“That will be all,” Andrew dismissed her.
The words were not loud, but they carried.
Mrs. Carter stopped at once. “Of course, Your Grace.”
He turned toward the staircase, then glanced back. Frances followed, carrying the child with both caution and care. Her steps were slower than usual, robbed of their sharp certainty by the sleeping weight in her arms. Andrew moderated his pace without meaning to.
The hall fell away behind them. The great staircase curved upward beneath portraits of stern, dead Sinclairs who had survived wars, debts, scandals and their own unfortunate taste in waistcoats. Candlelight from the sconces trembled along the gilt frames. Outside, late afternoon pressed pale and cool against the tall windows, turning the glass silver.
Halfway up, Frances quietly spoke. “You did not tell me she was a girl.”
Andrew kept his eyes ahead. “No.”
“Was that an omission of strategy or merely habit?”
“Must it be one of the two?”
“With you, I begin to suspect everything is either strategy or evasion.”
He glanced at her then. She was looking down at the baby, but there was the faintest curve at the corner of her mouth.
“I see marriage has not made you charitable,” he pointed out.
“Marriage has made me observant. Charity remains under consideration.”
Against his better judgment, amusement touched him. “That is unfortunate. I had hoped for charity first.”
“You should have married a less observant woman.”
“I did try to avoid marriage altogether.”
“As did I. Yet here we are, Your Grace. We must both endure the consequences of our poor execution.”
The nursery lay in the east wing, though he had avoided calling it that whenever possible. It had once been a suite of rooms used by his mother’s ladies, then shut up after her death, then aired and furnished with almost brutal efficiency once Mary’s child had been brought from the cottage. It was comfortable now. He had seen to every detail as one might provision a fortress against siege.
A fire burned low in the grate when they entered. The room smelled of warm milk, clean linen, beeswax and the faint powdery sweetness particular to infants. Curtains of soft cream muslin had been drawn back to admit what remained of the day. A cradle stood near the hearth, polished pale wood beneath a canopy embroidered with faded silver thread.
Frances approached the cradle. The baby made a small sound, not quite waking, and Frances lowered her with such slow care that Andrew felt the motion in his own shoulders. She bent over the cradle, with one hand lingering beneath the child’s head until the last possible moment. The infant stirred. Frances rested two fingers lightly against the blanket and whispered something he did not catch.
Whatever it was, the child settled.
Andrew stood by the door and watched his wife bend over another woman’s baby with a tenderness she had not promised anyone.
The sight unsettled him more than the crying had.
It was not that she looked maternal, though she did. It was not that she seemed naturally suited to the scene, though that too was true in a manner he found almost alarming. It was that she had entered the room with no claim at all and, in the span of a few moments, made the child seem less like a responsibility and more like a person.
A very small person, perhaps, but a person all the same.
Chapter Eleven
“She is thoroughly appealing,” Frances said.
The words escaped before she could dress them in wit or restraint. They were plain, almost foolishly plain, and for that reason she felt heat rise at once beneath her skin.
The Duke didn’t say anything. She glanced back down into the cradle, where the baby slept with one fist curled near her cheek and her little mouth pursed as though she had quite exhausted herself with her earlier indignation. The firelight touched the child’s dark lashes and the soft curve of her brow. Something in Frances’s chest gave an unexpected little pull.
He was standing near the door, one shoulder almost touching the frame, with his arms folded across his chest. The pose might have seemed careless in another man. In him, it was control disguised as ease. Even in the warm nursery, with the scent of milk and clean linen softening the air, he looked as though he had brought a draught of winter in with him.
