Page 4 of A Baby for the Duke

“Mrs. Pike.”

“Your Grace?”

“Feed her. Warm the north nursery. Send Tom to the village and have him ask quietly whether any woman was seen walking on the Thorton road before dawn.” He was already moving toward the door. “And nobody speaks of this outside the house. Not to a sister, not to a sweetheart, not in the churchyard on Sunday. Not one word.”

“And where will you be, Your Grace?”

Colin paused with his hand on the doorhandle. “Finding out which of my brother’s lovers writes like that.”

CHAPTER 2

The correspondence filled a japanned box, and it took Colin four hours to get to the bottom of it.

He had expected to feel nothing. He had trained himself, over fifteen years of settling his brother’s accounts, to handle the evidence of William’s life the way a clerk handled a ledger, and for the first hour it worked.

Bills from a tailor on Jermyn Street. A note from a man in Newmarket concerning a horse. Three letters from a woman who signed them with only V., growing shorter and colder in succession, and a fourth from her husband, which Colin read twice and set aside to be burned.

By the second hour, it had stopped working.

There were forty-one letters in that box from women, and he could not have said, sitting there with the light going gray at the windows, whether that number appalled him or whether he had simply expected worse.

He knew his brother. He had made his brother.

Every debt paid, every scrape smoothed over, every furious father shown quietly out the front door with a bank draft in his coat, and at the end of all that care stood a young man who had gone to Italy and left a six-month-old child in a wicker basket on a step in January.

Colin laid the letters out across the desk in rows and looked at the handwriting.

That was the whole of it. He did not need names. Names could be false and often were. A woman with a husband would sign a letter with a V. or nothing at all. But he caught a familiar hand.

Whoever had folded that blanket around the baby and written Katherine in the middle of a blank sheet had written to William before, because women always wrote to William before, and Colin had every one of those letters in front of him.

He worked through them by the shape of the K.

It was full dark by the time he found it.

The letter was near the bottom, folded small, on paper that was better than most of what lay on the desk. The hand slanted the wrong way. It pressed too hard on the downstrokes, and the gs looped over instead of under.

For a moment, he thought he had it. Then he read the letter and knew that he did not.

My dear,

I have watched you across three rooms this Season and never once spoken to you, and I find that I have written you a letter regardless, which tells you more about me than I would like you to know.

He read it standing up.

He read all of it, which he had not intended to do. At the end, he stood holding it for longer than was reasonable, because those were not the words of a woman who had a child by his brother. Those were not the words of a woman who had been in a room alone with his brother.

The letter had been written by somebody frightened and clever who had wanted, quite badly, for one honest sentence of hers to exist somewhere in the world, and who had been careful to make certain it could never be traced.

Careful, but not careful enough.

Colin turned the page over. The seal had been broken in the middle when William opened it, the way William opened everything—with a thumb and no patience—and the wax had split so that half the impression remained.

Half a wheel. The wing of a bird. Three letters of a Latin motto that ran off the tear.

He went very still.

Six years ago, he had sat in the second row at Westminster and watched a wool merchant kneel and stand up a marquess because the man had grown too rich to be left outside the fence and the Crown had preferred him in. Colin had gone because his father’s ghost had left him a seat there and because he was twenty-four and had not yet learned that he could simply refuse.