Page 3 of A Baby for the Duke

“Nobody saw who left her?”

“No, Your Grace.”

“Nobody saw a carriage? A cart? A woman walking away up the drive?”

“No, Your Grace. It was still dark.”

Colin stood over the basket with his hands tucked behind his back. The child was wrapped in blankets, good ones, and looked clean. Somebody had dressed her carefully and packed a second gown at the bottom of the basket and folded it. There was also a cloth doll with an embroidered face tucked in beside her, and the sight of it lodged somewhere beneath his ribs that he chose not to examine.

Whoever had left her had not left her carelessly. Which was worse. Careless would have meant a woman in trouble. This meant a woman who had made a decision.

“There was a note, Your Grace,” Sarah said.

“Where?”

“Under her blanket, folded.”

She brought it to him, and he opened it. There was only one word, in a woman’s hand, written small in the middle of the page.

Katherine.

He turned it over and found nothing on the back. No date, no direction, no explanation, no plea, nothing that a woman leaving a child on a doorstep before dawn might reasonably be expected to write.

“That’ll be her name, Your Grace,” Mrs. Pike called from the doorway. “You’d not send a child anywhere without her name.”

“No,” Colin agreed. “I wouldn’t.”

He looked at the note for a moment longer. Then he folded it, put it in his waistcoat pocket, and crouched down beside the sofa so that his face was level with the basket.

Up close, the baby was smaller than he’d thought. Her hands were the size of walnuts. She had a crease across the bridge of her nose from frowning, which was not a thing he’d known babies could have, and her eyes were an unmistakable, unmerciful, familiar blue.

His own eye. His brother’s eyes. His father’s eyes.

“Where did you come from?” he murmured.

The baby’s face crumpled like paper in a fist. She drew in a breath that seemed far too big for her, held it, and then let out a wail that knocked the three maids off the wall at once and sent the cat straight up onto the mantelpiece.

Colin rose to his feet, and she screamed harder.

Mrs. Pike came forward with the cane going like a metronome, scooped her out of the basket, and settled her against her shoulder. Within a moment, the screaming had dropped to a wet, offended hiccup against the housekeeper’s neck.

“There, my lamb. There now.”

“She was perfectly content,” Colin noted.

“She was.”

“She was content until I spoke to her.”

“She was,” Mrs. Pike agreed, and had the decency not to look at him while she said it.

Colin stood in the middle of his own drawing room with his hands hanging at his sides and a headache starting behind his ruined eye, and he thought about William.

William in Italy. William, who had gone abroad in April with three trunks and a great many debts and a letter for him that had said nothing at all in four pages. William, who never in his life had ended a thing cleanly.

Somewhere in this house was a bundle of his correspondence that Colin had been given at various times, by various men who wanted various debts settled, and he had never read a line of it because reading it had seemed a squalid thing to do.

He would be reading it this morning.