“Both of us, darling,” Caroline said from her place on the settee, where she was stretched out as if preparing for a nap. “Hardly anyone in this room has noticed me, and I am wearing a new dress.”
“At least you’re glad to see me, aren’t you, Pappa?” Hollis crossed the room and stepped over a big basket of his yarn to kiss her father’s cheek.
“Your arrival gives me a thrill like no other, except perhaps my granddaughter. Where is the cherub, Eliza?”
“I’ve got her, Your Honor,” Poppy said, walking across the room to him.
Eliza followed closely behind, as if she thought Poppy might drop the baby. She pressed her hand to Hollis’s cheek as she breezed by. “Happy you’ve come, darling.”
Hollis rolled her eyes. She glanced around the drawing room, that familiar place where the four women in this room had grown up. Four motherless girls. Eliza and Hollis’s mother was lost to cholera, and Caro’s mother soon thereafter. She thought of how they’d puttered about this room as their father’s sight had slowly left him.
She wondered what Eliza thought of this room now after living in palaces. It looked the very same as it had all those years. A bit more worn, of course. And the bookshelves were stuffed with even more books. Her father’s knitting—a hobby he’d taken on after his sight had left him—took up more room than it once had. A basket of yarn—tangled, thanks to a very disobedient cat, Mr. Pris—was at her father’s feet.
The mantel above the hearth was still cluttered with the clocks Eliza had stored there. She had a peculiar hobby of repairing clocks, and before Prince Sebastian had blundered into this house and demanded information from her—thereby starting a chain of events that had led to the darling little cherub—Eliza had taken in the clocks as extra work. When she had moved to Alucia, they remained precisely where she’d left them, still in disrepair, still clicking and turning and chiming at different times. It was as if Poppy was afraid to move them lest Eliza come bursting through the door one day, desperate to finish the repair of them.
In the front bay window, there was a pair of upholstered chairs, separated by a small table stacked with books. They were great readers, and even Ben and Margaret used to come round in the evenings to listen to Eliza or Hollis read to their father.
The hearth was lit and the room warm, but it needed a good airing, and the carpets a good sweeping.
As usual, Hollis’s father was in his rocking chair, his feet on his own small footstool. A blanket covered his lap and his unseeing blue eyes strayed to one side of the room, where there was nothing but a wall.
“Here she is, Your Honor,” Poppy said.
The justice put aside his knitting, and Poppy placed the baby in his lap. Hollis’s father put his fingers to the baby’s head, and a smile like she had not seen in many years illuminated his face as he slowly and carefully moved his fingers over her round head, then to her cheeks, nose and mouth. Cecelia was quite patient and looked on as he examined her with his hands.
“Oh, my,” the justice said, his voice shaking a little. “She’s beautiful, Eliza. Isn’t she beautiful? I imagine she looks just like you did at this age. What an angel you were, as fat as a little pig. This one, she’s a little angel.”
The little angel had had enough of people petting her, and she tried to turn. When she couldn’t, she began to cry. Eliza picked her up and soothed her. She stepped over the inquisitive dogs and set Cecelia down on the carpet. All the residents of the house gathered around to watch—Ben and Margaret, Poppy, Hollis, Caroline, and Eliza. Even her father was smiling as if he could see the entire tableau.
A long braid of hair slid across Caroline’s back and over her shoulder. There had been a time Caroline would not leave her house without her hair perfectly styled in the latest fashion, and her clothing impeccably outfitted. But today she wore a brown skirt and blouse, as if she planned to work in the garden when she left here. It reminded Hollis of how in just two short years, Eliza and Caroline’s lives had changed quite dramatically. Eliza had assumed she’d be a spinster all her life, and now she was a duchess. Caroline had assumed she would be the toast of society for as long as she drew breath, and now wore buckskins and braided her hair and stomped around the gardens.
“What happened to Pappa’s ribbons, if I may ask?” Eliza said suddenly as she sank down on the floor beside her daughter.
“What ribbons?” Caroline asked.
“You remember them, Caro—Poppy strung them all over the house so Pappa could feel his way around and move without assistance.”
“I don’t need them,” Hollis’s father said. “It’s fourteen steps to the door, two shuffles to the right around the dogs. Twenty-eight steps to the stairs and one swift kick to the cat, who crosses my path without fail. And, besides, I mean to take one of those county court seats. Move the whole lot of us to the country.”
This news surprised Hollis. “Really, Pappa? You’d leave London?”
“I need clean air,” he said gruffly as he picked up his needles again. “And not two days ago, Ben and I were nearly flattened by a speeding carriage. It’s too crowded in town.”
“But what of Ben and Margaret and Poppy?”
“I’ll go wherever His Honor goes,” Poppy said.
“As would we,” Ben said from his place near the door.
“But—but what about me?” Hollis asked.
“You?” Caroline laughed. “You have Donovan, darling.”
Hollis did not miss the quick look Caroline gave Eliza. When Eliza realized Hollis had seen it, she blushed.
Well, then. Her sister thought she and Donovan were lovers, too.
“Hollis, love, you are welcome to accompany me,” her father said.
