Page 76 of A Baby for the Duke

“Goodnight, Your Grace,” she said, and shut the door behind her.

She stood on the other side of it in the dark, with her hand still on the handle, listening to a man on the other side of two inches of oak not moving at all.

Colin stood where she had left him for a long time.

The candle went down a quarter of an inch. Somewhere below, the house made the small sounds a house did at ten o’clock. Beyond the green door, there was no sound whatsoever, which meant she was standing on the other side of it, which meant that all he had to do was cross four feet of floor and open it.

He did not cross the floor.

He had climbed down from the treehouse at nine o’clock with a sentence worked out, and he had rehearsed it the whole way across the lawn. He was going to tell her about the gallery; that was the plan.

Then she had come through that door and offered him her duty, in the voice of a woman reading out terms, and he had understood what he had made of her in a fortnight.

She came in here prepared to be a payment. That is what I have taught her she is.

So he had thrown out the bargain, which was the only decent thing left on the table, and she had told him what it cost her—she had been right about all of it—and he had stood here with his hands shaking and asked her to leave his room.

He looked at the green door.

Say her name. She is four feet away and has not moved. If you say her name, she will open it.

He put out the candle instead and stood in the dark, and after a while he heard her retreat.

CHAPTER 25

They did not speak for six days.

That was not strictly true, and Leonora was precise with herself about it, because the untrue version was easier to be wretched over.

They spoke. They said good morning. They said that the weather had turned and that Katherine had cut a tooth and that Mrs. Rowe’s turbot had been a triumph, which it had, and which neither of them had tasted.

What they did not do was say anything meaningful.

The turbot came up on Saturday, on the new copper, with a sauce that Mrs. Pike reported had taken four hours and reduced the kitchen to a state of religious silence. Leonora had it laid in the small dining room instead of the big one, put candles in the middle, and had Katherine’s chair brought in because she had discovered that a baby at the table made it impossible for two people to ignore one another for very long.

Colin came down at seven, in a coat that he had not worn at the table since the wedding.

“Duchess.”

“Your Grace.”

He held her chair. She sat. And for one hour and twenty minutes, the Duke and Duchess of Thorton were so exquisitely polite to one another that Bess developed a nervous cough and had to be sent out.

“The fish is remarkable.”

“Mrs. Rowe will be pleased.”

“You should tell her so.”

“I will.”

“She trained in Bath, I understand.”

“Under a Frenchman,” Leonora said, “for six years.” And then she could not think of one further word about the Frenchman, or Bath, or fish, or anything else in the world.

Katherine threw a piece of bread at the candles. They both reached for it. Their hands brushed, and Leonora pulled hers back so fast that she knocked her own glass. Colin caught that too and set it upright.

The silence that followed was unlike anything she had experienced before.