Page 38 of A Baby for the Duke

“This was a mistake,” Colin said.

“Your Grace⁠—”

“Put the sheets back the way you found them.”

Then he walked out, leaving her among sixty dead Walfords with a baby on her hip and the dust turning gold in the light of the window she had opened.

She heard a door close somewhere at the far end of the house with a great deal of care, which was worse than if he had slammed it.

CHAPTER 13

She did not cry in the gallery, which she counted afterward as one of the better decisions of her marriage.

She gave herself as far as the bottom of the stairs, then she took the baby down to the nursery, washed the pear out of her hair, put on the plainest gown she owned, and went to find the housekeeper.

“Mrs. Pike, I would like to look through the household ledger.”

Mrs. Pike had been counting linen. She put down the sheet she was holding. “Your Grace?”

“The ledger. Wages, stores, the tradesmen’s accounts, whatever there is.” Leonora sat down at the table in the stillroom without being invited, which she had worked out was the only way this was going to happen. “And I would like to know the name of every person in this house, what they do, and how long they have been here.”

“His Grace keeps the accounts himself.”

“His Grace is up in a tree.”

There was a pause of about two seconds, and then Mrs. Pike laughed so hard that she had to hold the edge of the dresser.

She handed her the ledger. It was in Colin’s hand, which Leonora had not seen before. Small, upright, beautifully regular—the hand of a man who did his sums at four in the morning and made no mistakes. She went through the records of the past two years with her chin in her palm and learned more about her husband in forty minutes than she had learned in nine days.

The tenants’ rents had not been raised since the year the old Duke died. Three cottages had new roofs. There was a line, twice a year, for a widow in the village with no other label attached to it. And every quarter, a large sum went out to an address in Italy.

“He pays his brother’s debts before he pays his own coal merchant,” Leonora noted.

“He does, Your Grace.”

“And nobody knows about the roofs.”

“The men who put them on know.”

“Nobody in London knows about the roofs.”

“No, Your Grace,” Mrs. Pike agreed. “That’s how he likes it.”

The names took another half hour, and Leonora wrote them all down on the back of an old invitation because there was nothing else at hand.

Mrs. Pike, housekeeper, thirty-one years in the house since before Colin was born. Bess, Sarah, and Peg, housemaids. Peg was seventeen, hired five months ago, and was the girl whose name Colin could never remember, and whose mother kept the alehouse at Thorton Green.

Then there was fourteen-year-old Tom, who did the boots and the coals and the errands. Ferris, who had painted a door shut in a hurry nine years ago and had never been forgiven for it, and who was footman, valet, and anything else that was wanted. Wilkes at the stables and a boy under him. Two women who came up from the village three days a week for the rough work and were not, Mrs. Pike said firmly, to be counted, and were counted anyway. And Mrs. Rowe, the cook, who had been sending up the same eleven dinners in rotation for six years because nobody had once commented on any of them.

“Eleven dinners.”

“Eleven, Your Grace. Not the hall dinners, which are what they are and always have been. Eleven dinners for the dining room, sent up in their turn, and when she comes to the end of them she starts again at the beginning.”

“For six years.”

“His Grace has never remarked upon it. He eats what’s in front of him and thanks the maid who brings it, and Mrs. Rowe considers that sufficient.” Mrs. Pike’s mouth had gone tight. “You’ll have had the turbot on Thursday, Your Grace. The one at the dinner.”

“I did.”