“Tomorrow,” he promised. “We will play so hard that you will not have to be told to go to bed in the evening. In fact, you will beg your nurses to let you go there.”

There was a swell of derisive denials. Charles, who was obviously something of a leader, snorted.

“It is a promise,” Edwin told them. “But today I have come to see a certain baby by the name of Jeremy, who is mine. Has anyone seen him running around here, by any chance?” He looked around him with a frown of concentration.

“Nah,” a plump little boy told him, the utmost contempt in his voice.

“He’s just a baby.”

“I wanted to play with him,” a little girl added, “but he had to go to sleep. Is he yours? He is Aunt Lizzie’s too.”

Elizabeth led the way to a room beyond the nursery.

“You ought not to have said that about tomorrow,” she said with quiet reproach. “They will be disappointed when you do not keep your promise.

Children do not forget, you know.”

He did not answer. The room was quiet and in semidarkness with the curtains drawn across the window. But the baby was not asleep. Edwin could hear him cooing and could see him waving his fists in the air as he lay on his back in his crib. His eyes focused on his father when Edwin stepped closer. Edwin swallowed hard and was glad that his wife was standing well behind him. He had ached for this moment for almost three months.

Being separated from his child was the most bitter experience of his life. He had considered a number of schemes for bringing him closer, including buying a second house in London for Elizabeth to live in. But there would be too many awkward questions if he and his wife both lived in London but not together. Yet it seemed somehow impossible to set his family up in his own London home, formerly his father’s, even though it was large and tastefully decorated and furnished and well staffed and situated in a fashionable part of town. It was, nevertheless, well known as the home of a prosperous merchant.