Behind them, Clara’s voice rose in authoritative declaration: “The Earl of Carrots — I mean the Duke — shall also oversee the management of all biscuits not otherwise assigned.”
Neither of them moved.
“She is going to be extraordinary,” Rosamund said, very quietly, against his forehead.
“She already is.”
“About the baby.”
“Yes.”
“She is going to be completely insufferable about the baby.”
His chest moved against her with the sound she had first heard in a study full of string, low and private and carrying the warmth of a man who had spent years without anyone to laugh with and had subsequently discovered that laughter was something he intended to keep in considerable supply.
“The baby,” he said, “will be very fortunate.”
“The baby will have a seven-year-old tyrant for a sister who will have opinions about its name and its sleeping arrangements and the colour of its nursery walls.”
“The baby will also have a father who is entirely unequal to refusing either of them anything whatsoever.”
She pulled back to look at him. He was still not composed. The unsteadiness was still in his hands and the brightness was still in his eyes and the severity she had spent a year learning to see through was entirely absent, replaced by the open, unhidden factof a man who had arrived, at last, at the life he had stopped believing was available to him.
“I know,” she said. “I have never found that a difficulty.”
He kissed her. Not urgently, not with the hunger that had characterised the earlier months when restraint had been a habit not yet broken of — but with the settled warmth of a man who had learnt that he was permitted to do this and had made his peace with the permanence of the permission. She held his lapels and let him, and somewhere below the warmth was the thing she had arrived at over months of mornings and an afternoon on a bench in Hyde Park and a night on a staircase in Hertfordshire — the knowledge, finally trusted, that this was not something held tightly against loss. This was simply what was.
“Your Grace,” Clara’s voice arrived from behind them. “You are in the doorway again.”
Tristan lifted his head. He did not step back from Rosamund. He turned his head to look at his ward, who was standing in the centre of the nursery with Bess under one arm and the new Duke of Carrots under the other, regarding them with the expression of a person who had witnessed this sort of thing before and had opinions about it.
“I am in the doorway,” he confirmed.
“It is not efficient,” Clara said. “You are blocking the light.”
“I apologise.”
“You do not look sorry.”
“I am privately sorry.”
Clara examined him. Then she examined Rosamund. Then she looked between them.
“Is there news?” she asked.
Rosamund felt Tristan’s hand find hers. She laced her fingers through his — not tightly, not with the desperate grip of a woman holding on against loss, but with the simple, deliberate pressure of one person choosing another’s hand. The way she had reached for him on a staircase. The way she intended to keep reaching.
“There is news,” she said.
Clara was silent for a moment. Then she looked at the velvet rabbit in her arms, and at Bess, and at the rocking horse in the corner, and at the room she had claimed and named and made entirely and thoroughly hers over the course of a year in a house that had not known, until she arrived, how much it needed her.
“The baby,” she said, with the authority of a woman who had already made her decision and saw no need to wait for anyone else to arrive at it, “will need a proper name. I shall compile a list.”
Rosamund pressed her face against Tristan’s shoulder. He held her hand and looked at Clara with the expression he always wore when she managed, without any apparent effort, to say the truest thing in the room.
“Of course,” he said.
“There will be requirements,” Clara said.
