Page 45 of A Baby for the Duke

“Duchess—”

“That was the nicest thing that has happened to me since I came to this house,” Leonora continued. “I am going up now, before either of us says anything else about it. Goodnight, Your Grace.”

With that, she went past him up the steps and in.

Colin stood in the dark on his own doorstep with a lamp in his hand for a while afterward.

CHAPTER 16

The house was very quiet after Sunday.

That was the bad thing about a good day: it ended. Leonora had been carried through it on four women and a great deal of noise, and had gone up to bed at eleven entirely certain that the worst was behind her.

On Monday, she had woken to an empty gallery with the curtains still open and a black Holland cover at the end of it that nobody had touched, and a husband who had said the nicest thing that he had said to her in a fortnight and then not been seen since.

Four hours of Emily had not shifted it an inch. Neither had the dinner, nor her mother, nor the hour. She had merely put it down for a day and picked it up again, and it weighed exactly what it had weighed on Saturday.

So, on Monday, she did not expect him at breakfast. She was proven right when he did not appear, which was not a comfort.

“He must have slept in the treehouse,” Mrs. Pike said, before she was asked. “There’s a stove there, and blankets. He’s done it since he was a boy. He’ll come in when he’s hungry.”

“And when is he hungry?”

“That I couldn’t say, Your Grace.”

Leonora sat down in front of the hot chocolate she did not want. Katherine, who had been passed to her the moment she came through the door and who had taken a fistful of her collar and declined to give it back, was chewing meditatively on the corner of a napkin.

“Mrs. Pike.”

“Your Grace?”

“Did Mrs. Rowe get my message about Thursday?”

“She did.” Mrs. Pike straightened the breakfast cloth where Katherine had dragged it. “She sat down.”

“Is that bad?”

“She sat down on the flour bin, Your Grace, and remained there for a good while. Then she went out to the yard and came back and said she’d want two days’ notice and a fish from Reading and not to be spoken to on the day.” A small dry pause. “She’s ordered new copper.”

“On my authority?”

“On yours. I’d have stopped her if I’d wanted to, but I didn’t want to.”

Leonora put her chin in her hand. “Six years of the same eleven dishes, and it took one sentence.”

“It took one sentence from somebody who’s allowed to say it. That’s not the same as one sentence.” Mrs. Pike began stacking plates. “There’s a great deal in this house that’s waiting on somebody who’s allowed.”

“Why is there a covered portrait in the gallery?”

The housekeeper’s hands froze over the tray. It lasted less than a second. Leonora, who had spent four Seasons in the corners of rooms watching people’s hands, saw it clearly.

“I don’t recall anything of the kind in that gallery,” Mrs. Pike said.

“It’s eleven feet wide.”

“Is it, indeed?”

“It’s propped against the paneling at the north end under a black Holland cover, and there are no pictures for twenty feet on either side of it, which means something used to hang there and was taken down.”