“She said it was because you are the best mother in the world,” he added softly.
She did cry then, big silent tears rolling from her eyes.
“Would you like me to bring you the babies now?” he asked.
She nodded. “Please. And . . .” She paused, and Gregory saw her throat work. “And bring the rest, too.”
“Are you certain?”
She nodded again. “If you can help me to sit up a little straighter, I think I can manage hugs and kisses.”
His tears, the ones he had been trying so hard to suppress, slid from his eyes. “I can’t think of anything that might help you to get better more quickly.” He walked to the door, then turned around when his hand was on the knob. “I love you, La la la Lucy.”
“I love you, too.”
Gregory must have told the children to behave with extra decorum, Lucy decided, because when they filed into her room (rather adorably from oldest to youngest, the tops of their heads making a charming little staircase) they did so very quietly, finding their places against the wall, their hands clasped sweetly in front of their bodies.
Lucy had no idea who these children were. Her children had never stood so still.
“It’s lonely over here,” she said, and there would have been a mass tumble onto the bed except that Gregory leapt into the riot with a forceful “Gently!”
Although in retrospect, it was not so much his verbal order that held the chaos at bay as his arms, which prevented at least three children from cannonballing onto the mattress.
“Mimsy won’t let me see the babies,” four-year-old Ben muttered.
“It’s because you haven’t taken a bath in a month,” retorted Anthony, two years his elder, almost to the day.
“How is that possible?” Gregory wondered aloud.
“He’s very sneaky,” Daphne informed him. She was trying to worm her way closer to Lucy, though, so her words were muffled.
“How sneaky can one be with a stench like that?” Hermione asked.
“I roll in flowers every single day,” Ben said archly.
Lucy paused for a moment, then decided it might be best not to reflect too carefully on what her son had just said. “Er, which flowers are those?”
“Well, not the rosebush,” he told her, sounding as if he could not believe she’d even asked.
Daphne leaned toward him and gave a delicate sniff. “Peonies,” she announced.
“You can’t tell that by sniffing him,” Hermione said indignantly. The two girls were separated by only a year and a half, and when they weren’t whispering secrets they were bickering like . . .
Well, bickering like Bridgertons, really.
“I have a very good nose,” Daphne said. She looked up, waiting for someone to confirm this.
“The scent of peonies is very distinctive,” Katharine confirmed. She was sitting down by the foot of the bed with Richard. Lucy wondered when the two of them had decided they were too old for piling together at the pillows. They were getting so big, all of them. Even little Colin didn’t look like a baby any longer.
“Mama?” he said mournfully.
“Come here, sweetling,” she murmured, reaching out for him. He was a little butterball, all chubby cheeks and wobbly knees, and she’d really thought he was going to be her last. But now she had two more, swaddled up in their cradles, getting ready to grow into their names.
Eloise Lucy and Francesca Hyacinth. They had quite the namesakes.
“I love you, Mama,” Colin said, his warm little face finding the curve of her neck.
“I love you, too,” Lucy choked out. “I love all of you.”