Page 17 of A Baby for the Duke

“All right,” she relented.

The Duke nodded once. He did not say anything else, nor did he look pleased.

He looked at her for a moment longer than the nod required. Then he walked her back to the house. In the hall, in front of her mother and both her brothers and Hobbs, he told her father that he would obtain a special license by Tuesday and that he saw no reason to wait on it.

“The wedding is in a week,” he said, looking at Leonora.

The house went mad.

Her mother had a list before the front door clicked shut. There was to be a gown, which could not possibly be made and would be made.

There were to be flowers.

There was the question of the wedding breakfast, and whether it should be held at Huntington House or Thorton Manor. Her mother settled that one against herself in the space of a single sentence and then argued the other side for ten minutes.

Alexander offered to write to a dozen people. Evan was already at the desk in the morning room, with the marriage contract in front of him and his coat off, which he had not done in Leonora’s presence since he was nineteen.

Augusta went up and down the stairs eight times without any discernible purpose and finally sat on the third bottom step, watching it all, radiant.

Leonora stood in the middle of it with her shawl still on and understood that nobody was going to ask her anything, because everybody had a great deal to do.

Then a hand closed round her wrist and pulled her sideways through the door of the little breakfast room, before the door closed behind her.

“Right,” Marina said. “Sit down.”

“Marina.”

“Sit down and tell me the truth, because you’ve been saying all right all morning in a voice I don’t like.” Marina leaned back against the door, which was something she had been doing since they were six. “Do you want this?”

“It doesn’t matter what I⁠—”

“It matters to me.”

“Marina.”

“I mean it, Nora.” Her sister’s chin had gone up, and there was no mirth in her eyes. “Say the word, and I’ll ruin it. I’ll say that I wrote the letter. I’m a far better candidate; everyone knows I’m the wicked one. Mama will scream for a fortnight, and then she’ll marry me off to somebody dreadful, and it will be perfectly all right because I’d survive it and you wouldn’t.”

Leonora sat down on the window seat.

“I don’t want you to ruin it,” she sighed.

“Because of the scandal?”

“Because of the baby.”

Marina blinked.

“She’s six months old and has nobody,” Leonora explained. “Not one person in the world, except a man who’s decided to be responsible for her because there’s nobody else in the room, and a housekeeper with a bad hip. And I keep thinking, if I say no and it all goes away, and in five years I find myself a spinster reading novels in the window seat, what will happen to her? Who will sing to her? Who will find out that she doesn’t like being handed to people?”

“Nora.”

“So no, I don’t want you to ruin it.”

Marina came and sat down beside her. She put her head on her shoulder, and for a while, there was only the clatter of servants outside the door, her mother’s voice rising up the stairwell, Augusta’s shrieking about the flowers.

“And the Duke?” Marina asked.

“What about him?”