Page 86 of Baron Bolt

Thin. Furious. Outraged past all bearing at the general unjustness of the universe. The most ordinary sound in the world. Every squalling infant in every parish in England made that noise. His knees nearly went out from under him where he stood.

The door opened.

Heat hit him first. Then candle-smoke. Lavender and copper and blood. Linen everywhere. His mother weeping openly into Lady Clarke’s shoulder. Lady Clarke wet-eyed, back straight, patting her as if she were holding two households up at once and had decided she might as well keep doing it. And in the great bed, propped white and wrecked against the pillows, gold hair dark with sweat and stuck to her cheek, Ophelia grinned at him like a woman who had just cleaned out every purse at the table.

“Never,” she said hoarsely, “wager against me, my lord.”

“I never have,” he replied. His voice wobbled and he found he did not care.

The midwife put the bundle into his arms.

His hands looked absurd around it. He had carried muskets. Dispatch cases. Dying men. He had never in his life held anything that weighed so little and so much. The babe was red as a boiled crab and thoroughly cross about everything. Small face crumpled, small mouth working. One fist escaped from the wrapping and beat the air as if demanding to see whoever was in charge of this nonsense.

Damian counted. He could not help it. Ten fingers. Ten toes, when the midwife watched his face and turned back the cloth to show him. The little chest going like a bellows, fast and strong. Two ears. Two eyes, screwed shut against the insult of candlelight. One cracked open at him. Murky infant blue. It agreed perfectly with its fellow.

A living creature. Furiously, mundanely, gloriously alive. Ordinary as bread and twice as miraculous. The fear Damian had carried unspoken lay quietly down inside him and did not get up again.

The babe seized his finger with startling authority.

“He has a grip like a prizefighter,” Damian breathed out in awe.

“He gets that from me,” said Ophelia.

His mother made a sound like a teakettle achieving its purpose.

“Edward,” Ophelia said then, softer, watching his face. They had settled it between them weeks ago in the dark, her head on his shoulder. Saying it now, over the child, made it true in a way the settling had not. “Edward Archer.”

“Edward,” Damian agreed.

His brother had asked one thing of him at the last, believing to the end that Damian had come back from Waterloo merely wounded. Marry her. Take care of her. Take care of them both. He had never got to tell Edward what had actually come back. But he had kept the promise to its letter, and then gone on far past the letter, into country the contract had never mapped. Somewhere between the promise and this bed he had gone and fallen in love with her. That had not been in the terms at all. If Edward was watching from wherever reasonable men went, Damian hoped he approved of what he had left behind. And knowing his elder brother, he did approve.

Ophelia gathered their babe back against her. Damian sat on the edge of the bed, and a thought arrived sidelong, quiet as a pickpocket. Whether this body of his, being what it was, having been where it had been, could ever get a child of its own making. He did not know. No physician on earth could tell him, and he would hang before asking one. Perhaps in a year, when she had forgiven him this night, they might make a private study of the question. He found that he wanted to. That was the strangest miracle of the whole strange year. A man who had climbed out of his own grave, now planning futures.

“You are staring,” Ophelia murmured. Her eyes were already closing.

“I am inventorying my winnings.”

“Mm—” she said, and was asleep before the sentence found its end.

Damian sat holding his son. Outside, the rain went soft against the glass.

A se’nnight later the household had reorganized itself entirely around the person of one tiny tyrant, and the grandmothers had gone to war.

The field of battle was the cradle by the nursery fire. The armies were evenly matched. His mother held the ground to the left, delicate hands flying.

“The Archer chin. Look at it, Genevieve. Edward had that chin at a week old. That same chin. Damian was born scowling over it. It is the chin of my husband’s father, who quarreled with a bishop, and I see it plain as day⁠—”

“That,” said Lady Clarke from the right, planted there like a garden wall, “is the Clarke brow. Her grandfather’s brow. The chin, dear Delilah, has not yet arrived. The brow is present and accounted for.”

Damian consulted his heir privately over their heads. Edward, milk-drunk and sleeping with both fists thrown up like a prizefighter who had won on points, resembled at this stage of his career nothing so much as a disgruntled turnip. Any chin was pure conjecture. The brow was theory.

“… and for a wedding-night child to come before his time and be so hale,” his mother was saying, for perhaps the hundredth occasion since the birth, “so strong, so forward. It is Providence, Genevieve, and good Archer stock. My boys were both just the same⁠—”

“Remarkably forward,” Lady Clarke agreed, and poured the tea.

The wedding-night arithmetic was family gospel now. Both women recited it with the shining faith of churchwardens. Both were wrong about everything from the conception to the chin. Both were so incandescently happy that no power in England could have corrected them, nor should have.

Damian caught his wife’s eye across the room. Ophelia sat enthroned in wrappers and shawls, smug as a general reviewing conquered territory. Her face wore perfect demure agreement. Under it, just for him, the gamester’s glint of a woman watching two players bid against each other over a hand neither had seen. He thought, privately, that his mother had struck rather nearer the mark than she would ever know, and for entirely the wrong reasons. Whatever chin the boy grew, it would be Archer enough.