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“Only to the baby. Very soft. I could not hear the words.” Martha hesitated. “And he touched his hair, Your Grace, the way you do and then he went.”

It wasn’t much information but it was all that she knew about him for the time being.

“Thank you, Martha.”

It was the fourth morning.

Theodore had recovered as swiftly as he had fallen ill. They had made sure for the doctor to continue making regular visits but Phillipa still felt an unease, as though the baby would fall sick again.

“Did you see any signs of sickness from the baby?” she asked Martha, who must have grown tired of all the inquiries by now. But that didn’t matter in the slightest to Phillipa, who only wanted the baby to be well.

“Not that I could see,” Martha replied with an equally concerned face. “If anything, I think he is going rather well. Very pink, and active. He is sleeping better, too.”

Phillipa breathed a sigh of relief.

But just cause the crisis with the baby had been averted didn’t mean that all was well at all.

She thought back to Gregory once again.

He had timed his visits in way that they occurred whenever Phillipa was sleeping. They happened early in the morning, or late into the night. The only people who had seen him were members of the staff, or the baby.

“His Grace has gone out, Your Grace,” said the butler on the first day.

“Gone out again?” said Phillipa, on the second.

By the third, she had stopped asking. She saw only the empty chair at dinner, and the plate of cold meat and bread and butter left for him on a tray in the study, untouched.

It was Mrs. Glenn who spoke, on the third afternoon, finding her in the nursery with a cold cup of tea and the wooden horse in her lap.

“When he was a boy,” she said, taking up the tray, “he wore a path in the carpet of this room. Back and forth, back and forth, whenever something troubled him. He would not sit with it.”

“I have noticed that he does not sit.”

“He does not know how to be helped, Your Grace.” The housekeeper’s voice was very even. “He has only ever been the one who helps.”

Phillipa looked down at her hands, “And what does one do when they wish to help him?”

“I would tell you to give him his time.”

She took her dinner alone, in the long dining room and tried her hardest to be reasonable.

He is grieving and that is what a person who is grieving does.

There was no reason to grief, after all.

She told herself that she had, after all, been married to him on a bargain, and nothing in the bargain entitled her to his company.

She sat at the small parlor desk with Augusta’s suggestion before her and wrote down the names of every orphanage in London she knew, and the ones she had only heard of, and drew a neat line beneath each, and left space to write what she found. It was good work, and useful, and she was glad of it.

And under all of it, the anger.

It surprised her. It rose in her at odd moments.

He had told her things he had told no one else, she was sure of it. He had let her see his face without its armor, and had looked, for a moment, as though he might trust her with the rest. And then he had gone, put a wall between them and taken all of himself to the other side.

I offered, she thought, furious. I said I would stay. I said we would do it together, and he did not even answer.

He did not rely on her.