“I’ll Marry the First Woman Who Enters,” the Duke Declared— Then She Burst In Chasing a Bird With…

Chapter 17

The birth came on a Tuesday in August, in a heat that had sat on the county for three weeks without moving, and it frightened Adrian Sinclair more than anything that had ever happened to him in his life.

That included a knife in a foreign street. That included a burning mill and the sight of his wife lashed to a chair. It included, though he never said so, the afternoon he came home at seventeen to a sheet in the hall.

He paced the passage outside her door for six hours.

“You are going to wear a path into the floor,” Theo said, from the window seat he had occupied since two o’clock, with a book he had not turned a page of.

“I am thinking.”

“You are panicking.”

“I am not.”

“You are,” said Theo. “You have gone the color of a fish.”

Inside, Clara swore — clearly, inventively, in the flat voice of a woman who has decided that politeness is a luxury she can no longer afford — and Adrian flinched as though he had been struck.

“That is normal,” Theo said. “I am told that is normal.”

“How would you know?”

“I asked the midwife. Twice.”

A cry came through the door.

Adrian stopped dead.

It was not Clara’s voice. It was small, and furious, and absolutely certain of its own existence, and it went through the timbers of Ashbourne Hall like a nail.

The door opened. The midwife came out with her sleeves rolled and a face of professional serenity.

“Your Grace.”

He stared at her.

“Is she well?”

“The mother is tired and will be very hungry in an hour. The child—” The woman paused, and then, because she was sixty-one years old and had decided some years earlier that she would not spend her life managing the feelings of dukes, she smiled. “A healthy girl, Your Grace. Ten fingers. A voice like her mother’s.”

Adrian closed his eyes.

For a second he thought his legs would not hold him. He put a hand on the wall and stood there in the passage of his own house with his forehead against the plaster, breathing, while Theo very kindly looked out the window.

Then the midwife said, “You have an heir, Your Grace.”

The words struck him somewhere below the ribs.

You have an heir. He had heard some version of that phrase all his life, at dinners, at funerals, at christenings, from his aunt’s mouth and his solicitors’ and every matchmaking mother in three counties. For eight years it had meant duty. It had meant continuation. It had meant a solution to a problem, a name on a deed, a signature to fill in the blank at the bottom of a document he had not written and did not want.

He walked into the room.

The shutters were half drawn against the heat. Clara lay against the pillows with her hair stuck to her temples and her face the color of paper, and in her arms was a very small bundle with a fist up beside its head.

Adrian approached slowly.

“She is beautiful,” he said, which was a lie, because she was blotched and wrinkled and looked like an angry old man, and both of them knew it, and they both maintained the lie for the rest of their lives.

“She has your eyes.”

“I hope not.”

Clara laughed, weakly, and then winced.

He sat on the edge of the bed.

“May I?”

She handed her over.

He took his daughter with both arms held out stiff and flat, the way one takes a tray of glasses.

“What if I drop her?”

“You will not.”

“What if I do?”

“Then,” said Clara, “I shall never forgive you, and you will deserve it.”

He laughed — a short, unsteady sound — and the baby opened her eyes.

They were gray. Not the gray-blue of Clara’s; a lighter, stranger gray, the color of a winter afternoon. She looked at him with an expression of profound and ancient suspicion, the expression of a woman who has just arrived somewhere and intends to inspect the premises before deciding on them.

“Hello,” Adrian whispered.

Clara watched her husband.

She had seen him in a burning mill with a knife in his hand. She had seen him in a lord’s drawing room holding his temper like a horse on a short rein. She had seen him at his father’s grave, not crying, not healed. She had thought she knew the full range of the man.

She had never seen him terrified by love.

He looked up.

“You are going to be a good father,” she said.

“How do you know?”

“Because you care enough to be frightened.”

He looked down at the child, and then at his wife.

“I love you,” he said.

“I know.”

“And her.”

“I know.”

He shifted the baby to the crook of his arm, which he had watched the midwife do and was now attempting with a look of enormous concentration, and he said, more to the bundle than to Clara:

“I never thought this would be my life.”

“Neither did I.”

He smiled. “Would you change it?”

“No.” Clara closed her eyes, and her hand found his on the blanket. “Not even the bird.”

“Especially the bird.”

They named her Rosalind Aurelia Sinclair — Rosalind for Clara’s mother, Aurelia for the woman in the portrait at the top of the gallery, whose gold chain had traveled sixty years through a locked room and a rented house and a bird’s beak to arrive at last around the throat of a duchess in a bed in August.

Lady Beatrice wept for two hours and then began, immediately and without consultation, drawing up a list of eligible godparents. Theo bought the child a rattle made of silver, which the bird stole within a fortnight, and returned eleven days later to the roof of the chapel, where it remained until Christmas.

And the necklace went into the bottom drawer under the winter stockings, as it always did, until such time as it should be needed.