Nurse Ellis’s expression softened. “Then try.”
Frances stood slowly, and the baby stirred. Frances froze. The baby’s mouth trembled, and Frances immediately began to sway from one foot to the other. The movement had the careful, anxious rhythm of a person crossing a frozen pond and hoping no one noticed the cracks beneath her shoes.
“Hush,” she whispered. “Please do not cry. I have no strategy prepared for crying.”
Frances resumed the sway, a little slower. She held the child higher against her shoulder, as Nurse Ellis had taught her, and patted lightly at her back. She glanced toward the nurse.
“Like this?”
“A little firmer, Your Grace. She will not break.”
Frances walked a little, from the hearth to the window and back again. The room had settled into evening quiet. The lamps were lowered, and the fire threw a gentle glow over the nursery walls. Outside, the glass reflected a blurred image of Frances moving with the baby in her arms, her own face paler than usual, her mouth set with concentration.
Still, as she held the baby, she could not help looking for him in her.
The fair hair? Perhaps. The set of the brow? Impossible to tell. The stubbornness? Well, that could belong to anyone, though Andrew possessed enough of it to share generously.
Was he her father? She could not, for the life of her, tell.
The baby fussed again, turning her face against Frances’s shoulder.
Frances tightened with alarm. “No, no. We were doing so well.”
Nurse Ellis murmured from near the hearth, “Keep walking.”
Frances obeyed. Then, she began to recite the first lines of the novel she had been reading earlier, then stopped when she forgot them. Instead, she invented.
“There was once a very small lady,” she murmured, “who came to a very large house and immediately made herself its most important resident. She possessed no fortune, no title, and very little hair, yet everyone obeyed when she cried.”
The baby quieted.
Encouraged, Frances continued.
“This small lady had a fearsome temper, excellent lungs, and a habit of looking at people as though they had disappointed her before they had even begun. But she was also very brave, though she did not know it, because everything in the world was new to her.”
The words softened as she spoke them. The baby’s body grew heavier by degrees. Frances hardly dared breathe. Her hand, supporting the baby’s head, had begun to cramp from holding the same careful position too long.
Still, she did not stop, and at one point, she heard a surrendering sound.
Frances looked down.
“Asleep?” she whispered.
Nurse Ellis came nearer, peered gently, and smiled. “Asleep.”
Relief washed through Frances so swiftly that she almost laughed. It was a small victory. Yet, it felt enormous.
Frances stood very still, holding the sleeping child. She did not know the truth. She did not know whether Andrew had lied by omission, whether he protected another, whether some future revelation would make a fool of her compassion. She did not know what claim this baby had upon her husband’s life.
But she knew the child had fallen asleep in her arms. She knew the small weight of her. She knew the warmth. She knew that when the baby cried, something in her now answered before reason did.
That frightened her more than she expected.
Frances lowered her cheek, not quite touching the baby’s cap, but close enough to feel the softness of it.
“Oh, little one,” she whispered so quietly even Nurse Ellis could not have heard. “What are you doing to me?”
The baby slept on, unconcerned by questions of blood, scandal, marriage, or belonging.
