Page 78 of A Baby for the Duke

“Your Grace.”

“Whoever is doing it may stop.”

“I couldn’t say who’s doing it, Your Grace.”

“You could narrow it down to one person.”

“I could narrow it down to eleven,” Mrs. Pike countered. “And I’ll thank you to consider what that means, since every one of them has been in this house for years and never once taken a side in anything, and they have all taken one now.”

Colin walked the field on Monday and came back four hours later with mud to the knee. On Tuesday, a gang of six men began opening the ditch. On Wednesday, Mrs. Hartley sent up a second cake unprompted, with no message at all, which Leonora understood perfectly.

And every single day the house got a little brighter, and every single day the two of them moved through it like people carrying something breakable in opposite directions.

Colin watched her from the gallery, which he was aware was contemptible.

It had the best window in the house. He had come up on Wednesday afternoon to see whether the men had reached the second hedge and had not gone down again, because his wife and the baby were sitting on a rug on the lawn below.

Katherine had learned to get on her hands and knees that week. She could not do anything with it yet. She would get on all fours, rock, look immensely pleased with herself, and then topple onto her face and cry. Each time she toppled over, Leonora picked her up and set her back on her hands and knees. She said something Colin was too far away to hear, and the baby stopped crying at once and began again.

Nine times, he counted.

She will be able to cross the lawn within a fortnight, and I will not be with her.

Below him, Leonora sat back on her heels and tilted her face up to the sun. Colin looked at the column of her throat and thought about a green door and a candle he had put out on purpose.

“You should be down there,” Mrs. Pike said from behind him.

“I have letters.”

“You have a pocketful of them, and they’re all from her, and you have not put one of them down since Monday.”

Colin did not turn round.

“You are extraordinarily insolent,” he noted.

“I am fifty, I have a bad hip, and there is nothing you can do to me.” Mrs. Pike came and stood at the other side of the window. “That’s a fine field you’ve dug this week.”

“It needed digging.”

“It’s needed digging since your father stopped up the ditch twenty years ago, and you’ve done it in four days because your wife wrote you a note about it.” She looked down at the lawn. “You’ll say that’s a coincidence.”

“I shall say nothing whatsoever.”

“That’s what I thought,” Mrs. Pike said, and went away.

Colin stayed at the window.

The baby got up on all fours once again, rocked, and stayed up. She did not fall. She hung there over her hands with her head up, astonished at herself, and then she looked around for the one person in the world who would be pleased about it, found her, and made a sound that carried across the lawn. Leonora lifted both hands in the air and laughed out loud.

Colin heard it through a closed window from forty yards away and thought that he had done a great many sums in his life and had never once been this wrong.

He went down.

He reached the door to the terrace, pressed his hand flat against it, and stopped, because from there he could hear Leonora talking to the baby in the voice she used when nobody was near, and he understood that the voice would change the moment he stepped out onto the lawn.

She will be perfectly pleasant to me. That is what I have made. She will be pleasant, and the child will look at us both, and I will have spoiled the best hour of her week.

He stood there long enough for his hand to go cold against the glass.