“Sacrifice,” she said flatly. “And sometimes, it just isn’t worth it.”

She thought his eyes . . . what she saw in his eyes couldn’t be respectable, or true, so she devoted herself to her roast beef.

Chapter Five

In the next weeks, Philippa’s life took on a rhythm. Every time Kate nursed Jonas, he would cry bitterly for hours. Philippa and Kate took turns walking him, rocking him, massaging him . . . none of it really seemed to help his aching stomach.

But, as Philippa pointed out with somewhat immodest pride, he was growing plumper, without the castor oil and emetics the doctor had prescribed. In fact, when she reached the end of her second week in the castle, Jonas’s improvement was undeniable. “There’s nothing wrong with you,” Philippa crooned to him in the middle of the night after Kate had fed the baby and handed him over to her now-indispensable nursemaid. Jonas blinked up at her. His eyes fluttered, and he almost, almost went to sleep, but then another pang must have caught him because his face twisted in anguish, and he pulled up his legs and cried out.

“Poor baby,” Philippa said, kissing his cheek. then popping him up on and over her shoulder in his favorite position. It meant that he hung gracelessly down her back, rather like a sack of beans, but it worked. Unless she stopped walking, of course.

She decided to take him to the portrait gallery because she had walked around and around the nursery earlier in the evening, and she felt that one more turn around that well-worn path would drive her mad.

The castle was warm and dark. She descended a level and made her way to the portrait gallery to find that moonlight was streaming in the windows there, its color as pale and chilly as the white gooseberries she used to gather as a child. She didn’t stop for long before the portraits, just paused to examine how moonlight made the be-ruffed gallants look like faded copies of their daily selves.

She knew the moment Mr. Berwick—or Wick, as he’d insisted she call him—entered the room. It was as though the air changed somehow. He always found her in the middle of the night. He’d look for her in the nursery, or the gallery, and walk with her. When they encountered each other during the day, usually at dinner, they talked courteously enough of Jonas, of the castle, of whatever . . . but never of their nocturnal rendezvous.

All of that polite daylight conversation and observance of convention melted away in the soft glimmer of moon and candle. It was as though the obscurity of the night gave them sanction to be their true selves. The way he looked at her was nothing like the way Rodney used to look at her. Oh, Wick desired her. She could see a demand in his eyes, a hunger that he couldn’t mask.