Mrs. Bridwell set the linen down. She had the steady, unhurried manner of a woman who had spent twenty years caring for other people’s children and had learned to navigate the grief that came with it.
“He knows the voice that’s here. That’s the one that matters.”
Mary pressed her lips to Tommy’s forehead. He smelled of the lavender soap and warm milk, and his skin was impossibly soft against her mouth. She had memorized him in ten days. The way his brow furrowed before he cried. The hiccup that followed every feeding. The particular weight of him in the crook of her left arm, which he preferred to the right for reasons only he understood.
“Mrs. Bridwell?”
“Your Grace.”
“Does it strike you as odd that His Grace has not held this child? Not once?”
The nursemaid picked up the next cloth. She folded it with great attention. “It is not my place to say, Your Grace.”
“It is not your place. But I am asking.”
Mrs. Bridwell smoothed the folded linen and placed it on the stack. “In my experience, some people are afraid of what they’ll feel if they let themselves hold a child. Especially a child they didn’t expect.”
“And some people are simply cold.”
“That is also possible.” Mrs. Bridwell met her eyes. “But cold men do not stand in doorways watching babies sleep, Your Grace. And they do not cover sleeping women with blankets when they think no one is looking.”
Mary went still. “The throw. That was him?”
Mrs. Bridwell said nothing. Her expression said everything.
Mary looked down at Tommy. His eyes had closed, his breathing deepening into the steady rhythm of sleep. She should have felt something warm at the knowledge that Evander had been there, that he had crossed the room and tucked the throw around her shoulders while she slept. She should have felt it as a kindness.
Instead, she felt the shape of what was missing. He had come in the dark, when she could not see him. He had touched her only when she could not feel it. He offered care the way a man leaves coins on a table and walks out before anyone can thank him.
She was married to a man who would cover her with a blanket but would not sit beside her in the light of day.
“Did you have children of your own, Mrs. Bridwell?”
“Two, Your Grace. Both are grown now. A son in the Navy and a daughter married to a shopkeeper in Bath.” A quiet pride moved across the nursemaid’s face. “They were terrors as babies. Far worse than this one.”
“And their father?”
“Lost at sea. Twelve years ago.” Mrs. Bridwell said it the way she said everything, with a steadiness that came from long practice. “He was a good man. Clumsy with words. Better with his hands. He built the cradle our children slept in, and he sat beside it every night for the first month, just listening to them breathe.” She paused. “Some men show love with their presence, Your Grace. Others show it with the things they do when they think no one’s watching.”
Mary turned the words over. She thought of her own father, who had shown love by arranging marriages and managing reputations and never once asking what she wanted. She thought of Charlotte, who had shown love by running toward it and leaving everyone else behind.
And she thought of Evander, standing in a dark nursery, draping a throw over a woman he would not speak to at breakfast.
“I am lonely, Mrs. Bridwell.” The words left her before she could catch them. She held Tommy closer, as though the baby could absorb the confession before it reached the air. “I did not expect to say that.”
“You can say whatever you need to say in this room, Your Grace.”
“I am angry with my sister for leaving. I am angry at his brother for taking her. I am angry at my father for handing me to another man like a debt to be settled, and I am angry at the Duke for?—”
She stopped.
Tommy stirred against her chest, sensing the tension in her arms, and she forced herself to soften.
“For making me feel as though I am furniture in this house,” she continued. “Something useful that he arranged to have delivered.”
Mrs. Bridwell pulled the rocking chair closer and sat down. She folded her hands in her lap and looked at Mary with the same patience she showed Tommy when he fussed.
“You are not furniture, Your Grace.”