Page 43 of A Baby for the Duke

“That is exactly why you should do it. Not this Season.” Emily crossed back to her. “One day. When you’re both ready, and it’s on your terms and not theirs. You march four hundred of them through that door, and you stand beside him in the middle and force every one of them to be polite to his face. By midnight, the story will have changed, because the ton will believe anything if it happens at a good enough party.”

Leonora had considered that for a while.

“I shall write it down,” she said.

Sybella found the improper book behind the Herodotus within six minutes, which Leonora considered an outrage, and wrote down its title. In the gallery, she strolled to the north wall with her hands behind her back, stopped in front of the covered canvas, looked at it, looked at the empty wall above it, and moved on without a word, which Leonora would think about for a fortnight.

“Well…” Emily began.

“Don’t.”

“I have not said anything.”

“You are about to say something.”

“I am about to say,” Emily said, sitting back down in the middle of a drawing room with its furniture shoved against the walls, and arranging her skirts with enormous care, “that a man who has not been in a room with four women in six years has just been rude about his own cook, invited us all to dinner, and told us at some length about turbot. And that he did it while looking at the carpet, which I found very interesting.”

“He looked at Nora,” Sybella piped up from the window seat, without raising her eyes from her notebook.

“He did. Once. When he thought nobody would catch him at it.”

“Twice,” Sybella said. “The second time was when Augusta asked if he was her brother.”

Leonora put her hands over her face.

CHAPTER 15

Dinner started at six. Contrary to Colin’s recommendation, they had mutton.

Mrs. Rowe had been given four hours’ notice of five extra covers and had, according to Mrs. Pike, said one word that no housekeeper would repeat and then produced a saddle of mutton, a dish of peas, three fowls, and a syllabub that arrived at the table under its own weather.

Colin came down at ten minutes to six in a coat.

He had not intended to. He had gone up at four with the intention of sending word that he was engaged and had gotten as far as sitting down at the desk with a sheet of paper in front of him. He had sat there for a while, not writing anything, and had rung for a razor instead.

He stepped into a dining room that had nine people in it and every candle lit.

“You will sit there,” said Lady Huntington, who had arrived at five without any warning whatsoever, having heard from a coachman that her daughters were at Thorton. “Next to me, Your Grace, because I have three things to say to you and my husband is at the other end and cannot stop me.”

“Mama,” Leonora warned.

“Say your three things, Lady Huntington,” Colin allowed, sitting down.

Lady Huntington did, and Colin, who had not been talked at like that by a woman in his adult life, discovered that all it required of him was to eat.

The first thing she said was that his housekeeper was a treasure and ought to be given a girl under her. The second was that the north field was the talk of the county and her husband had heard of it in a coffee house in London, which was a thing that did not happen to ditches. The third, delivered in a rather low voice with her eyes on the fowls, was that she had been very frightened for her daughter in May and was not frightened now, and that she did not intend to say so again and would be obliged if nobody mentioned it.

Colin looked at his plate. “My lady…”

“That is all. Eat your mutton. It is dreadful, and I have had worse from a duchess.” Then she turned to her left and launched into a conversation about a curate.

Further down the table, Augusta had been permitted to dine with the grown-ups and had said nothing for twenty minutes, which her mother described as a triumph. Marina and Alexander had a bet running on something nobody would explain.

Colin had not expected to enjoy it. He was clear with himself about that afterward. He had come down out of obligation and had expected to sit through two hours of being managed by strangers. Instead, he found that if a man said almost nothing at a table containing three Belmont women, nobody noticed, and the evening went on perfectly well without him.

Which left him free to watch his wife.

She was sitting at the far end, between Marina and the red-haired girl, being loud.