By the time there was a quiet knock on the door, Patrick felt twenty years older, drained of life, awash in a sea of self-hatred. The nurse stood on the threshold, looking at him with some trepidation. She’d had a tea break about an hour ago and heard all about the duke terrifying his wife into falling down the stairs. He didn’t sound like the sort of man one would want to cross.

“Your Grace—” She stopped. She’d never had a father want to see a dead baby before. She’d brought fathers their sons and announced them as “heirs;” she’d brought fathers their daughters and announced them as “wee beautiful creatures.” But her experience failed her this time. “It’s a girl,” she finally said.

Patrick moved over to her silently and took the tiny bundle from her arm. The nurse’s mouth dropped open.

“Go,” he said brusquely.

Nurse Mathers fled, clattering her way back up the stairs to tell the doctor that he’d better be the one to take that poor dead child from the father, because she didn’t want anything else to do with a man as devilish looking as that. Those eyebrows! She shivered deliciously, thinking of how she would describe him to her mother.

Alone in the study, Patrick sat on his favorite armchair. They’d wrapped a sheet over her face. He pulled the cloth away from his daughter’s little face and tucked it around her neck. Then for a second he just leaned back, holding a scrap of humanity, so light that it felt as if she might float off his arm. She was so pale, her skin as white as first snowfall.

Finally he got up and climbed the stairs, slowly, as if he had ninety years rather than thirty.

When Sophie really woke up, woke up clearly, four days later, she knew instantly what had happened. A fountain of dread poured out from her heart, and her hand fluttered willy-nilly to her midriff … but it no longer held her baby. It was gone, gone as if the baby had never rested there, kicking and floating in its little house.

She didn’t say anything, but the quality of the silence in the room had changed. Patrick was sitting in a chair next to her bed, and he saw her looking at the wall before her with an awful knowledge in her eyes. The moment he had dreaded for days had arrived. She seemed not to have seen him and was just staring ahead as tears slowly slipped over her cheeks.

Patrick lurched forward, out of his chair, and half fell to his knees on the wide step leading to the bed. He reached out and pulled Sophie’s small, fragile hands into his large brown ones, burying his face in them.

Sophie looked at him silently. Her tears felt oddly cool, sliding down her cheeks one after another.