“You say that as though it were a criticism.”
“It is a description.”
“Lovingly rendered,” Adrian said. He rose also, dusting crumbs from his coat with the unconcerned efficiency of a man who had long ago accepted that crumbs were an occupational hazard of his domestic arrangements. He caught Rosamund’s eye and smiled. He had been there when she needed him to be there, and she had been here when he needed to be somewhere that felt like home, and neither of them had ever found it necessary to make a speech about it.
“Clara,” he said, collecting his coat from the chair, “I shall return on Thursday. We have unfinished business regarding the northern territories.”
“The library windowsill is still contested,” Clara confirmed.
“It shall not remain so for long.” He bowed to her with the elaborate gravity he always brought to his departures from the nursery — the same gravity he had brought to every interaction with her since the morning he had arrived uninvited at breakfast and asked her to prove she was brave enough for his company, and she had examined his butter knife and found it sufficient. Clara accepted the bow with the regal composure it deserved.“Your Grace. Duchess.” He paused at the door. “You are both looking very well.”
He left. His footsteps descended the stair with the unhurried rhythm she had learnt over the course of a year — the gait of a man who considered Rath House a place he was welcome, which it was, because it was, and because the woman who ran it had decided that a household that had been quiet for too long had no business excluding the one person who reliably made it louder.
The nursery settled into its afternoon quiet. Clara had returned to the velvet rabbit, conducting a private briefing on the responsibilities of the newly elevated dukedom. Thunderclap surveyed the proceedings from his corner with the impassive dignity of a horse who had grown accustomed to parliamentary process.
Tristan came to stand beside her in the doorway.
He did not say anything immediately. He looked at Clara and at the nursery and at the afternoon light lying across the carpet.
Then he looked at her.
She had not told him yet. She had known for nine days — had known with the certainty of a woman who had been paying close attention to her own body since childhood, when attention had been the only instrument available for navigating a world that rarely announced its changes in advance. She had known, and she had been carrying it in the manner she had once carried everything that mattered: carefully, privately, with the old instinct of a woman who had learnt that the things you held tightly could always be taken, and that the only protection was to keep them close until you were sure.
She was sure now.
“I have something to tell you,” she said.
He heard the quality of it immediately. She watched him hear it — the shift in his attention, the way the warmth in his face deepened rather than guarded itself.
“Tell me,” he said.
She looked at him. At the face she had catalogued for a year with every available faculty — the hard jaw and the severe brow and the grey eyes that had stopped giving nothing to the world about six months ago and now, when they were turned on her, gave rather too much for a man who still occasionally pretended to be intimidating. At the slight disorder of his hair, which had never quite recovered from the months of Clara’s persistent interest. At the hands, resting still at his sides, which had signed their name on eight documents on a Tuesday afternoon and then spent a year learning what they were capable of when the documents were put away.
“We are going to need another room,” she said.
He was very still.
“The nursery,” she continued, keeping her voice even and her face composed, “will need to be extended. Or the room beside it prepared. Something with a good aspect. Mrs Alcott will know what she prefers.”
Tristan looked at her. He had not moved. His face held the arrested quality of a man whose mind had just arrived at a conclusion faster than his composure had been prepared for and was conducting emergency measures.
“Rosamund.”
“I am told the east-facing rooms receive the better morning light. The physician says spring, so we have time to be particular about?—”
“Rosamund.”
“—the aspect, and Clara will want to be consulted on the wallpaper, obviously, because she will have opinions, she has opinions about everything, including the governance of?—”
He crossed the distance between them in two steps and took her face in his hands and she stopped talking because his hands were not steady, and they were almost never unsteady anymore, and the fact of their unsteadiness reached her somewhere below every word she had been preparing and dissolved the prepared words entirely.
He looked at her. His eyes were very bright.
“Spring,” he said.
“Spring.”
He pressed his forehead to hers. The same gesture as the foot of a staircase in Hertfordshire, in a house that was beautiful and wrong, and it carried now everything it had carried then and considerably more besides — the months of mornings, the pianoforte finally played properly, the walks in the garden where Clara named things and the evenings where London came through the windows and neither of them needed to say what they were thinking because the thinking was the same.
