His Father’s Eyes

"He reached for me as though the world were still whole. I reached back knowing it was not."

The corridor leading back toward the main house seemed longer than I remembered, its shadows deeper despite the grey morning light filtering through the tall windows. My footsteps echoed against the polished floors with a hollowness that matched the emptiness spreading through my chest. The east wing. Voices at midnight. A thud. The words circled through my thoughts like crows above carrion, each repetition stripping away another layer of whatever composure I had managed to assemble.

I was so absorbed in the turning of these new fragments — trying to fit them against things I already knew, trying not to fit them against the worst of what I feared — that I nearly collided with Miss Fletcher as I rounded the corner.

"Oh! My apologies, Mrs Jeffries," the nanny exclaimed, stepping back with the instinctive deference of a servant who had overstepped some invisible boundary. She kept a protective hand upon young William's shoulder, steadying the child who had been toddling alongside her with the determined unsteadiness of legs not yet confident in their purpose.

"Mama!"

The word struck me before I had properly registered its source. William Jr. reached for me with chubby arms, his small face bright with innocent joy that knew nothing of the catastrophe swirling around him. At not yet two years old, he inhabited a world bounded by nursery walls and familiar faces, where fathers disappeared and reappeared according to mysterious adult schedules, and the greatest tragedy was a missed biscuit or a favourite toy temporarily mislaid.

Something cracked in my chest at the sight of him — this small, perfect creature who carried his father's blood and bore, already, such striking resemblance to the man who had vanished. I knelt down to his level despite the protest of muscles exhausted by the morning's strain, gathering him into my arms with a fierceness that made him squirm and laugh, thinking it a game.

"Good morning, my darling," I murmured against his dark curls, breathing in the clean, milky scent of him. He smelled of the nursery — warm linen and the faint sweetness of the porridge he had eaten for breakfast, and beneath that the particular scent that was simply his, that I would have known in a darkened room amongst a thousand children. I pressed my face into his hair and held him, and for a moment there was nothing else — no empty bed, no letter, no voices in the east wing, no Victoria in the drawing room with her watchful eyes. Just this. Just him. The solid, wriggling, living weight of my son in my arms.

He tolerated the embrace for perhaps ten seconds before pushing back with the imperious determination of the very young, his small hands pressing against my shoulders. He wanted to see my face. Children are like that — they need to look at you when they speak, need to confirm that the world is arranged as they expect it.

"Papa... breakfast," William Jr. announced with the directness that only very young children possess, his lower lip threatening to wobble into something more distressed. "Where Papa?"

The question struck like a blow to my sternum. I had known it would come — had been dreading it since the moment I discovered William's empty side of the bed — but nothing could have prepared me for the innocent confusion in my son's voice. The simple expectation that surely there must be an answer. Surely Papa would appear if only the right words were spoken.

"Papa had to go away for a little while," I managed, the lie sitting heavy on my tongue. "But he loves you very much. You know that, don't you?"

William Jr. considered this with the solemn gravity of the very young, his brow furrowing in a manner so like his father's that my breath caught. Then he nodded, apparently satisfied for the moment. Children are resilient in their innocence, able to accept explanations that would never satisfy an adult mind. But that resilience would not last. Soon — in days, perhaps, or weeks — he would begin to notice the whispers and the worried glances, would understand that something terrible had happened even if no one would explain precisely what.

And what would I tell him then? What words existed for a child too young to comprehend betrayal or danger or the terrible ambiguity of a father who had vanished leaving only warnings and unanswered questions?

I pressed a kiss to his forehead — that smooth, warm expanse of skin that still carried the softness of infancy — and released him. He toddled a step away from me and then turned back, reaching for my hand with his small fingers. He wanted to show me something. He was tugging me toward the nursery stairs with the urgent purposefulness of a child who has important business to conduct, something involving blocks or a wooden horse or whatever had captured his attention before Miss Fletcher brought him down for his morning walk.

"In a moment, my love," I said, gently extracting my hand from his grip. "Mama must attend to something first. But I shall come to the nursery later. I promise."

The promise felt reckless even as I made it. I did not know what the next hour held, let alone whether I would be free to sit on the nursery floor and stack blocks and pretend that the world made sense. But his face needed the promise, and so I gave it.

I rose to meet Miss Fletcher's gaze. The nanny stood a careful distance away, her hands clasped before her in a posture of professional patience. She was young — five-and-twenty, perhaps — with the kind of placid countenance that gave nothing away. Fair hair drawn back beneath a plain cap, eyes of indeterminate colour that watched without seeming to watch, features arranged in an expression of neutral competence that could have meant anything or nothing at all.

She had come with excellent references from a family in Hobart Town, and William had approved her hiring without reservation. I had liked her well enough in the months since her arrival — she was quiet, diligent, attentive to the child's needs. William Jr. had taken to her readily, which was the only recommendation that truly mattered.

But standing here now, in this corridor where the morning light fell in pale slabs across the floorboards and my son's hand still reached for mine, I found myself studying Miss Fletcher with an attention I had never before directed at her. The steadiness of her expression. The careful positioning of her body — close enough to intervene if the child needed her, distant enough to afford the mistress privacy. The way her eyes moved between my face and the child's, cataloguing our interaction with the professional attentiveness of a woman whose livelihood depended upon reading the moods of the household.

What had she heard this morning? What had the servants told her — or not told her? She would have been in the nursery when my scream tore through the house at dawn. Would have felt the household shift beneath her, the sudden disruption of routine, the whispered conferences in corridors and on staircases. She would have had to manage the child through all of it — keeping him fed, keeping him calm, keeping him contained in the nursery whilst chaos reigned below.

And she had managed it. Here he was, clean and fed and cheerful, his small world intact. Whatever Miss Fletcher had observed or surmised, she had maintained the nursery as a sanctuary, had shielded my son from the morning's upheaval.

I found myself grateful for that. Grateful and — something else. Something I could not quite name, that hovered between appreciation and unease. Miss Fletcher's very competence, her ability to maintain composure whilst the household disintegrated around her, spoke to a self-possession that went beyond mere training. She was watching me now with those calm, careful eyes, and I could not tell whether what lay behind them was simple professional concern or something more considered.

"Perhaps you might take William to the nursery for his morning lessons?" I suggested, keeping my voice gentle despite the turmoil beneath. "I have... matters to attend to."

"Of course, madam." Miss Fletcher bobbed a slight curtsy, her expression revealing nothing beyond professional compliance. "Come along, Master William. Cook has promised jam tarts for our elevenses if you practice your letters nicely."

The promise of sweets worked its predictable magic, and William Jr. allowed himself to be led away with only a single backward glance at his mother. That glance — questioning, uncertain, too knowing for a child not yet two — would haunt me for hours afterward. There was something in his eyes, those blue eyes that shifted like his father's between light and shadow, that seemed to ask a question no toddler should be capable of forming. Are you all right? Is something wrong? Why do you look like that?

Or perhaps I was reading into an infant's gaze the weight of my own guilt. Children look back at their mothers. It is what they do. It need not carry meaning beyond the simple pull of attachment, the brief reluctance to let a familiar face disappear around a corner.

But I could not shake it. Could not unsee the way his brow had furrowed, that small echo of William's expression when something troubled him.

I stood motionless in the corridor until their footsteps faded, until the nursery door closed somewhere above with a soft finality that seemed to punctuate the silence. Miss Fletcher's voice drifted down, muffled by distance and closed doors, speaking to the child in those calm, measured tones that constituted her particular talent. Then nothing. Just the creak of the house settling around me, the distant sounds of the kitchen below, the faint whisper of wind against the windowpanes.

I leaned against the wall and pressed my hand to my mouth. Not to stifle a sob — I was beyond weeping now, wrung dry by the morning's excesses — but to hold something in. Some sound or word or truth that wanted to escape, that pressed against my lips with the urgency of confession.

Whatever happens, William had written, whatever you may hear spoken about me in the days and years to come, never doubt that I love you both.

I did not doubt his love. But love, I was learning, could coexist with things dark enough to destroy everything it touched. And the child it was meant to protect — that small, trusting creature with his father's eyes and his mother's stubbornness — deserved better than the wreckage we were making of his world.

I straightened. Drew my hand from my mouth. Pressed my palm flat against the wall for a moment, feeling the solidity of the plaster beneath my fingers, the house that William had built standing firm around me even if nothing else would hold.

Then I smoothed the front of my dress and turned toward the drawing room, where Victoria waited.