Page 24 of A Baby for the Duke

He climbed down the ladder, had a horse saddled, and rode out over the park at a speed no reasonable man would at that hour. He jumped a hedge he had no business jumping. He came back forty minutes later with his horse blowing and himself no better.

Mrs. Pike was on the lawn. She had a rug laid out on the grass in the sun, where the baby sat propped against a cushion. She was holding a wooden ball above the baby’s head and drawing it away over and over. As he watched, Katherine caught the ball and immediately put it in her mouth. Mrs. Pike laughed out loud, and the sound drifted all the way to where he had pulled up under the trees.

Colin watched them.

That is the reason. There is a child in this house who cannot be here without a mother, and I have found her one. It is a piece of arithmetic. On Friday, there will be a woman at my table, and it will change nothing at all.

The baby dropped the ball, and Mrs. Pike gave it back.

Nothing at all.

Colin did not move. He was aware that he had been sitting in the shade of the beech tree for four minutes without once thinking about the child.

Mrs. Pike caught him in the hall before he had taken off his gloves. She had a slate in her hand. She had been carrying a slate around the house for three days now, and every time he came within reach, there was another line chalked on it. He had begun to think of it the way other men thought of a summons.

“The east rooms,” she said.

“What about them?”

“They’ve been shut since your father’s death. If Her Grace is to have the chamber over the drive, then the two beside it need airing, and the flue needs sweeping. I’ll need four girls from the village to have it done.”

“All right, you can send for them.”

“And the little green door between the chambers is painted shut.”

Colin stopped with one glove half off. “Since when?”

“Nine years or so, when the damp got into that wall and Ferris painted the whole of it.” Mrs. Pike did not look up from her slate. “Shall I have it eased, Your Grace, or shall I leave it?”

There was a pause that lasted too long for a question about a door.

“Have it eased,” Colin instructed.

“Very good.”

They went through the house together, which they had not done in six years, and it was worse than he had expected. Dust sheets over everything in the blue drawing room. A stopped clock. A window in the music room that had been cracked since before William started going to school and had never once been mentioned to him by anybody, because nobody came into the music room.

“Open all of it,” Colin said.

“All of it?”

“Curtains, shutters, the lot. Get the light in before Friday. If Lady Leonora walks through this house while it looks like a tomb, she will spend the rest of her life in three rooms, and I will have done that to her.”

Mrs. Pike wrote on her slate for far longer than that required.

“You might tell her so yourself,” she suggested.

“Tell her what?”

“That you thought of it. Women like to be told, Your Grace, and you’ve never told anybody anything in your life.”

“I’d rather she walked in and found the house open,” Colin said.

“So that you needn’t say it?”

“So that it’s done.”

“Mm,” Mrs. Pike murmured.