Page 80 of A Baby for the Duke

“God help us,” he muttered.

“She has been waiting four Seasons for one of us to be looked at in this building,” Leonora said. “You have made her the happiest woman in London, and you have not spoken to her since Tuesday last week.”

That was the last easy thing that was said between them.

The opera was Italian and long, and Colin, who had not sat still in a public building since he was twenty-four, discovered that two hours was a great deal longer than his wife had implied.

He watched the stage. He watched the boxes watching him. Twice he turned his head to say a word to her about the tenor, and twice he remembered that they were not saying things to each other this week.

At the interval, her brothers joined them.

They arrived in a body, the way Belmonts did everything. Alexander had a bottle. Evan had the expression of a man discharging a duty. Within four minutes, the box was full and loud, and Leonora had gone out into the corridor with Marina on her arm.

Colin watched her go and made himself stop watching.

“That,” Alexander said, sitting down uninvited, “is the third tier’s entire evening. Two Belmont women walking off arm in arm. There’ll be nothing else discussed at supper.”

“They have been at it since we came in.”

“They have been at it since Wednesday, Your Grace. You have no notion what you have done to this town.” Alexander was counting boxes on his fingers. “Lady Ashwood has told four people that she always knew there was nothing to the story about the baby. Four. She wrote to my mother in May to say that she could not receive Nora. Old Cottesloe has informed the smoking room that he was at Westminster the day my father knelt and that he has always considered him a very sound man, and my father has never met him.”

“And that is a good thing?”

“It is a rout.” Alexander drank. “Do you know what they cannot forgive? Being wrong in public. So they have decided, all at once, at about half past nine this evening, that they were never wrong at all, and by Sunday there will be forty people in this town who will tell you they have always said the Duke of Thorton was much misunderstood, and half of them will believe it.”

“Are they always so idle?”

“Always. It’s their profession.” Alexander poured. “Now, my brother has something to say to you, and he has been rehearsing it since Hounslow. I have promised to make it less dreadful, which I shan’t, because I want to watch.”

“Alexander.”

“Go on. You’ll only do it worse later.”

Evan put down his glass.

“Your Grace,” he began. “Is my sister happy?”

The box went quiet.

“That is not a question a man asks another man about his wife,” Colin said.

“No, it isn’t.” Evan held his eye, which Colin noted, because most men could not manage it for more than a moment. “I am asking it regardless. My mother has received four letters from her so far, and every one of them is about the cook. I know my sister. She writes about cooks when there is nothing else she is willing to put on paper.”

“Evan,” Alexander said, without any laughter in it.

“I want an answer.”

Colin turned his glass by the stem. He thought about a note in a small upright hand and a candle put out on purpose, and a woman on a lawn setting a baby back on her hands and knees a dozen times, and about the fact that he could see from where he sat the exact place in the corridor where his wife was standing with her back to him.

He released a breath. “You should understand what this was.”

“I understand what it was. There was a column.”

“Before the column. There was a joke, a basket, and a lady who happened to be in my house on the wrong evening.” He set the glass down. “Your sister and I came together by accident. There was no courtship. There was no choice made by either of us that a reasonable person would call a choice. It is an arrangement that the newspapers arranged, and it will hold because I will see that it holds, and she will want for nothing in her life.”

“That is not what I asked you.”

“It is all I am going to tell you. None of the rest matters.”