The baby was asleep in his crib.

“We are about to leave,” he said.

“Are you?” She turned toward him, straight-backed and regal and unsmiling.

He had wasted his time coming up here to talk to her, he thought. He had probably ruined her Christmas, in fact.

“Does the baby need you?”

“He has just been fed,” she told him. “Your eagerness to see him has certainly diminished since yesterday.” She spoke softly, but the rebuke was unmistakable.

“I came up here early,” he said, feeling a stirring of anger against her. Why had she married him if she despised him so? But the answer to that question was obvious, at least. It had certainly not been from personal choice. “His nurse was changing his nappy, and he was as cross as blazes, though she assured me that he could not possibly be hungry. I held him for half an hour.” He had held his tiny son against his shoulder with an intense ache of tenderness. “He almost deafened my right ear for a few minutes, but he finally found amusement in chewing on the brocade collar of his papa’s dressing robe.”

Not for the first time he wondered how his son would grow up. Would he, too, despise his father and be embarrassed by his origins?

“I did not know that,” his wife said. “Nurse did not tell me.”

“I suppose,” he said, “you do not want to come outside with us?”

“Gathering greenery?” she said. “And engaging in a snowball fight?” She sounded shocked.

“No.” He nodded briskly and turned back to the door. “I did not think so. We will probably be back late for luncheon. You may wish to have the meal set back an hour.” If her mother would permit such a disruption of the household routine, that was.

He was at the door of the outer nursery-deserted this morning-when her voice stopped him. She had stepped out of Jeremy’s bedchamber and was closing the door behind her.