Page 104 of A Baby for the Duke

Leonora stood in the doorway. “Mrs. Pike.”

“I have said nothing at all.”

“There are six lamps burning between this house and that tree.”

“His Grace lit them. I only fetched them out of the stillroom because he could not find them. I did not ask him what they were for, and he did not tell me.” Mrs. Pike bit off a thread. “Thirty-one years, Your Grace. I have never once seen that man ask anybody for anything. Go up the ladder.”

Leonora went up and got it out of the press herself.

It was at the bottom, under everything, where it had been since May, and she had not put it on since the night she wore it to a wedding-night quarrel. She stood with it over her arm for a moment and thought about that, and then she took the pins out of her hair and put it on, and she was steadier about all of it than she had expected to be.

Then she rang.

“My coat,” she said, when Susan came. “And my boots.”

“Your boots, Your Grace?”

“My boots. I am going out on the grass and I have no intention of doing it in slippers again.”

Susan fetched them and knelt and laced them without one word about the hour, or the coat, or what was underneath it. She was seventeen years old and she managed the whole thing with the discretion of a woman of fifty, and it was only at the door that she gave herself away.

“Your Grace? Begging your pardon. But everybody’s ever so glad.”

Leonora stopped. “Everybody?”

“The kitchen,” Susan said. “Mrs. Pike. Tom’s been at the window since supper.”

And then she stepped out and closed the door behind her.

CHAPTER 37

The second rung held, the way it always did.

Leonora came up over the edge of the platform in a coat and a pair of boots and a great deal of black gauze, and stood up.

The small room was full of light. Colin had lit it like a chapel. There were candles on the sill and on the bench and in a row along the beam. The ceiling was golden with it.

The smell of the place was the same as it had always been: sawdust and cold air and the pipe he never smoked in the house. And on the sill, standing square on four legs with its head turned as though it had heard a sound behind it, was the horse.

“Oh,” Leonora murmured.

“You finished it.”

“This afternoon, while you were at your mother’s.” He was standing with his back to the far wall and his hands at his sides. “I sat up here from noon until five and did the ear, and I could not think what else to do with myself.”

She crossed the room, crouched down in front of the horse, and did not touch it, which he noticed but did not comment on.

“It’s beautiful.”

“It’s a toy horse.”

“It is four months of a man’s evenings and a hock you had to cut twice,” Leonora countered. “Katherine is going to drag it about by the tail until its ear comes off, and you are going to mend the ear. That is what it is for.” She stood up. “Thank you for showing me. But it is nine o’clock, and it is cold. It could have waited until tomorrow, could it not?”

“It could.”

“Then why am I up a tree in my nightgown, Your Grace?”

Colin did not answer. Instead, he reached up, untied the black silk eyepatch, and took it off.