Page 114 of A Baby for the Duke

“You told me in May about the back stairs,” Leonora began. “You told me that he was nine and that he saw it, that he never said one word about it in twenty-one years and then made you a cane, and I have thought about it every day since. I have never known how to thank you for telling me, because it is the only reason I did not give up on him in the first fortnight.”

The old woman looked down at the accounts. “He would not have wanted it told.”

“I know.”

“I told it anyhow.” Mrs. Pike straightened the corner of the book, which did not need straightening. “I have spent thirty years watching that boy be careful. His mother was the last person who was ever glad to see him come into a room, and she has been dead for twenty-one years. I made up my mind in May that if there was a chance of another one, I would take it, regardless of what he thought of me for it.”

“There was a chance.”

“Aye.” Mrs. Pike nodded, then picked the pen back up.

Leonora sat quietly in the stillroom for a while and let the old woman have the time she needed, and neither of them mentioned it ever again.

CHAPTER 41

The letter to Italy was sent on Thursday.

Leonora found him writing it in the study with the door open, which was a change, for the door had been shut every day since May.

“You may read it,” Colin said, without looking up. “It is four lines, and three of them are about money.”

“I will not read your letter to your brother.”

“You may read every letter I write for the rest of my life, and I would be obliged if you would, because you will find the thing I have failed to say and put it in the margin.” He signed it. “There. Tell me what I have left out.”

Leonora did not read it at once. Instead, she sat down on the arm of the chair and looked at his desk, which she had never properly looked at before—the japanned box at the corner with the correspondence in it, the estate ledgers, the inkstand with the chip out of the base that had clearly been there since he was a boy.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Yes.”

“Do you miss him?”

Colin put the pen down.

“Every day,” he admitted. “That is the part nobody understands, because everybody in this county has decided that my brother is a scoundrel and that I am a martyr, and they are both approximately true and neither is any use. He is the only person left who is mine. Mrs. Pike remembers my mother better than either of us and I thank God for it, but she remembers her as a servant remembers a mistress. William is the only creature alive who was her child, and he is in Italy, because I made him a life so soft that he could go.”

“That is not the whole reason he left.”

“No,” Colin agreed. “He left because he got a woman with child and could not face it. I have not forgiven that, and I do not intend to. But he could only run because there has never once been anything at his back. I saw to that. I was fifteen, and I decided that he should never be frightened of anything for the rest of his life. I kept to it, and what I have made is a man of one-and-twenty who cannot stand to be uncomfortable for an afternoon.”

Leonora was quiet for a moment.

“You will not do that to Katherine.”

“No.”

“You will not, Colin. I have watched you all week. On the day Agnes wrote, you sat on a nursery floor with a seven-month-old who could not understand one word and told her about her father anyway, out loud, in an empty room, because you had decided she should hear it from you and hear it true.” She came round the desk and put her hand on his shoulder. “That is the opposite of what you did for William, and you did it without being asked. You had better know that you did it.”

Colin turned the pen over in his fingers.

“She will hate me for a year when she is grown,” he sighed. “Somewhere about seventeen. She will find out the truth, and she will hate me for a year.”

“Very likely.”

“And I shall let her.”

“Yes,” Leonora said. “You will. And then she will come back, because they do come back if you let them go, and she will be about twenty, and she will sit in the gallery and ask you what her mother was like. And you will tell her the truth about her too.”