Page 77 of A Baby for the Duke

“I have a note for you,” she said. “About the north field.”

“A note?”

“It is not urgent. I shall leave it on the hall table.”

“You might simply tell me.”

“I might.” Leonora nodded. “But I have decided that I would rather write it down, because when I write things down, I do not convey everything I am thinking, and at present that is a considerable advantage to both of us.”

Colin looked at her above the candles.

“As you like,” he said.

They conducted a marriage by correspondence across forty feet of hallway for six days.

Your Grace, Mr. Beddoes reports that the north field has flooded in each of the last three years and expects it will do so again. He has not brought it up because he does not come up to the house. He believes the fault lies with a culvert on the Hartley side. I said you would look at it. I hope I have not exceeded myself. L.W.

The reply came back within two hours, on the same sheet, underneath.

You have not exceeded yourself. Tell Beddoes I will walk the field with him on Monday at seven. The culvert is mine, not Hartley’s. My father stopped up the ditch twenty years ago to enlarge a covert for shooting, and nobody has had the nerve to mention it since he died. Beddoes has had that field for three years, and it has cost him a crop in each of them. C.W.

Leonora read that four times.

Then you must tell him it was your father, she wrote back. Not simply that it is yours. He has spent three years believing he is a poor farmer. L.W.

I had reached the same conclusion at about six o’clock this morning, though it took me longer than it took you. C.W.

It always does. L.W.

She had sent the last one back within the hour.

There were other notes, and not all of them were about ditches.

Your Grace, Mrs. Rowe wishes to know whether you have any objection to a raised pie. I have said that you have no opinions about food whatsoever, which she received as a challenge. I am sorry. L.W.

I have an opinion about mutton. C.W.

Everyone in this house has an opinion about mutton. It is the only subject on which the household is united. L.W.

Then take it off. C.W.

I have already taken it off. I took it off on Tuesday. I was being polite. L.W.

You were being nothing of the kind. You were finding out whether I would notice. C.W.

Leonora had sat with that one in her hand for a while.

And did you? L.W.

Yes. C.W.

She kept every one of them. She was not proud of it. They went into the drawer of the escritoire in the blue room, on top of eight hundred pages of shipwreck. By Wednesday, there were nine of them, and she read them in bed like a woman reading letters from a man at sea, which she supposed was close enough to the truth to be humiliating.

On Sunday, the household discovered that its master and mistress were not speaking and reacted by becoming extremely helpful.

Bess laid the small dining room without being asked. Peg took to dusting the hall table at the precise moments when notes were most likely to arrive on it. Tom started loitering by the side door with an expression of tremendous nonchalance. And on Monday morning, Leonora stepped into the breakfast room to find that somebody had put the two places together at one end of the table instead of at opposite ends, which nobody would confess to and which she moved back, and which was moved again on Tuesday.

“Mrs. Pike.”