Page 54 of A Baby for the Duke

“Your Grace.” Mrs. Pike had stopped. “Your gown.”

Leonora looked down.

Leonora looked down at herself, and then, because Mrs. Pike was still looking, turned her shoulder to the hall glass.

Her gown, which had left the house that morning the color of butter, was gray to the knee with sawdust and marked at both hips where two hands had held her. There was a long green smear all the way down the back of it that she had not known was there until that moment, and rather wished she had gone on not knowing.

“I fell,” she offered.

“Did you?”

“Off the ladder. The second rung. As you warned me.” Her whole face was burning, but she went on regardless, because there was nothing else to be done. “It was very undignified, and I would consider it a kindness if we never spoke of it again.”

Mrs. Pike studied her.

“The second rung,” she said gravely, “has a great deal to answer for.”

“It does.”

“It has for many of us over the years.”

“Mrs. Pike.”

“I’ll have hot water sent up, Your Grace,” Mrs. Pike said, then walked off down the corridor.

Leonora could hear her laughing all the way to the green baize door.

Colin heard it from the far end of the corridor and could not, for the life of him, identify it.

There was singing. That was the first thing. Somebody in his drawing room was singing a song about a cat that went to sea, and doing it badly, in an accent that came from no county in England. There was a second noise underneath it that took him another six steps to place because he had not heard it in this house since his mother died.

Somebody was stamping in time.

He came to the doorway and stopped.

Every candle in the room was lit. The furniture had been shoved back against the walls. In the middle of the carpet, Katherine sat upright in her chair with her fists on the tray and her mouth slightly open, and walking in a wide circle around that chair was his wife.

She had a bowl in her left hand and a spoon in her right, and she was performing. There was no other word for it. She sang the verse about the cat and the fishing boat, and then she was a gull, wheeling, one arm out. Then she was the sea, which involved swishing her skirt. Then she was the cat again, arriving at the mast in four enormous stamping strides, and at the top of the mast the spoon went into the baby’s mouth as though it had always been going there. Katherine swallowed without seeming to realize it.

Colin had never in his life seen anything like it.

He had also, he realized, been standing in the doorway for a while.

“Husband!”

He had been spotted.

“No,” he huffed.

“I haven’t asked you anything.”

“You have that face.”

“I have this face,” Leonora said, flushed to the ears, entirely out of breath, “because I have been a cat and a gull and the Bay of Biscay for ten minutes, and she has eaten two-thirds of a bowl, which has not happened once since she came into this house. And I am not stopping now. Come here.”

“Duchess.”

“There is a verse where the cat meets the captain, and I cannot be both.”