Page 39 of A Baby for the Duke

“That is the third of the eleven and she has been sending it up since before the old Duke died, and nobody has said one word about it in six years, and she trained under a Frenchman in Bath. She can cook a turbot that would make you weep.”

“Then she may do one on Thursday,” Leonora decided. “I shall weep, and I shall say so at some length, and you may tell her I said it in those words.”

Mrs. Pike wrote it on the slate.

“Thirty-one years,” Leonora murmured.

“Your Grace?”

“You have been in this house for thirty-one years. You came before he was born.”

“I came at nineteen as a nursemaid.” Mrs. Pike kept her eyes on the slate. “His mother was five months pregnant with him. She was frightened of the whole business and hadn’t a soul in this county to say it to, and I was the youngest maid in the house, so she said it to me. We were friends, which we shouldn’t have been.”

Leonora put the pen down. “What was she like?”

“Small. Fair. She sang all the time and none of it in tune. And she couldn’t manage the ton; they terrified her.” Mrs. Pike’s mouth moved. “She had this house lit like a fair. That’s the thing nobody remembers. Every candle in every room and the shutters open all winter, because she refused to live in a place that looked like a ‘family vault.’”

“And the old Duke?”

“Loved her past all sense,” Mrs. Pike answered. “Which people call a fine thing when they’ve not watched it.”

She put the slate down and straightened its corner, which did not need straightening.

“He gave me this hip, since you’re asking. Not on purpose. It was three weeks after her funeral. He had been drinking brandy since noon, and the boy had asked him a question about the baby. I stepped between the two of them on the turn of the back stairs and fell down it. His Grace was nine back then. He saw the whole of it, and he has never once mentioned it to me in twenty-one years. Then, a fortnight after his father was buried, he came into this room and put a cane in my hands that he’d made himself, and went out again without a word.”

The stillroom was very quiet.

“He was fifteen,” Leonora concluded.

“Indeed.” Mrs. Pike nodded. “He was fifteen, and he has been apologizing to the household ever since, in wood, because he cannot do it in words.”

The tenants came at four.

Leonora heard the noise from the stillroom and got to the front hall in time to see Bess trying, with enormous politeness and no success, to persuade a woman with a covered basket to hand it over and go away.

“I’ll not be leaving it on the step like a parcel.”

“Mrs. Hartley, I promise you it will be⁠—”

“I left the last one on the step in March, and I’ve never known whether it was eaten.”

“Mrs. Hartley,” Leonora said.

Everybody stopped.

There were four of them on the gravel, and it was clear from the arrangement that Mrs. Hartley had been pushed to the front and was not enjoying it. She was the woman who had curtsied so low at the wedding breakfast that she nearly fell over. She did it again now.

“Your Grace. We would not have troubled you. Only there’s a hare pie, a jar of damson jam, and something my sister’s daughter embroidered for the baby. And we thought…”

“You thought you would come and see me,” Leonora said.

There was an appalled silence.

“Which is quite fair,” she continued, “because I have seen you all from the chapel door and none of you got to look back. Bess, would you take these to the kitchen and fetch Mrs. Pike, and ask her to have the drawing room opened and tea sent in? As for the four of you, come and sit down, because I have been in this house since yesterday morning and I still do not know your names.”

Nobody moved.

“Come in,” Leonora urged.