Page 65 of A Baby for the Duke

“Eat.”

“I am a grown woman and a duchess, and you are holding a spoon.”

“I am aware of the spoon. Eat.”

“Colin—”

“You have had four hours of sleep since Monday, you sat in a draft for five of them, and you are the reason there is a child in this house who eats at all.” He held out the spoon again. “So you will forgive me if I am unmoved by your dignity, Duchess. Open your mouth.”

She opened her mouth.

Somewhere in the middle of the afternoon, when the baby had gone down for the third time and the light had turned the color of weak tea, they played a word game because she was too hot to sleep and too miserable to read.

“A town.”

“Bath,” Leonora said, with feeling.

“A creature.”

“A bat. Colin, this is a very poor game. Everything begins with B.”

“That was the design of it.”

“That was the design?”

“You’ve been arguing with me for ten minutes instead of complaining about your head.” He shrugged. “It seemed a fair exchange.”

She looked at him from her pillow, with her hair stuck to her forehead, and laughed, which turned into a cough, which she was extremely rude about.

By eight o’clock, Leonora could not bear herself.

The fever had broken somewhere in the early evening and left her in a state she could only describe as swampish. Her hair was wet at the roots, and she had been in the same shift since two in the morning. She had reached the point where lying still was worse than moving.

“I need a bath,” she declared.

“You need to sleep.”

“I want a bath, and then I will sleep. If I do not have one, I shall lie here all night thinking about it. So, on the whole, the bath is more efficient.” She pushed herself up on her elbows, and the room briefly tilted sideways. “Ask Mrs. Pike.”

“Mrs. Pike is fifty and has been on her feet since five, and she is asleep in a chair on the landing outside this door because she would not go to bed while the child was feverish, and I have already carried her shawl out to her once.”

“Then Susan.”

“Susan went home to her mother’s on Tuesday. Her sister’s lying in.”

Leonora lay back down and put her arm over her eyes. “Then I shall be swampish,” she groaned, “and we shall not speak of it.”

There was a silence of about four seconds.

“I’ll do it,” Colin said.

She dropped her arm.

He was standing at the end of the bed with his sleeves rolled up, his expression unreadable. Leonora understood in a slow beat that he had made the offer as a piece of household arithmetic, the way he had claimed a child and married a stranger and gone into a lake, and that he would take it back if she made anything of it.

“All right,” she agreed.

It took him twenty minutes and four trips. She lay listening to him going up and down the back stairs with buckets in both hands, and thought that if she said one word about it he would stop.