Page 115 of A Baby for the Duke

She rose, rounded the desk to stand behind his chair, and read four lines over his shoulder.

He had told William that the debts at Ludlow were settled, that Katherine was well and had cut four teeth and could cross a room, and that a horse he had been carving for eleven weeks was finished and was already being dragged about by the tail. He had also told him that the north field was drained.

There was nothing in it about a wife, or a lake, or a treehouse.

“You have left out everything,” Leonora noted.

“I know. That is why the door is open.”

Colin turned the page over and wrote four more lines, slowly, with his ears going red, and did not let her see them. Then he sealed it.

“You have written four lines about a wooden horse to a man you have not seen in a year.”

“I am aware.”

“He will read it in Florence and know exactly what it means. He will not be able to say so either, because you have both been raised in the same house by the same man.” Leonora put her hand on his shoulder. “What did you say?”

“I told him that I have married a woman who lights up rooms,” Colin said, “that he will meet her when he can bear to come home, and that he need not be frightened of it, because there is no longer anybody in this house who is keeping an account of what he owes.”

The gallery took him until Friday.

Leonora did not go in. That was the hardest four days of the week, and she did it by finding a great deal to do at the other end of the house, and by not asking Mrs. Pike anything, and by refusing on Wednesday to look up when she heard a ladder being carried down the corridor.

On Friday evening, he found her in the nursery.

“You may come and see it now.”

The curtains were open the whole length of the south side, and the low light was spilling across the boards. At the north end, on the wall that had had nothing on it for fifteen years, hung four feet of a green garden in June.

Leonora stood in front of it for a long while.

“It is the right wall,” she remarked.

“It gets the sun until six.”

“It is the right wall, Colin, and you knew it in a drawing room a week ago and could not say so.” She looped her hand through his arm. “And the other?”

Colin looked down the gallery to where eleven feet of black Holland cloth was still propped against the paneling.

“Not yet,” he murmured.

“That is not a no.”

“No, it is not a no. It is the first time in fifteen years it has not been a no, and I should like to leave it there for a while and get used to the feeling.”

“Then leave it there for as long as you like.” Leonora smiled. “It is not going anywhere, and neither am I.”

“There is something I have never told anybody,” Colin admitted.

“You do not need to.”

“I would like to. I am practicing.” He was looking at the black Holland cover. “I sat in front of it. After. For about a year, when I was sixteen. Before I had it taken down. I used to come in here at night and sit on the floor in front of it, exactly where my father used to sit, with a bottle I never opened, because I wanted to know what it had felt like for him.”

Leonora did not say anything at all.

“And then, one night, I realized that I had been doing it for a year, and that I was sixteen and sitting in the dark in the same spot my father used to, with the same bottle beside me. So I got up, had the painting taken down the next morning, and I never came into this room again. That is the whole story of the covered painting. It is a great deal less interesting than everybody has always assumed.”

“It is not less interesting.”