Page 36 of A Baby for the Duke

“I’m not hungry.”

“You’ve been out since last night.”

He turned back at that, and whatever crossed his face was gone before she could read it.

“Aren’t you going to stay?” she asked.

“Katherine prefers it when I’m not in the room.” He said it flatly, the way a man reported the price of wheat.

That was what undid her, more than the eye patch and more than the corridor and more than any of it.

She looked at the baby. Katherine had gone still in her chair, both fists closed on the tray, and she was watching Colin across the room with her chin tucked down. Her eyes had gone to the black silk eyepatch and stayed there.

“Oh,” Leonora murmured.

“You see, then.”

“I see a child who has known you for a fortnight and has been given no reason to think you are anything but a very tall stranger who appears in doorways.” She bent, picked Katherine up, and settled her on her hip. The baby’s hand went straight to her hair, which had pear in it. “You might win her over instead.”

“That isn’t how it works.”

“That is precisely how it works. It’s how it works with everybody.” Leonora crossed the room and stopped in front of him. She had to tip her head back further than she had expected. “You may begin this morning.”

“How?”

“By showing us the house.”

Colin looked at the pear in her hair and then at his niece on her hip. Leonora watched the refusal arrive at his mouth and die there.

“Fine,” he relented.

It was the worst tour ever given by an Englishman.

“The ballroom.”

That was all of it. He stood in the doorway with his hands tucked behind his back while Leonora walked into a room the size of a parish church, shuttered, sheeted, and gray as a wet Sunday. She stopped in the center with the baby and looked up at a ceiling painted with clouds.

“Katherine, this is a ballroom.” She went to the nearest window and pulled the shutter back, and light spilled in across the dust sheets. “This is where the ton comes to be looked at. Everybody stands at the edges pretending to be too warm, and the musicians are always put in the coldest corner. If a lady wishes to speak to a gentleman, she must first find three other people to stand near, or somebody’s aunt will write about it. And here, in the middle, they dance.”

Katherine said nothing, only grabbed a fistful of the nearest dust sheet.

“Your father is going to open this room one day,” Leonora continued, “and we shall see what the ton does about it.”

Silence ensued. Then the click of Colin’s boots on the floorboards, continuing down the corridor. She gathered the baby closer and followed the sound.

“The library.”

She opened the curtains in there too. There were maybe four thousand books and the smell of a room shut for too long. She walked Katherine down the shelves with one hand out, touching the spines.

“These are books. Every one of them is a person talking, and most of them are dead, which does not stop them in the least. Your father has a great many, and I intend to read every one, starting with whichever is the most improper.”

“Third shelf,” Colin called from the door. “Behind the Herodotus.”

Leonora turned round. “I’m sorry?”

“You asked which was the most improper. It’s behind the Herodotus. My grandmother’s.” He had not stepped into the room. “She hid it there because nobody in this family has ever voluntarily opened a Herodotus.”

“Your Grace, was that a joke?”