Page 46 of A Baby for the Duke

“You’ve a good eye, Your Grace.”

“I have two, which in this house makes me conspicuous.” It came out before Leonora could stop it, and she put her hand over her mouth, appalled at herself.

Mrs. Pike laughed. She laughed until she had to sit down on the chair by the sideboard, which no housekeeper in England would have done in front of a duchess.

Leonora discovered that she was laughing too.

“Oh, Your Grace.”

“That was unforgivable.”

“That was the first joke made in this house in six years, and I’ll thank you not to apologize for it.” Mrs. Pike wiped her eyes and stood up. “I can’t tell you more about the gallery. That’s not the same as not knowing. Do you understand me?”

“I do.”

“Then we’ll say no more.”

“Did the butler bring in the post?”

The post was brought in a minute later, and Leonora went through it with the baby on her knee.

There were seven invitations and a bill. Lady Ashwood was hosting a ball on the fourteenth. The Bellinghams were hosting a ball on the twentieth, and somebody named Cottesloe was hosting what the card described as a small dance on the twenty-second, which in Leonora’s experience meant three hundred people and a supper.

She set those three aside.

He’d hate them. He would stand at the edge of the room with his hands behind his back, and every woman there would look at his face and then look away. He would let them do it, and he would come home and be unbearable for a week. And I am not going to be the wife who drags him into rooms to prove a point.

What was left, she kept. The opera next Thursday. The Thornbury races. A private view and auction of a collector’s paintings at the end of the month, which she looked at for a moment longer than the others and could not have said why. And, at the bottom of the tray, a letter that had come a long way.

The paper was foreign. The hand was young and fast and sloped hard to the right, and it was addressed to His Grace the Duke of Thorton. Leonora sat with it for some time.

It isn’t mine. I have no business reading it whatsoever.

She put it on top of the pile, tucked the pile under her arm, and handed the baby to Mrs. Pike. “Where is the treehouse?”

“Your Grace⁠—”

“Past the yew walk or through the kitchen garden?”

Mrs. Pike eyed her carefully and then nodded. “Through the kitchen garden. And mind the second rung; it’s been loose since 1809. He’s never once mended it, and I’ve never once worked out why.”

Colin had gotten the leg right at about four in the morning.

He had been at it since the middle of the night, with a candle stuck to the bench in its own wax, and somewhere in the small hours his hands had stopped arguing with him and simply done the thing they had always known how to do. Now, there was a horse standing square on four legs on the sill, with its head turned as though it had heard a noise behind it.

He had not slept in two days, and he was aware that it was showing.

He had known he was wrong on Saturday, before he reached the end of the gallery.

That was the part he could not get past. Not the walking out. He had been walking out of rooms since he was fifteen and it had never once cost him a night’s rest. It was that he had gotten ten steps down the corridor, with the click of his boots echoing off the floorboards and his wife standing in the light of a window she had opened, and had understood with total clarity that she had asked the one question she had been invited to ask, that he had told her to ask it, and that she had been holding his niece on her hip while she did it.

Ten steps. He had known at ten steps.

Then he had gone on walking, because a man who turned around at ten steps had to say something when he got back, and Colin had nothing to say.

That is my mother, painted eight months before she died. My father sat in front of it every night for six years with a bottle, and on the last night of his life, he took it down himself, and I have not been able to look at it since.

Try arranging that into a sentence in a gallery in the middle of a Saturday morning.