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“Nooo,” wailed Joan, with the operatic despair only a five-year-old could summon over falling blocks, and then, spotting Phillipa in the doorway, brightened at once and abandoned the tragedy entirely. “Your Grace! Did you bring peppermints?”

“I understand this is the third time I have been asked that question in as many minutes.”

“It is a very important question,” said Joan, with great seriousness, taking Phillipa’s hand and towing her toward the ruined block tower as though its reconstruction were now a matter of some urgency requiring a Duchess’s personal attention. “Tom always eats his too fast and then he is cross for the rest of the day. I save mine. I am very good at saving things.”

“I have noticed that about you.”

“It is because I used to have nothing to save,” Joan said, with the matter-of-fact bluntness children sometimes brought to their own hardest truths, entirely without self-pity, as though remarking on the weather. “So now that I have things, I like to keep them a good long while before I use them up. Mrs. Fairley says it is a very sensible habit for a girl in my position.”

Phillipa knelt down amid the scattered blocks, throat suddenly tight, and began helping rebuild the tower with rather more care than the task strictly required. “It is a very sensible habit indeed,” she managed, after a moment. “I think I might learn something from it myself.”

“You may have my peppermint, if you like, since you gave it to me first,” Joan offered, generously, producing a rather linty specimen from her pocket. “That is only fair.”

“I could not possibly take it back, Joan. It is yours to save for exactly as long as you like.”

Joan considered this with the gravity she brought to all her decisions, and then nodded, satisfied, and tucked the peppermint carefully back into her pocket, and returned to the business of the block tower with the single-minded focus of a child for whom, Phillipa thought, watching her, this small crooked house had somehow, against every reasonable expectation, become something very like a real home.

It was watching Joan’s careful, deliberate saving of a single peppermint that the whole of it crystallized in Phillipa’s mind: not for the first time, but with a clarity that had been building in her for weeks, that whatever she managed to build in her own strange, complicated marriage was the truest measure of what any of it was for.

CHAPTER 14

“Would you like to come closer, Your Grace? He sleeps sounder when there is a bit of warmth near the cradle. I have found babies know when someone is standing too far off to properly want them.”

Martha was attending to the baby as she addressed him.

Gregory did not move for a long moment. Then, feeling rather foolish, and rather more exposed than the small dim room warranted, he crossed the remaining distance and stood beside the cradle, looking down at the small figure in it.

“I suppose...” he said, with some hesitance.

It gave him a chance to observe the little boy, which he had not gotten enough opportunity to do so before.

The baby had his mother’s mouth. He had noticed it before, in glimpses he had allowed himself and then quickly looked away from, but standing this close there was no looking away from it any longer.

“He has her mouth,” he said, before he had quite decided to say it aloud.

“Does he, Your Grace?” Martha’s voice was gentle, and carefully unsurprised. “I did not know his mother, of course. But I have thought, once or twice, that he has a particular way of looking cross when he does not get his own way immediately, that seems rather too well developed for a child his age.”

Something that was almost a laugh escaped Gregory, rough and unpracticed. “She was exactly that. Cross the moment anything did not go precisely as she wished, and utterly unrepentant about showing it.” He looked down at the small sleeping face a moment longer. “I used to find it exhausting, when we were young. I would give a great deal, now, to find it exhausting again.”

Martha said nothing to that, only bent to smooth the blanket with unnecessary care, giving him the privacy of the silence without withdrawing from the room entirely, and Gregory stood a while longer beside the cradle, in the dark, with his hand resting lightly on its edge, before he made himself leave.

He did not go far, only stood in the corridor outside, his back against the cool plaster of the wall, and allowed himself, for the length of perhaps five minutes, the particular grief he had been outrunning for weeks.

I will do better by him, he told himself, in the dark corridor, with a fierceness that startled him. Whatever it costs me. However long it takes me to learn how.

It haunted him, of course, that his sister wasn’t here. It felt like he had failed in some important way, and that somehow, the only chance at redemption that he possessed was to make sure that the boy lives the best life possible.

“Call for the carriage,” he hastily told one member of the staff.

He had reached his limit of facing his feelings, and found that he could no longer sit with his grief.

A distraction was what he needed, and therefore not long after, he found himself at the Gentleman’s Club.

He had already downed one drink when Ronan appeared.

“Well, well, well, look who we have here? I see you seem fine, and in perfect health.You declined my fencing this morning on account of a headache,” said Ronan, dropping into the chair opposite Gregory’s at the club with an expression of theatrical betrayal, “and yet here you are, drinking, at an hour when any sensible man with a headache would be lying down in a darkened room.”

“I find that whiskey cures a great many ailments fencing cannot touch.”