Page 79 of A Baby for the Duke

Then he went back up and wrote her a note about a culvert.

CHAPTER 26

The gown was ivory shot with green, and it had cost a lot of money. Leonora had chosen it in about ninety seconds, on Wednesday, out of pure spite.

“You look,” Susan commented, standing back, “if you’ll pardon me, Your Grace, like something in a shop window.”

“That is precisely the effect I was after.”

“Only I meant it kindly.”

“So did I,” Leonora said, and went down.

Colin was at the foot of the stairs, with his hat in his hand. He had been standing there for a while. She watched him look up and freeze.

It lasted perhaps two seconds. Then his face closed the way a door closed on a lit room, and he asked, “Ready?”

“Yes.”

“Then we should go. It is forty miles to town and the roads are bad past Hounslow.”

He handed her in; that was the first problem. Handing a woman into a carriage required a hand. His was bare, and hers was gloved, and the whole transaction lasted perhaps two seconds and neither of them recovered from it.

The ride lasted two and a half hours, and they said eleven words during it.

Leonora counted them, because counting things was what she did in rooms she could not get out of, and she had four Seasons of practice. Four words about the road at Hounslow. Three about the weather. Two about whether she was warm enough, and two more when she said that she was.

She looked out the window at the dark and thought about the notes in her escritoire, every one of them warmer than any sentence he had said to her face in six days, and understood that her husband could say anything at all to her provided that he did not have to watch her hear it.

Somewhere past the turnpike, she gave in and looked at him.

He was asleep.

Not properly. His head had lolled back against the squabs, and his hat was on the seat beside him. He had the particular gray look of a man who had not slept in a bed for four nights.

Leonora sat in the dark of the moving carriage and looked at his face for the first time in six days without him knowing she was doing it.

The scar ran up from beneath the black silk into his hairline. The other end of it ran down to his cheekbone and stopped. She had never once been permitted to look at it for longer than a glance, but she did now, and felt nothing whatsoever except an enormous, useless tenderness.

Fifteen years. You were fifteen. Somebody should have held you, and nobody did, and you have arranged your entire life since so that nobody ever will.

He woke at Kensington and caught her at it. She did not look away in time, and neither of them said one word about it.

The Regent Theater had four tiers, and every one of them turned round.

Colin had expected it. He had been expecting it for nine days, since his wife had put the invitation in his hand in the treehouse and told him it would be two hours and they could leave. What he had not expected was the sound, the way a house of two thousand people dropped half a tone when something worth looking at came into a box.

“They are all staring,” Leonora said pleasantly, sitting down.

“Yes.”

“At you or at me?”

“At you.” He took the chair beside hers. “They have been told for six years that I have a face like a butcher’s block. You are the novelty. They cannot work out why you look pleased about it.”

“I look pleased about it because my mother is in the third tier with her opera glasses trained on me, and if I don’t, she will come down here.”

Colin glanced up. Lady Huntington, caught in the act at sixty feet, waved her hand vigorously.