing like that could happen to me again.” The words came out faster than he intended, and he could not stop them. “I am no longer certain I ever stopped wanting it. Perhaps it was only easier to call a thing unwanted than to admit how much I feared losing it.”

Sebastian let the silence stand a long moment. Then he said, “She has made a good place here.”

“Yes.”

“You seem to have found one too.”

Another day Tristan would have rejected the observation. Today he stood with his cuff still wet and his chest still aching from the child’s weight, and accepted it. When Lydia called from the terrace to ask whether they meant to stand in the doorway all afternoon, he went without pretending to remember another task.

That night, when their guests had gone up, Lydia sat at her dressing table brushing out her hair. Tristan lay on the bed in his shirt with his hands behind his head and watched her in the glass.