“How graciously low your expectations are.”
“They are practical.”
“They are ducal.”
“They are often the same thing.”
Despite herself, she took a small bite. Andrew watched as though she had just performed some act of great diplomacy. His shoulders eased, barely, but she saw it.
Concern,she thought to herself.
And perhaps concern, if tended too long, could become something neither of them was prepared to name.
She lowered her eyes to the bowl and ate because she had promised, because she was hungry, and because tomorrow, the baby would need her again.
Later that night, Frances woke to the sound of crying.
For a moment she lay still, caught between sleep and uncertainty, listening through the dark. Sinclair House had its own nocturnal language: the settling of old wood, the sigh of wind against glass, the faint crack of dying embers in the grate.
Then, the cry came again. It was thin, wounded and painfully insistent.
Frances was out of bed before she had properly decided to move. She drew on her robe, pushed her feet into slippers, and opened her chamber door with care. The corridor beyond was dim, lit only by a single lamp burning low in its bracket. The house felt vast at night, its portraits rendered into shadows.
She told herself Nurse Ellis would already be awake, having heard the cry herself. She told herself it was not necessary for her to come.
She went anyway.
The nursery door was half open when she arrived. The baby lay in her cradle, with her face red and furious, and her little fists batting at the blanket as though fighting some private war against linen. Nurse Ellis was nowhere in sight, though a faint sound came from the adjoining room.
“Hush,” Frances whispered, moving quickly to the cradle. “You will wake the entire house and then we shall both be scolded.”
The baby cried harder.
“Yes, I see. The idea of being scolded holds no terror for you.”
Frances lifted her with careful hands. It was done less awkwardly than before, though still not gracefully. The baby’s body was warm and rigid with displeasure. Frances settled her against her shoulder and began the slow, uneven sway she had been practicing.
“There now,” she murmured. “I am here. It is only dark, and darkness is not nearly so frightening once one has properly scolded it.”
The crying softened to a hiccup. Frances walked with her from hearth to window, then back again. Her own eyes burned with sleep, and the chill of the floor crept through her slippers, but the small weight against her shoulder steadied by degrees. The baby’s breath changed first. Then her fist loosened against Frances’s robe.
At last, she fell back asleep. Frances held her a moment longer, not because it was necessary, she assured herself, but because putting her down too soon might undo all their effort. When she lowered the child into the cradle, she did it slowly, with one hand lingering beneath the tiny head until the last possible second.
The baby did not wake. Frances released a breath she had not realized she was holding.
“There,” she whispered. “A triumph for us both.”
She tiptoed from the nursery and closed the door almost entirely behind her. Then she turned and nearly walked into Andrew. She stopped so abruptly that one hand flew to her chest.
“Oh!” she gasped.
He was standing in the corridor only a few feet away, dressed not in coat or waistcoat, but in shirtsleeves, with his cravat loosened at his throat. The sight disordered her more effectively than any rebuke could have done. He looked less like the Duke of Sinclair and more like a man dragged from sleep by the same cry that had summoned her.
His hair was slightly mussed. His eyes were alert, and fixed upon her. He inhaled deeply before addressing her.
“You continue to ignore my rules,” he told her.
Frances gathered her robe more tightly around herself, suddenly aware of the thin nightclothes beneath it, of her loose hair and of the hour. “The baby was crying.”
