Page 40 of A Baby for the Duke

They came in.

Word spread through Thorton Green in about forty minutes, which Leonora had not anticipated. Two more came at half past four with cheese. A woman called Ivy Dunn came at five with three of her children and an apology. By half past five, there were sixteen people in the front hall of Thorton Manor, and Bess had been sent twice for more tea.

It took them ten minutes to stop perching on the front six inches of the chairs and sit back in them like people who had been asked. It took Katherine, who was brought down and passed along the row like a subscription plate, about four.

By six, Mrs. Hartley had explained the entire feud between the Thorton Green alehouse and the vicar, her sister-in-law had asked whether it was true that Leonora had a twin, and a small round man called Beddoes had told Leonora, in the voice of a man confessing to a crime, that the north field had flooded three years running and nobody had wanted to mention it.

“Why did nobody want to mention it?”

Sixteen people looked at each other, and then, by some arrangement Leonora never saw made, they all looked at Beddoes.

“Well,” Beddoes said, turning his hat over. “You don’t, do you?”

“You don’t what?”

“You don’t go up to the treehouse, Your Grace.”

Leonora set down her cup. “Mr. Beddoes, my husband has not raised the rent in fifteen years and has put roofs on three cottages out of his own pocket without telling a living soul about it, and you are still frightened of him?”

“He’s a very quiet man,” Mrs. Hartley remarked, with feeling.

“He is. He is the quietest man in England, and it has done him no good whatsoever.” She cleared her throat. “So, here is what will happen. You will come to the house when the north field floods, you will come when the roof leaks, and you will come at Christmas, and if he growls at you, you will remember that he made an old woman a cane with his own hands and you will growl back.”

There was a long, doubtful pause.

“He did make her that cane,” Beddoes acknowledged. “I saw him cutting the wood.”

It was nearly eight before she went upstairs.

She crossed the gallery because it was the shortest way to the nursery… and stopped, because the curtains she had opened that morning were still open, and the last of the light had spilled across the far wall onto sixty Walfords who had not been looked at in six years.

At the north end, the black Holland cover had not moved.

“I’ll have them shut, Your Grace,” Mrs. Pike called from behind her.

“No.”

“He’ll notice.”

“I know,” Leonora said. “That’s rather the point.”

She went to the window. Below her, the lawn ran down to the yew walk, and past the yew walk to the dark shape of an old beech. Thirty feet up in it, small and yellow and perfectly steady, a lamp was burning.

She stood there and watched it for a long moment.

I have opened your curtains and fed your tenants and read your accounts and learned the name of the girl you cannot remember, and you are up in a treehouse, and neither of us has the first idea what to do with each other.

Then the lamp went out.

Leonora stayed at the window, her pulse loud in her ears, and waited to hear the side door.

The house stayed quiet.

CHAPTER 14

Colin heard them from the treehouse.

That was the remarkable part. He was thirty feet up in a beech at the far end of the garden, with a chisel in his hand, and at about eleven o’clock on a Sunday morning a sound drifted across the lawn that he had not heard at Thorton in his lifetime.