Eugenia schooled her expression to the polite curiosity that anyone might feel on encountering a pack of two-legged Dalmatians. Or, to look at it a different way, four spotty children ranging in age from three to fourteen.

“I can guess that you’ve used India ink to create the dappled effect,” she said to Otis’s best friend, Marmaduke, “but how did you turn your face that sickly white?”

“Cornstarch mixed with rose water,” he said. “It’s what my nanny uses when she has an afternoon out.”

“Mama!” Sally was so plumply adorable that Eugenia couldn’t stop herself from bending over and picking her up, despite having already dressed for the evening.

Sally giggled and rubbed their noses together.

Eugenia hitched Sally higher on her hip and turned back to Lizzie, Otis, and Marmaduke. Sally laid her head on Eugenia’s shoulder and began sucking her thumb. “Lizzie, I suspect you were the genius behind this.”

“We were practicing for the event of an infectious disease,” Lizzie replied. “England has been visited by waves of disease for centuries. If we’re caught unprepared, we might all succumb.”

“I fail to see how drawing spots on everyone’s faces will prepare for a wave of the measles.”

Otis and Marmaduke, bored of playing at plague, dropped onto the floor and began playing spillikins instead. Sally was blinking, about to fall asleep, her face now mostly clear of cornstarch as it had transferred to Eugenia.

“I had in mind something rare, not the measles,” Lizzie said, not at all bored. “Something more like the Black Death. An epidemic—that’s what you call it when a great many people die.”

Sally gave a little sigh and snuggled closer.

The brilliant intelligence that had made Ward into one of the most successful inventors in England had turned up in a vastly different form in Lizzie.

As if that thought had drawn him, the nursery door opened and her husband walked in. There was a smile in his eyes when he looked at Eugenia . . . a smile that told her just how much he had enjoyed their morning.

Sally had been born seven months after they married, leading Eugenia to decide that French letters—no matter the color of ribbons—were clearly not always effective.

“How wonderful,” her husband had told her, his eyes shining when she told him she was carrying a baby.

“It would have been a disaster if I hadn’t married you!” she had retorted.

“I was planning on kidnapping you,” her husband had said unrepentantly. “If you hadn’t succumbed to all those cakes, I was going to toss them in the carriage so I could feed you on the way to Gretna Green.”

Now he strolled over and kissed his daughter’s cheek. “Generally, this child looks as clean as a newly shelled egg. Not at the moment, though.” He surveyed the speckled crowd. “So who is responsible for all the spots?”

Eugenia sank into a rocking chair, holding Sally’s warm body tightly against her. Ward had woken her twice the night before—no, that wasn’t fair, because she had turned to him one of those times, waking out of sleep with a desperate hunger for him.

She closed her eyes, allowing the sound of Ward’s laughter as Lizzie explained the epidemic that had struck the nursery to settle about her like a warm blanket.

She had two things to tell him, and she was hugging them to her until they sat down to eat together later that night. First, she’d had a letter from Marcel: their venture had just finished its first quarter with an actual profit.

This was wonderful, but the second bit of news was even better. For all her childhood dreams of living in a neatly ordered household, she was now the mistress of a house that rang with laughter and chaos, in which intellectual curiosity and experimentation ranked far above the propriety she had so yearned for.

She wouldn’t trade it for a moment—although the baby nestled in her womb would only add to the mayhem.

Lizzie, meanwhile, had moved from lecturing Ward about possible epidemics to telling him about the bird’s nest she’d found that morning, when she stopped and put a finger to her lips.

Ward turned to find that that his wife and daughter had fallen asleep. Sally was sucking her thumb just as he used to, her cheek nestled against her mother’s shoulder. His heart gave a thump in his ribs that told him, again, how lucky he was.

Eugenia thought he didn’t know that she was carrying a baby, but he watched everything about her, driven by a gut-deep need to make certain that his wife was well and happy. Her breasts had grown delightfully larger, and she tired more easily.

She would tell him in her own time, though; he didn’t want to ruin her surprise.

“She’s having another baby, isn’t she?” Lizzie asked.

He looked down in surprise as his sister slipped her hand into his.

“Well, isn’t she?”

“I think so. Why do you think so?”

“She’s sleeping,” Lizzie said. “Normally she doesn’t stop moving.”

“That’s true.”

“I guessed yesterday, when she didn’t want any trifle. Eugenia never refuses trifle—except when she was carrying Sally.”

Ward ruffled her hair. “You frighten me sometimes, Miss Lizzie.”

“Pooh,” his sister said. She kicked Otis’s leg. “Let’s go see the new puppies in the stable before we have to go to bed.”

Marmaduke leapt to his feet, though Otis just gave his sister a mulish look.

“Come on, Marmaduke,” Lizzie said, grabbing his hand.

Ward had the feeling that it would be like that for the next fifty years.

He took Sally from her mother’s arms and handed her to Ruby before he picked up Eugenia and carried her off to their bedchamber, ignoring her sleepy protests.

She opened her eyes and smiled at him. “We’ll name him Felix,” she said, before going back to sleep.

“Felix?” Ward snorted. Not if he had any say in the matter.

Then he kissed her, and knew that he would let her have her way, because all that mattered was that his family was safe and together. And that he showed this woman every day that his promise of seven minutes, seven minutes in heaven, would be repeated to the very end of their days.

It would never be enough.