Page 44 of A Baby for the Duke

Not loud. That was the wrong word.

She was audible. She had opinions, and she gave them. Twice she said something so wicked that her twin covered her face with her napkin, and once she did an impression of somebody’s aunt that stopped the whole table.

Colin had been married a fortnight and had never seen her do any of it.

When the syllabub was served, Lord Huntington asked whether it was true she had given tea to sixteen tenants in his drawing room, and she said that it was sixteen exactly, and that one of them had brought a cheese and another a hare pie, and that Mrs. Hartley had sent up a second cake on Wednesday with no message attached to it at all, which she considered the best letter she had ever received. Lord Huntington put down his spoon and looked at her with an expression Colin recognized, because he had seen it on his own face in the gallery window.

This is who she is. This is who she is when she is among people who have known her all her life. And when it is the two of us at that table, she tells me the fish is remarkable and asks whether I would like the salt.

“Your Grace,” the Duchess of Huxley said on his other side.

“Duchess.”

“May I be blunt?”

“You have been sitting beside me for forty minutes waiting to be.”

Emily laughed, which he had not expected.

“Very well. I have known Nora since we were nine years old, and in that time, she has been in love with a great many things. Poetry. A horse. A wholly unsuitable novel her aunt left at Bath, which she believes I do not know she has read four times.” She turned her glass. “She has never once been in love with a person because she has never once been looked at long enough to try.”

Colin said nothing for a moment. “You have known her since she was nine. What was she like?”

Emily set down her glass. “Nobody has ever asked me that in four Seasons. Not one man.”

“I am asking.”

“Then I shall tell you, and you will have to sit still for it.” She turned in her chair. “She was the funniest child I have ever met, and nobody outside her family has ever found out because she has four siblings and every one of them is louder. By the time I met her she had already decided that the way to be loved in that house was to take up no room at all, and she was nine, and she has not taken up room since, and she is extremely good at it. It has cost her four Seasons and a great many friends she should have had.

“And then she moved to a house where there is nobody but a housekeeper and a baby and a man who does not come down. I have been watching her all day, Duke, and she is taking up room. She gave tea to sixteen of your tenants in your own drawing room. She has opened a gallery. She told my sister what she thought of a book out loud, at a table, which I have not heard her do since she was fifteen.”

“That is not my doing.”

“I did not say it was. I said it was happening in your house.” She picked up her glass again. “That was me being blunt. I have no advice to attach to it. I merely thought that somebody in this house ought to have said it out loud, and it clearly was not going to be her.”

They left at nine.

It was noisy and slightly chaotic. Augusta had to be extricated from under the piano in the music room, where she had been conducting a survey. Lady Huntington embraced Colin, which seemed to surprise everybody, including her. Sybella shook his hand and told him that his Palladian window was an atrocity and that she should like to come back and see the library properly.

Colin stood on the steps with a lamp and watched the whole party go: Lord and Lady Huntington into their own carriage with a good deal of argument about a rug, and the four younger women and the child into the Huxley one. His wife was going down the steps after them, still talking.

Emily was last. She stopped with one foot on the step and said something to Leonora that he could not hear. Leonora answered, and then Emily said loudly across the gravel, “And she told me about a horse.”

“She always tells you about a horse,” Leonora snorted. “She has been telling people about horses since she was six, and it has never once meant that there was a horse.”

“Then you’ll ask her.”

“I shall ask her on Tuesday, and she will tell me about a different horse. Then, one day, she will tell me the truth all at once at two in the morning, and I will be extremely tired and not at all surprised.” Leonora kissed her friend’s cheek. “Go home. Your husband must be asleep over a newspaper.”

The carriage rolled away.

Leonora stood in the drive until it turned out of the gates. Colin stood on the steps above her with the lamp, and neither of them said anything for long enough that it became a thing they were both doing on purpose.

“Thank you,” she said eventually, without turning round.

“For what?”

“For coming down. Both times.” She was looking at the gate. “You needn’t have. I had told them you would not, and I had made it sound like a preference and not a wound, which is the only lie I have told this week. But then you came down twice and made me a liar in front of my oldest friend.”