“Let’s hope she stops at petals,” Felix replied, but the moment was already sliding into the next.
They spent the better part of an hour there: Rose reading, Felix half-listening and half-dreaming, Lizzie alternating between naps and attempts to devour the local flora. The city moved around them, but for once, Felix felt as if they had claimed a quiet bubble out of time.
When the shadows began to lengthen, Rose packed up the blanket, and they meandered up Bond Street, following the crowds to the toy shop Felix had once frequented as a child. The shop windows were stacked with impossible wonders—wooden trains, puzzles, dolls dressed in silk, and carved animals so lifelike that Felix expected them to leap from their shelves and escape.
Inside, the clerk greeted them with a deference reserved for only the highest of the high.
“Your Grace,” he murmured, bowing to Felix, and “Your Grace,” to Rose, and “How can we serve the little one today?”
Felix was not immune to the pleasures of acquisition. He let Lizzie peer at every toy in the shop, then selected a hand-painted rocking horse that looked sturdy enough to carry her through every crisis in the nursery. Rose tried to protest.
“She is far too young for that,” she insisted.
“She will grow into it,” Felix said, already arranging for the horse to be delivered to the house by evening.
“She may not walk for months,” Rose argued, though she was smiling as she said it.
“Then we shall wheel her around until she does.”
At the counter, Felix noticed a case of jewelry—mostly lockets, gold, and silver, and some inlaid with stones. He asked the clerk to open it, and, after a moment’s inspection, selected the smallest locket they had: a plain gold oval, just large enough to hold a lock of hair or a scrap of paper.
“For Lizzie,” he explained. “To mark her first trip out on the town.”
Rose did not argue this time. She watched as he had the locket boxed, her eyes soft and distant.
They took the carriage back home as the first lamps lit the street. Felix kept a hand on Rose on the other side, Lizzie snoring gently between them.
That night, after Lizzie had been put to bed and the house had quieted, Felix sat at his desk with the locket in his palm. He opened it, considered, then noticed a small curl from Lizzie’s hair tucked inside. Certainly, that was Rose’s doing.
He thought for a moment, then took a sliver of parchment and wrote, in his neatest hand: “Forever.” He folded the scrap and placed it opposite the curl.
He snapped the locket shut and tucked it away, a small secret against his chest.
He had never quite had a family before. He intended to keep this one.
CHAPTER 18
The house had taken on a new kind of hush. Rose recognized the change immediately. It was the kind of silence that meant nothing was about to break, that the world could be trusted, at least for tonight.
She sat at her writing desk in the corner of the parlor with a quill poised over a half-finished letter to her sister. The paper was beginning to ripple where her hand had lingered too long. On the rug, Lizzie was occupied with a length of silk ribbon, her fingers grasping and releasing it in a rhythm that struck Rose as almost meditative. The baby’s contented burbles filled the air, a counterpoint to the tick of the mantel clock.
Across the room, she watched Felix lean against the casement, his profile silvered by the streetlamps beyond. He held a glass of whiskey that caught the light and fractured it into gold, but he had not yet taken a sip.
“Any word from the Whiteridges?” he asked, his voice so casual it felt rehearsed.
Rose glanced up, then down at her page, then up again. “None. I suspect my mother is punishing me for missing Violet’s birthday. Or perhaps she’s heard the latest rumor about us and wishes to appear martyred by association.”
Felix’s mouth quirked at the edge. “She’ll forgive you. Especially when Lizzie walks before any of her children ever managed.”
“She’s not walking,” Rose protested, but with more pride than alarm. “She’s simply… ambitious.”
“As are you.”
The praise, if it was praise, made her cheeks warm. She bent her head over the letter, willing the flush away. From the periphery of her vision, she watched Felix cross to the settee, glass in hand, and lower himself with a slow, wary grace. The moment he sat, Lizzie made a direct path for his shoe, gnawing on the toe as if she meant to prove a point.
“She’s going to be trouble, isn’t she?” Felix acknowledged.
“It’s hereditary,” Rose said, risking a smile. She could not remember the last time she had spoken so easily. The room seemed to expand, as if it were finally large enough for them all.
