Page 2 of A Baby for the Duke

“You’ve done it four hundred times. You’re remarkably good at it. Last spring, you sent away a bishop.”

“He was rude about the roses.”

“Mrs. Pike.”

“You’d best come down,” she urged.

Colin put the chisel in the box and closed the lid, then picked up the cat, who objected to being picked up and expressed the objection by hissing at the general direction of the ground.

He climbed down the rope ladder one-handed, which he had done ten thousand times, and landed on the dewy grass beside a woman half his size who came up to the middle of his chest and had never, in his memory, taken a single step backward.

“Well?” he prompted. “What did they say?”

“Not much, really.”

“Nothing at all?”

“Very little.”

“Mrs. Pike, you’ve walked out here on a bad hip to fetch me for a caller who has neither a name nor anything to say. Am I to guess?”

“I’ve put them in the drawing room.”

He stopped walking. “You let them in.”

“Of course I let them in.”

“You know the rule. Nobody crosses the threshold until I’ve seen them.”

“I could hardly leave them standing out there on the step all alone!” Mrs. Pike argued with such genuine horror that he turned and looked at her.

“Why not?”

“Why, because it’s a baby.”

There were three maids in the drawing room, and not one of them was working.

They had arranged themselves around the sofa in a half circle, and they were making a sound Colin had never heard in this house in his life—a sort of low cooing, the noise a dovecote made at dusk.

Sarah had a finger extended. Bess was on her knees on the carpet. The new girl, whose name he could never remember, was holding her apron in both fists and looking like she might weep.

In the middle of the sofa sat a wicker basket, and in the basket sat a baby.

She was perhaps six months old, and had a great deal of dark hair and cheeks like two apples. She was not crying or laughing. She was looking at each of the maids in turn with an expression of profound and unhurried assessment, the way a magistrate looked at a witness he had already decided about.

As Colin watched, the baby reached both hands toward Bess and opened and closed them twice, in a manner that could not have been clearer if she’d spoken.

The maids scattered.

He hadn’t said anything, but they scattered anyway and formed a line along the wall. The cooing stopped as though a door had shut on it.

“Your Grace,” Bess greeted.

Colin crossed to the sofa. Mercutio leapt out of his arms and onto the back of it in one motion and sat there. The baby turned her head and regarded him with the same courtroom seriousness. Mercutio, who had bitten a footman on Tuesday, began to purr.

“How long has she been here?”

“Half an hour, Your Grace. Perhaps a bit more. Tom found her on the porch when he came round with the coals.”