Page 35 of A Baby for the Duke

“Try what, Your Grace?”

“The pear.”

“You’ll want your oldest gown.”

“I’m wearing my newest one, and I shall regret it in about a minute and a half.” Leonora came around the table and held out her hand for the spoon. “Give it here.”

What followed was, by any reasonable measure, a disaster.

She began sensibly, which was her first mistake, for the child regarded the approaching spoon with the flat contempt of a magistrate and turned her head away.

She tried singing, which worked for exactly as long as it took Katherine to realize that singing did not have to be paid for with pear.

She tried holding the bowl out of sight. She tried eating some herself and pronouncing it delicious, which was a lie, because it was pear and nothing else and it tasted of wet paper.

Then she made the spoon into a swallow.

She had done this for Augusta years ago, on a nursery floor in a house that smelled of her mother’s lily water. She did it now without thinking, lifting the spoon up and round and down in a long swooping curve with a vroom vroom. Katherine’s mouth opened in pure astonishment, and the bird went in.

“Ha!” Leonora exclaimed.

Katherine, knowing she had been tricked, took immediate revenge. Leonora received the entire second mouthful across the chin and the front of her newest gown.

She sat back on her heels and laughed until her eyes ran. “Oh, that’s fair. That is entirely fair. I’d have done the same.”

“Your Grace, your dress.”

“It’ll wash.” She wiped her chin with the back of her wrist, scooped a fresh spoonful, and sent the swallow round again. “My youngest sister would not eat a mouthful in her second year unless she was entertained, and my mother was not a woman to be beaten by a person of eighteen months, so the whole house was put to work. In the end, my brothers took to boxing in front of her while Mama fed her. Two grown men in shirtsleeves knocking each other about the nursery, and Augusta would sit there opening and closing her mouth like a little bird.”

Mrs. Pike laughed out loud.

“Oh dear,” Leonora snorted. “I do hope I shan’t have to box with my husband.”

“I hope the same, wife,” Colin said from the doorway.

Leonora twisted around on her knees with a spoon in one hand.

Colin was in his shirtsleeves, with sawdust on his forearms. He had clearly been up all night.

And it was clear that he had been standing there for a while.

Leonora was suddenly horribly aware that she had pear on her chin, down the front of her gown, and in her hair. She wiped at her chest with the napkin.

Colin looked at the ceiling.

“Still not fond of fruit, then,” he noted.

“She is not, and she is very rude about it. She has beaten every person in this house who has tried.” Leonora got up. “But I will win.”

“Others have said that.”

“I am not others, Your Grace. I have twelve years of experience with my sister and no shame whatsoever.” She set the bowl down. “Are you going somewhere?”

She asked because he had already turned toward the corridor. She saw him pause for one beat, a man deciding.

“My chambers,” he said.

“You’ve not eaten.”