Page 12 of A Baby for the Duke

The footman stopped in the middle of the floor with the soup.

“We are getting married. Lord Huntington, I’ll speak to you properly in the morning about the settlement, but I would rather you all heard it from me tonight than from somebody else on Thursday.” He set down his glass. “Lady Leonora has also agreed to help me raise my daughter.”

Silence ensued, so thick it was almost tangible.

“Your—” Her father broke off. “I beg your pardon. Your what?”

“My daughter. Katherine. She is six months old. Right now, she is upstairs. The ton has not heard of her yet, but I imagine that will not last the week.”

Marina’s foot found Leonora’s under the table and pressed down hard.

Leonora watched her mother’s face cycle through so many emotions that she could not catch one of them.

“Your Grace.” Her father put both hands on the table, and his voice had gone back to the one he used on the mill floor, the one that had never quite been sanded off him. “I am a plain man, and I’ll speak plainly at your table. Why bring my daughter into this? If there’s a child, there’s a mother. Marry the poor girl who fell for you and be done with it.”

The Duke did not look away from him. “If she were alive and in this house, I might.”

Nobody said anything after that.

The silence lingered for so long that the footman, who had frozen halfway to the sideboard, gave up and set the tureen down on the nearest flat surface and stood facing the wall with his hands clasped behind his back.

Leonora looked at the Duke’s hands, thinking.

That is a lie, and he told it for a woman he has never met so that nobody at this table would go looking for her.

Her mother recovered first, because her mother always did.

“Well,” she began. “Well, then there is a great deal to be done, and none of it can be done from Grosvenor Square. When will you have the banns read, Your Grace?”

“Sunday.”

“Three weeks.” Her mother nodded to herself, already counting. “Three weeks.”

“I’d like your family to spend them here.”

Her mother let out a loud laugh. Then she clapped a hand over her mouth and said from behind it, “Your Grace, you have no idea what you are asking for. We are seven at breakfast when the boys are home, and nine when they bring friends. My husband shouts. My youngest listens at doors and is quite unrepentant about it. My daughters sing in the corridors. You would not survive a fortnight.”

“Perhaps I’d like the change.”

“You would not.”

“Perhaps I should like to find out.”

“But we might annoy you,” her mother stressed. “And one does not wish to annoy a duke.”

The Duke looked down the length of the enormous table. “I promise not to kill anyone.”

Leonora heard her father inhale. She heard Marina make a small, strangled noise into her glass. And then her mother laughed again, delighted, scandalized, entirely won over, and reached out and patted the Duke’s sleeve as though he were a nephew who had said a clever thing.

“Well, that settles it,” she declared. “We shall come. Leonora and I, and I shall chaperone every single moment, Your Grace, and I mean every moment, so you may put that out of your mind at once.”

“Mama.”

“I am being perfectly proper and your father is nodding. Now.” She gathered her gloves. “Have you a great many blankets?”

“I have no idea,” said the Duke.

“Then I shall bring my own,” said the Marchioness of Huntington, “for I feel the cold dreadfully, and I would rather not spend three weeks being brave about it in a house that size.”