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Gregory’s voice was terrible, a register Phillipa had never heard from him, and before she could so much as draw breath to call his name, he had crossed the room and taken Dornet by the shoulder and spun him bodily away from the crib, and his fist connected with Dornet’s jaw with a crack that she felt in her own teeth.

Dornet staggered, but he did not go down.

He came up with the knife flashing a swing that Gregory caught at the wrist and twisted hard, hard enough that Phillipa heard something give, and the blade clattered to the floorboards and skidded under the rocking chair.

Gregory slammed him back against the wall with both hands at his collar.

“You are a thief and a coward,” Gregory said, low and savage, his face inches from the other man’s. “You left my sister alone to die, and now you come into my house, into my son’s nursery, with a knife, for what? For a claim you forfeited the night you let her walk out that door without you?”

“I did not force her out.” Dornet spat the words through a split lip, and there was something underneath his fear now that was almost defiant. “She came because she wanted to. I never once forced that girl to do anything in her life. You cannot make me the villain when I didn’t convince her to do anything she didn’t already want to.”

“You left her to die.”

Something flickered across Dornet’s face, for one terrible instant Phillipa thought she saw something that might almost have been grief.

“I was not ready. I was a boy with nothing to my name and a girl who thought love would feed us both. What was I meant to do? And then I heard that she had given me a son, and I thought of nothing else. He is my blood, Your Grace. Whatever else you believe of me, that boy carries my name whether either of us likes it or not, and I will not be shut out of the only thing I have left of her.”

The grip on his collar did not loosen even a fraction. “You forfeited that claim the day you vanished. You’re lucky I’m not doing worse to you right now… because I want to bash your head in.”

Dornet’s eyes went past Gregory’s shoulder, to the crib. Something in his face twisted with a hunger that made Phillipa’s skin crawl.

“I only want to look at him,” Dornet said, his voice gone suddenly, horribly reasonable, as though the knife in his hand were some small misunderstanding. A decoration of sorts. “One look, Your Grace. I have come all this way…. I am asking only to look at my own son’s face. Is that so very much?”

“You will not go near that crib.”

“I have done nothing tonight that I did not have every right to do. I was invited.” Something like genuine grievance flickered across his battered features. “Your own wife asked me to this ball, Your Grace. I came because I believed, for one foolish hour, that perhaps I was finally to be allowed something of what I lost. And now I find the whole of it was a trap. Do you think this is fair? You have turned me into a villain when I am not one.”

Gregory refused to relent. “You might have fooled my sister, but you cannot fool me.”

Dornet’s expression darkened.

“Give him to me,” Dornet said, “or I will take him.”

He wrenched sideways, breaking free of Gregory’s hold for just a moment, and dove for the blade beneath the rocking chair.

Gregory went after him, caught his ankle, and the two of them went down together in a tangle of limbs that sent the rocking chair skidding, and Phillipa heard, over her own scream, a short, sharp cry of pain that was Gregory’s.

“Gregory!”

She saw the blade come free, saw the dark stain already spreading at his sleeve where Dornet’s wild thrust had caught him along the forearm. Every careful promise she had made about staying back deserted her entirely. She flung herself across the room, not toward the knife, but toward Dornet himself, catching at his free arm with both hands and throwing the whole of her weight into it, shrieking.

The distraction was all Gregory needed.

He surged up from the floor, blood running freely down his forearm and dripping from his fingers, and drove his good fist into Dornet’s jaw with everything he had left in him. Dornet’s head snapped back against the floorboards, and this time he did not get up again.

For a moment the nursery was utterly silent, except for the baby’s crying and the ragged sound of Gregory’s own breath.

“Is he,” Phillipa began, and could not finish it.

“He is breathing.” Gregory climbed unsteadily to his feet, cradling his injured arm, and looked down at the man sprawled unconscious on the nursery floor with an expression that held no triumph in it at all, only a vast and sudden exhaustion. “Drummons. Fetch footmen, quietly, and have him locked in the blue bedroom until the constables can be sent for discreetly. I do not want this spoken of below stairs before morning.”

“At once, Your Grace.” The butler was already moving, two of the younger footmen appearing in the doorway as if summoned by instinct alone.

Martha had Theodore up out of the crib and against her shoulder, and the baby’s cries were already softening into hiccups now that the worst of the noise and fear had passed out of the room.

“Gregory, your arm.” Phillipa was at his side in an instant, her hands hovering, afraid to touch. “You are bleeding terribly.”

“It is not so bad as it looks.”