Page 74 of A Baby for the Duke

Colin stood with his hand on the doorhandle. “Send for me if anyone needs anything.”

“You mean if Her Grace does.”

“Anyone,” he said, and stepped out into the evening.

CHAPTER 24

He did not come back on Friday.

Leonora spent the whole day waiting and pretending that she was not, which meant she did a great many useful things very badly. She sat on the floor of the nursery and rolled a wooden ball toward Katherine forty times. She wrote to her mother about nothing. She went into the library and got the improper book out from behind the Herodotus—it was indeed improper—read four pages and retained not one word of them.

Every time a door opened somewhere in the house, her whole body turned toward it.

This is what I said I would do, she reminded herself on the stairs, at about four o’clock. I said I would go on as I am. However, I did not expect that waiting would consist of standing in corridors listening to the doors.

Mrs. Pike sent a boy out with food twice and said nothing about it either time.

The household, meanwhile, carried on as usual. That was the part nobody had warned her about. Peg came to ask whether the blue room was to be turned out. Mrs. Rowe sent up a message about the turbot, which was ordered, and which she could hold until Saturday and not one day longer. Beddoes came to the kitchen door about the north field and had to be told that His Grace was not available and would be spoken to, and went away looking as though he had expected exactly that and had come anyway, which Leonora chose to regard as a victory.

At two o’clock, a letter came from her mother, four sheets of it, wanting to know whether she had recovered, whether the Duke was kind, whether there was any news. The word news was underlined twice in a manner that could not possibly be misunderstood.

Leonora looked at it for a while. Then she wrote back that she was quite well, that Katherine had cut a tooth, and that Mrs. Rowe had produced a turbot on Thursday that had reduced the kitchen to religious silence and had been the finest thing eaten in that house in six years. She did not answer the underlined word at all.

At six, Mrs. Pike came to the nursery and found Leonora on the floor.

“He’ll come in tonight, Your Grace.”

“You can’t know that.”

“I’ve watched him do this since he was fifteen years old, and I can tell you the shape of it to the hour. Two nights is temper. Three is a decision, and he’s not made one, because he sent the tray back with the plate empty and he has never once eaten when he’d decided something.” Mrs. Pike slowly lowered herself onto the chair by the window. “You’ll want to be somewhere he can find you.”

“I have spent the entire day being somewhere he can find me.”

“I know.”

Later, unable to sit still, Leonora went to the gallery.

Somebody had put the dust sheets back over the furniture. The curtains she had drawn open on Saturday had been left open, which she had not expected and did not know what to make of. Sixty Walford ancestors watched her cross the room, and none of them had anything useful to offer.

She stopped at the north end in front of eleven feet of black Holland cover.

It would take one tug. That was what she was thinking about as she stood there. The bottom corner of the cloth hung loose, the house was quiet, and nobody in England would ever know.

But I would know. And I would have to look at him across the table tomorrow knowing it.

She pressed her palm flat against the cover, the way one would press their hand against a closed door to feel whether there was a fire on the other side. Then she dropped it and stepped out, leaving the curtains open.

At half past nine in the evening, when Katherine had gone down and the house had begun to settle, she heard boots on the stone at the side entrance and a door close. Then footsteps came up the back stairs, along the corridor, and into Colin’s bedchamber.

Leonora sat on the edge of her bed for perhaps ninety seconds. Then she got up and opened the green door without knocking.

Colin had a candle lit and his coat off, and he was standing at the washstand with his hands braced on either side of the basin. He did not turn round.

“You should be asleep,” he said.

“I withdraw my condition.”

“Your what?”