Page 103 of A Baby for the Duke

“With Katherine.”

“For eleven minutes.” He looked at the baby. “She is unmovable. She has her grandfather’s temperament, and I do not mean mine.”

Leonora had to look at the ceiling for a moment. Then she looked at him. His hair was mussed, and there was pear smeared down his front. He had been doing this alone at half past eight at night, for a child who could not have told anybody about it.

He did not know I would come home tonight.

“When she is asleep,” Colin said, “I am going to the treehouse.”

Something in Leonora went very quiet and very still.

“Of course,” she uttered. “Goodnight, then.”

“Leonora.”

“Yes?”

“I would like you to join me.”

She did not move.

“What?”

“I would like you to join me,” Colin repeated. “At the treehouse. When she is down.”

“You have never once let anybody up that ladder except me, and I forced you,” Leonora reminded him. “You were extremely rude about it.”

“I am aware of what I have never done.”

There was a silence in which she could hear her own pulse in her ears.

“All right,” she agreed. “I’ll come.”

He went out at nine.

She stood at the window of the blue room and watched him cross the lawn with a lamp. Then she watched him do something she did not understand at all. He stopped at the yew walk and put the lamp down, lit another with it, set that one on the grass, and went on.

By the time he reached the beech, there were six of them burning in a line across the dark lawn, and there was light in the treehouse itself, more of it than a working lamp would give.

Leonora stood at the window with her hand flat against the glass pane.

He has lit a path. He has gone out into the dark and lit a path so that I can find my way to the beech, and he has done it without saying anything about it, because he has never in his life been able to say anything about it.

She stayed at the window a long while after the last lamp was lit.

I could stay here. That is an option. I could send Susan down with a message that I have a headache and go to bed, and in the morning, I would say what I planned to say at Hounslow. It would end cleanly, and I would be at my mother’s by Friday.

He has never once asked me for anything in five weeks. Not one thing. He has given me a house and a name and a child and a ditch and four nightgowns, and he has not asked me for a single thing. But tonight, he has asked, and he has asked by lighting lamps because he cannot do it in words.

And if I do not go up that ladder, he will never ask again. He will decide that he was right about himself, and he will be extremely kind to me for forty years.

She went to the nursery, which she had not intended to do. Katherine was flat on her back, with both arms over her head in the manner of a child who had fought a battle and won. Mrs. Pike was sitting in the chair by the fire with the mending she never did.

“She went down twenty minutes ago,” the old woman said, “and it took the pair of you to do it. He sang at her for the better part of an hour and got almost six spoonfuls into her, and then you came in and she would not settle until she had shouted at you both from the doorway.”

“He told me it was five.”

“It was five and a half. I have made him a liar by half a spoonful, and he may live with it.” Mrs. Pike did not look up. “You’ll want your coat, Your Grace. It’s cold out, and that ladder’s damp at this hour.”