Page 14 of A Baby for the Duke

Augusta roused her at half past seven the next morning.

She did not knock. She never knocked. She barged into the room, jumped up onto the mattress, and landed on her knees beside Leonora’s head with the force of twelve years behind her.

Leonora startled awake, convinced the house was on fire.

“Nora. Nora. Is it true?”

“Gus.”

“Is it true?”

“Is what true, sweetling?”

“That you have a baby with the Duke.” Augusta’s face was three inches away and entirely serious. “Cook says so. She says it’s in the papers. I want to know if it’s true because I thought I was the only baby you would ever pamper.”

Leonora sat up. “What papers?”

“The gossip ones. Ellen fetched them.” Augusta was already burrowing under the counterpane, having gotten the important business out of the way. “Can I see her? The baby? Because if I am going to be an aunt, I should like to begin at once, and then I shan’t mind about the pampering. I have decided I shall be the best aunt in England!”

“Gus, what did the papers say?”

But Augusta had rolled over and was talking about names for kittens, and had reached the point of arguing both sides of Marmalade against Wellington when the whole house shook.

The sound came up the stairwell from the hall. It was a sound Leonora had heard four times in twenty-one years, and every one of those times had involved a man losing money.

“Nora! Here. Now.”

Augusta sat bolt upright. “That’s Papa,” she whisper-hissed.

Leonora got out of bed with her heart pounding hard. She put on her wrapper and went down the stairs barefoot. Voices drifted from the breakfast room to her ears before she even reached the bottom.

She paused on the last step.

There was her mother’s voice, high-pitched; Alexander’s, laughing, which was not the same thing as being amused; and Evan’s, low and quick, saying numbers. And her father’s, above all of it, saying the same word twice.

She pushed the door open. There were four newspapers on the table. Her mother had one, and her brothers had two more between them. The fourth lay open in the middle of the table beside the toast rack, where her father had thrown it down.

She came around the table and read it upside down, and then right way up.

LADY L.B. HAS A BABY WITH THE BEAST OF THORTON!

Our readers will recall that a certain new-made marquess’s daughter has for four Seasons worn gowns of a fullness unbecoming to a lady of her figure, and has been much given to retiring early. We now venture to supply the reason. A female infant of six months has been seen this week at Thorton Manor, the house from which no invitation has been sent since the old Duke’s death, and whose threshold only one family has crossed in six years. That family dined there on Thursday. We do not say more. We do observe that the lady in question spent three months at Bath last summer, and that Bath is famous for its waters and for other things besides.

The room had gone quiet around her.

“It’s ridiculous,” Leonora scoffed. Her voice sounded far away. “Everyone knows I have not had a baby. It is something people would have noticed.”

“You were at Bath,” Evan reminded her.

“To swim!”

“You stayed there for three months, at your aunt’s, and nobody in London saw you. That is all the ton needs.” Her brother did not look up from the column. He had a pencil in his hand and was underlining some words, which was the most frightening thing Leonora had seen in her life. “They don’t need it to be true, Nora. They need it to be possible. Once it’s possible, they will build the rest themselves, and it will be a better story than the truth, and it will follow you for thirty years.”

“Then we deny it,” Alexander declared. He had his boots on the fender and a piece of toast in his hand. He was the only person eating in the room. “Loudly. Everywhere. I’ll be at White’s by two, and I’ll be very flippant about it. By Thursday, it’ll be a story about how absurd the papers have become, and I’ll let three separate men win money off me while I’m doing it.”

“Denial confirms it,” Evan argued.

“Denial from you would confirm it. Nobody has ever accused me of being in earnest about anything in my life, which is exactly why it will work.”