Page 37 of A Baby for the Duke

“No,” Colin said, and stepped out into the corridor.

Leonora looked at the baby. “That was a joke,” she whispered. “But we shall say nothing about it.”

“The gallery.”

This was the one she had been waiting for.

She had eaten her own wedding breakfast in it, and had seen almost nothing: sixty people, a great deal of noise, and a long room full of candles with the shutters closed and the far end of it in the dark. She had spent four hours in there and could not have told anybody what was on the walls.

She went in ahead of him, drew the first curtain open, and stopped.

It ran the whole north side of the house. Portraits of Walford ancestors hung on either side, sixty of them, dukes and duchesses and boys in velvet with hunting dogs, going back to a woman in a stiff white ruff who had Colin’s cold blue stare and looked as though she would have successfully led a siege.

“Look up, sweetling. That is a painting. It’s a way of keeping somebody after they’re gone.”

She walked along the wall with the baby, naming things. A horse. A dog. A little girl in yellow with a bird on her finger, whose face Katherine studied gravely for some time.

“What color do you like best?” Leonora asked her. “Mine is green. Marina says that’s because I’m vain about my eyes, which is slander and also true.”

Katherine clapped.

“Green it is.”

Leonora came to the end of the room, where the last twenty feet had no pictures on the wall, and where a canvas eleven feet wide stood against the paneling under a black Holland cover.

She stopped in front of it. “Well, apparently your father’s favorite color is black. I can’t say I’m surprised.”

“Does that trouble you?”

Colin was further down the gallery, by the window she had opened. His voice had not changed in the slightest, and Leonora, who had spent four Seasons learning to hear what people did with their voices when they were pretending, went very still.

“No,” she said. “Only I’ve been thinking about the week.”

“Have you?”

“You said you’d give me a week to prepare. I’ve decided that’s not what you meant.” She turned around with the baby on her hip. “I think you meant a week to get to know one another. I want you to know that I am perfectly willing to, and that I have been trying since nine o’clock this morning, but it will not work if you say five words a day and one of them is fine.”

Silence followed.

“You want conversation,” Colin rumbled.

“I want to know one true thing about you that isn’t in a scandal sheet.”

“Then ask.”

“Anything?”

“Ask, and we’ll see.”

Leonora looked at the shape under the black cloth. She was aware, even as she opened her mouth, that there were forty better questions to ask and that she had four thousand books and a treehouse and a wooden horse to choose from.

She asked the wrong question anyway.

“Why is this painting covered?”

The change was not slow.

She watched his hands close. She watched him go somewhere else entirely. The face that turned toward her was the one from the corridor on the night of the dinner, and worse, there was nothing behind it now.