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“Gregory,” she said. “I have a favor to ask of you.”

He turned his head. “Go on.”

“I want us to take our dinners together. Every evening, if it can be managed. And I want you to join the baby and me for tea, properly, not once in a fortnight when I ambush you in your own study.” She kept her eyes steady on his, though it cost her something. “I am not asking you to explain yourself to me, not tonight. I am only asking you to be present.”

He began, predictably, to draw breath for the same explanation he had given her before and she stopped him before he could get the first word fully out.

“I know what you have told me,” she said gently. “And I believe you believe it. But Gregory, the only way through a thing like this is practice. If you spend an hour with him today, and another tomorrow, it will not undo whatever weighs on you, but it will become easier, a little, each time. And if the two of you come to know one another, truly know one another, the whole of the rest of it will grow easier too. It has to.”

What she did not say, though it sat very near the surface of her, was that the days were already hard enough without a husband who vanished from every room she entered. She did not say that some nights, lying alone in the great empty apartments Mrs. Glenn had so carefully prepared, she wondered whether the pull she felt toward him was only the natural consequence of two strangers thrown together, and whether it would fade to nothing if only she came to know him better, or whether it would only grow. She did not say that she needed, very badly, to find out which, and that this request, framed so carefully around the baby’s welfare, was in truth as much a test of her own resolve as it was a kindness to anyone else.

Gregory looked at her for a long time in the starlight, and she could not read, in his face, what he found there. But at last he nodded, once, slowly, and something in her chest that had been held tight for weeks loosened by a fraction.

“Tea,” he said. “Tomorrow. And dinner, every evening, for as long as you can bear my company.”

“I believe I shall manage,” said Phillipa, and was rewarded, for the first time in what felt like a very long while, with the sight of his real smile.

They sat a while longer beneath the stars after that, neither of them in any particular hurry to end the night, and Phillipa found herself thinking, as the last of the brandy went untouched at his elbow and the candlelit windows of the house glowed warm behind them, that this was very nearly the first time since her wedding day that she had felt entirely certain of anything at all. Not certain of what he carried, still unspoken, behind his careful eyes. Not certain of what shape their strange, deliberate marriage would eventually take, built as it was on a bargain struck across a different bench, in a different season, by two people who had scarcely known each other’s names. But certain, at least, of this: that whatever came next, she did not mean to face it from the far side of a closed door, and neither, she thought, watching him tip his head back once more to the wheeling stars with something almost like peace settling over his tired face, did he.

It was not a resolution. It was only a beginning. But Phillipa had learned, in her father’s old lessons beneath these very same stars, that even the smallest and most ordinary of lights, given time enough and patience enough, could eventually be traced into a shape worth naming. She thought, walking back into the house beside her husband some while later, that she was finally, cautiously, willing to wait and see what shape theirs might become.

CHAPTER 17

The wagon had scarcely finished unloading before the whole of St. Anthony’s descended upon it.

“Mind the crate on the left, it has the good flour in it,” Phillipa called, as two of the older boys wrestled a sack of oats between them with more enthusiasm than technique, nearly upending the lot into the mud of the yard. “Careful, now. If you drop it, you shall be the ones sifting the stones out of your own porridge for a month.”

That produced the desired effect. The sack was set down with exaggerated, almost comical delicacy, and Phillipa allowed herself a small smile as she turned back to her list, checking off the items against Mrs. Fairley’s careful accounting: flannel, forty yards. Wool blankets, two dozen. A crate of oranges, which had cost a small fortune out of season and which she had ordered anyway, because she had not forgotten Joan’s face the first time she had ever seen one, turning it over and over in her small hands as though it might be some manner of trick.

“You will spoil them, Your Grace,” said Mrs. Fairley, though there was no real reproach in it, only the dry, tired fondness of a woman who had spent a decade watching children go without and had never once, in all that time, minded being proven wrong about what they might have instead.

“I intend to spoil them thoroughly,” Phillipa said. “It is, I have found, a most satisfying use of a large fortune.”

The yard was a scene of cheerful chaos. Word had gone round the moment the wagon’s wheels were heard on the lane, and children had come pouring out of every doorway to watch the unloading with the rapt attention London’s fashionable set reserved for the opera. Tom had appointed himself supervisor of the operation and was directing traffic with a gravity that suggested he expected to be paid for it. The twins, now nearly three and considerably steadier on their feet than they had been in the spring, had discovered that an empty crate made a very fine drum, and were engaged in demonstrating this at considerable volume until Georgie relieved them of the wooden spoon they had commandeered for the purpose, at which point the demonstration became a debate, and the debate became a chase, and the chase ended, as it generally did, with someone crying and someone else being sent to fetch a biscuit as reparations.

Joan alone was quiet, standing at Phillipa’s elbow with her hand tucked into the folds of Phillipa’s skirts, watching the crate of oranges with an expression of such fierce, disbelieving hope that it made something in Phillipa’s chest ache.

“You may have one now, if you like,” Phillipa told her. “You need not save this particular thing.”

Joan considered this with her usual gravity, and then shook her head. “I should like to save it a little while first. Just to know it is there.”

“Then it shall be there whenever you decide you are ready,” said Phillipa, and privately thought that she understood the impulse rather better than she once had.

It was nearly an hour before the wagon was emptied and the household’s excitement had settled into its ordinary hum, and Phillipa was going through the last of the accounts with Mrs. Fairley in the small, cluttered office that served as the orphanage’s nerve center, when the matron set down her pen and folded her hands, in the particular manner of a woman working up to something she did not relish saying.

“He came again, Your Grace.”

Phillipa’s own pen stilled. She did not need to ask who.

“Twice more, since I last wrote to you of it,” Mrs. Fairley went on, low, glancing once at the door as though the subject itself might be overheard. “The second time, I was from home, and Nurse Hobbs saw to him. She said he asked after the children by name. Not any particular child, mind, but asked what names we had here, as though he were listening for one in particular to answer to. She thought it very odd, and did not care for it, and I do not blame her.”

“And the third time?”

“That was this very morning, not two hours before your wagon arrived. I saw him myself.” Mrs. Fairley’s mouth thinned. “He stood at the fence a good quarter hour before ever he came to the door, Your Grace, watching the children in the yard. Not the way a gentleman watches children who amuse him. The way a man watches a face he is trying to place. I did not care for it above half, and I told him so, as politely as I know how, and asked what his business was.”

“And what did he say?”

“That he wished to speak with you, particularly. That it was a matter of some delicacy, and best discussed with the Duchess herself, and not with the staff.” Mrs. Fairley’s hands twisted together in her lap. “I told him you were not at home, which was true enough, and that I could not say when you would next call. He did not seem best pleased by that, though he was civil enough about it. And then, when I pressed him for a card, so that I might at least send word to you properly, he gave me his name instead. Said he did not carry cards on him just now, but that I might tell you Michael Dornet had called, and that he would return.”