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“When I saw the maid… it was rather… it was by chance that I ran into her, but I believe now that it was divine timing. It was meant for me to find out, otherwise I would have never gotten the confirmation I needed, perhaps for an entire lifetime.”

Phillipa could hear the pain in his voice, and it broke her heart to see him like this. But she knew that it wasn’t her place to interrupt now, and she would let him speak to his hearts content.

This is a safe space for you, she wanted to tell him.

“She had been dead six months, Phillipa. She died sick, and frightened, with no one of her blood beside her. And I was not there in the end.”

“Gregory...”

“When our parents ignored her,” he went on, as though she had not spoken, “and gave all they had to me because I was the heir, I told myself I was standing between her and it. That I was taking the pressure so it would not touch her. But I was not protecting her at all. I was only leaving her, more quietly than they did. Exactly as they did.” A tear ran down his face and he did not seem to feel it. “And now I have her son. And I am so afraid that I shall do it again and fail him too.”

Phillipa did not let go of his hand.

“You could not be your sister’s parent,” she said. She kept her voice low and even, as she might with a child. “You were a boy yourself and you did protect her, in the ways you were able. I do not say it to comfort you but because I have watched what you do, every day, since the night I found that baby in your library, and I know what kind of man does that.” She drew a breath. “And as for Theodore, he will be perfectly well. He is going to be perfectly well. We will make sure of it, the two of us, together.”

He let out a sound that was half laugh and half sob. He had been looking at the cradle all this while, and now, slowly, he turned his head.

Their eyes met.

The pained smile that had barely formed on his mouth simply fell away. She saw it go. What was left in his face was something open and stripped and searching, something she had glimpsed once before, in a tumbled library, and never since. His gaze dropped. She knew exactly where. Her lips parted before she could stop them.

Kiss me, she thought.

She had never wanted anything so clearly in her life.

She leaned in, as did he with his hand coming up slowly toward her face, close enough that she felt his breath on her mouth.

He was close enough that she closed her eyes.

But before she could feel his lips on her own, he had pulled back so abruptly that her hand fell out of his.

He was on his feet before she had opened her eyes, stumbling a step, one hand dragged across his mouth as though to erase something.

“Forgive me,” he said roughly. “I do not want to fail you as well. I fear it is unavoidable.”

“Gregory...”

But he was already at the door, and through it. She heard his steps go down the corridor, uneven at first, and then quick and quiet, and then nothing at all.

Phillipa sat alone on the nursery floor, in the gray light, beside a sleeping child. She could still feel where his hand had been on her cheek. Her lips burned as she pressed her fingers to them and did not know whether she wanted to laugh or weep, and did neither, and stayed where she was.

CHAPTER 21

“You are certain of the name, Your Grace?”

“I am certain of the name.”

Mr. Pell nodded, slowly. Gregory had sought him out specifically.

Gregory had not slept in five days.

That was the trick, he had learned. If he kept moving and kept himself busy the grief would not catch up to him.

Or at least, that is what he hoped. But it was proving a lot harder to do in practice. In practice, he felt that the grief was consuming.

“And what else do you have?”

“Very little.” He had written it out the night before, in his study. “He was a milliner’s assistant. That is all the maid could tell me of his trade. She did not know the shop, only that it was somewhere near the Strand, and that he left it when he took my sister away, some two years since. After that, he left her. When he heard she was with child, he was gone in a month.”