Page 6 of A Baby for the Duke

“That,” their mother said, “is precisely what I am afraid of.”

She took Augusta by the shoulders and steered her out of the room, still talking. The door clicked shut behind them, and their voices faded down the corridor.

The room was very quiet.

Leonora had not moved. Her book was on the floor by her foot, and she was looking at it. Her hands had gone cold exactly the way they had gone cold in the sitting room at Huxley House with sleet at the windows.

“Marina.”

“Don’t.”

“Marina, do you think they…”

“No,” Marina replied. “No, I don’t.”

“Because if his brother had ever…”

“Nora.” Marina rose from the floor and went to sit on the edge of the bed. She took both of Leonora’s hands in her own, which were warm and calloused from the reins. “It has been six months. Six. If a man like William Walford were going to make trouble about a letter, he’d have made it in a fortnight, because that’s the longest he’s ever thought about anything. It’s a dinner. Dukes host dinners. That’s very nearly all they do.”

“He doesn’t.”

“Then he’s out of practice, and it’ll be a dreadful dinner, and we shall laugh about it for years.”

“And if you’re wrong,” Leonora said, “Mama will kill me. You understand that, right? I could escape the Beast of Thorton with my life and my reputation intact, but then I would walk into this house and be murdered in the hall by my own mother for having written a love letter to a rake. In front of witnesses.”

“She’d do it in front of the vicar.”

She let out a breath. “You’re certain?”

“I am absolutely certain.” Marina nodded. “And if I turn out to be wrong, I shall throw myself in front of you and confess to writing it myself. And then, when it’s my turn at the list, I’ll do something so appalling that you’ll look like a saint by comparison.”

“That isn’t a comfort.”

“It’s meant to be a plan.”

Leonora laughed, and it came out shakier than she liked.

She got up and went to the window, where the plane trees along the square were coming into leaf, and she thought about a folded sheet of paper with red wax on it, and a bird with its wing raised, and how very sure of herself she had been at three o’clock in the morning.

It was a joke. It was a joke, and nobody knows. In a week, we will have forgotten it.

“Nora.”

“Yes?”

“What did you write in it?”

Leonora watched a sparrow drop out of the plane tree onto the railings.

“Nothing that could be traced,” she replied.

CHAPTER 3

Her mother had chosen the gown.

That was, in Leonora’s opinion, the most alarming fact of the evening, more alarming than the length of the drive, or the fact that the lodge keeper had opened the gates of Thorton Manor without a word and stared at them as they went by, or the way the house came into view all at once at the top of the rise with only four windows lit in the whole of its front.

Her gown was the color of claret, and it was cut lower than anything she had worn in her life. She had said so twice, and her mother had said both times that a girl of one-and-twenty who dressed like a governess would be treated like one, and had then tugged down the neckline by a further half inch in the carriage.