Page 73 of A Baby for the Duke

Marina was quiet for a moment.

“When did you start caring for him?”

Leonora was quiet for long enough that her sister turned her head.

“On our wedding night,” she said. “I told him to wait, and he took his hands off me before I had finished saying the word, and then he stood there and asked me to explain. That was the whole of it, Marina. Eleven days ago, in a bedroom, in about a second and a half.”

“You have never said one word about this.”

“Because I did not know what it was at the time. I knew it a week later, when he came out of that lake with his boots full of water looking thoroughly cross and put five wooden balls into my hands.” She pressed the heels of her palms against her eyes. “And I have thought about very little else since, and I would be obliged if you did not make me finish that sentence.”

“Does he know?”

“No. And he isn’t going to.” She sat up and pushed her hair back. “Because the moment he knows, he’ll do the arithmetic and decide it’s dangerous, and he will put himself out of my reach so gently and so reasonably that I won’t be able to argue with a single word of it. So I shall simply have to go on as I am, be his wife, be pleasant at the opera, and wait.”

“For how long?”

“I don’t know.”

“Nora, that isn’t a plan. That’s a sentence.”

“I know,” Leonora sniffed.

Colin was on the landing.

He had come up to ask his wife whether she wanted a tray sent to her room, which was a thing he could have sent a maid to ask. He had reached the turn of the stairs and heard his own name and stopped, and then it was too late to leave without being heard leaving.

He heard all of it.

He heard a sound come out of Leonora that he had not known she was capable of making, and he stood there with his hand on the newel post and understood that he had done it that morning, in a sunlit room with his hand on the mantelpiece and every good intention he possessed.

I have hurt her. I have spent a fortnight protecting her from the harm I might do her one day, and I still did it to her this morning before breakfast.

He went down the stairs very quietly and was almost at the door.

“Your Grace.”

Mrs. Pike was standing by the long-case clock with her cane in her hand. He understood at once that she had been there for a while.

“I’m going out.”

“To the treehouse?”

“Yes.”

“For the night?”

“Yes.”

“Your Grace.” She did not move out of his way. “May I speak?”

“You have never once asked me that in thirty years.”

“I have never once needed to.” Mrs. Pike drew herself up to the whole of her five feet one. “That girl has been in this house for six days and there are candles lit in rooms that have been dark since your father died. Your daughter laughed. The kitchen laughed. I laughed, and I could not have told you the last time before that. And you are walking out the door with your coat over your arm to sit up in a tree in the dark.”

“I’m aware of how it looks.”

“You are not aware of half of it, and I am too old to be careful with you.” Her chin came up. “Go, then. But send for me when it stops working, because it will stop working, and I should like to be there when it does.”