Frances was still not accustomed to that. The words belonged to someone composed, elegant, and trained for such things. Not to a woman who had once declared marriage to be little more than a velvet-lined prison and had then walked into it with a duke at her side and a scandal at her back.
The baby lay in her cradle, wrapped in pale muslin. Her lashes rested like fine shadows upon her cheeks. One hand had escaped its covering and lay curled near her chin, impossibly small.
Emma came to stand beside Frances.
“She is beautiful,” Emma murmured.
Frances looked at her quickly, suspicious of sentiment.
Emma smiled down at the cradle. “Do not look at me so. I mean it.”
“She looks like a wrinkled plum when she is displeased.”
“Most of us do.”
“And when she cries, she sounds like an outraged kitten.”
“Then she has spirit.”
Frances looked back at the baby. “She has lungs, certainly.”
Emma’s smile deepened, but she did not press. That was one of Emma’s gifts. She knew when to let Frances hide behind sharpness and when to gently take it away.
“May I?” Emma asked.
Frances hesitated. It was absurd. Emma was a mother. Emma had held her own child through fevers, tears, sleepless nights and all the strange terrors of infancy. She had more right to confidence than Frances, who still sometimes feared she might hold the child at the wrong angle and undo her entirely.
Yet when the nurse bent to lift the baby, Frances stepped forward first.
“I shall do it.”
The words came too quickly. Emma noticed. Frances saw that she did. But her sister said nothing.
Carefully, Frances reached into the cradle and slid one hand beneath the baby’s head, and the other beneath her small, warm weight. The child stirred, her mouth moving faintly as ifshe objected on principle to being disturbed. Frances lifted her against her shoulder.
“There now,” she whispered before she could think better of it. “None of that. You were asked to behave for company.”
Emma watched her.
Frances cleared her throat. “She is not always reasonable.”
“Babies rarely are.”
“She has no regard for schedules.”
“She will learn one, in time.”
Frances glanced toward her. “Will she?”
“Oh yes.” Emma reached out and touched one finger lightly to the baby’s blanket. “Not perfectly, of course. Babies are not clocks. But a little routine helps. Feeding, resting, quiet when she is tired. The same comforts at the same times. It teaches her the world is steady.”
Frances looked down at the child’s face. The baby had opened her eyes, dark and unfocused, and was staring at nothing in particular with grave suspicion.
“I have been told not to pick her up each time she fusses,” she admitted, keeping her tone deliberately detached. “Apparently it encourages tyranny.”
Emma’s brows rose. “Who told you that?”
“Mrs. Carter.”
