Page 81 of A Baby for the Duke

There was a pause.

“Right,” Evan uttered.

“Right,” Alexander agreed, in a completely different tone.

They stayed for another ten minutes and talked about horses, and neither of them looked at him properly again. As they made to leave, Alexander stopped in the doorway with his hand on the curtain.

“Your Grace.”

“Yes?”

“You’re a bad liar, which is the only reason I haven’t hit you.”

“Say what you mean.”

“Very well.” Alexander came back one step into the box. He was not remotely amused now, which Colin found considerably more difficult. “I have watched you for two hours. You have looked at the stage twice and at my sister about forty times, and you did it in a building where two thousand people were watching you, which suggests to me that you could not help it. And then my brother asked you a simple question, and you told him it was an arrangement.” He tugged his gloves on. “I have a great many faults, Your Grace. I am idle, and I am frivolous, and I have never in my life done a day’s work my father would recognize as one. But I have never once let someone I love go on believing they were a transaction because I was too much of a coward to say the other thing out loud.”

“You know nothing about it.”

“No,” Alexander agreed. “But she does. And you have let her think it for a fortnight.” He stepped out and let the curtain fall.

Colin sat alone in the box.

Below him, the orchestra came back in twos and threes and tune. Above him, two thousand people were gossiping about him. And out in the corridor, thirty feet away and in plain view of his chair if he turned his head, his wife was standing with her sister, and had been standing there for a very long time.

CHAPTER 27

“Icould put something in his wine,” Marina offered.

“Marina.”

“Not enough to kill him, just enough to make him unwell in a public building. Everybody will see it.”

“That would be worse for me than for him, and you know it.”

“That is precisely the trouble with poisoning people,” Marina huffed. “It never lands where you want it.”

They had gotten as far as the end of the corridor, past the crush, into the cold drafty part where the lamps ran out and nobody stood because there was nothing to be seen. Leonora had her back against the wall and her fan shut in both hands, and had been perfectly composed for nine minutes, which was about eight minutes longer than she had expected to manage.

“He pulled out my chair on Saturday,” she revealed. “And he asked after the fish. When I dropped my glass, he caught it before it could topple over and then pulled his hands back like a man who had touched a hot dish.”

“Nora.”

“And then he wrote me a note about a culvert that was the kindest thing anybody has said to me in a year.” Her voice cracked. “A culvert, Marina.”

“I know.”

“He can put anything on paper. He put four sentences on paper about a ditch his father stopped up before either of us was out of the schoolroom, and he has not looked me in the face since Friday. I have begun to think that I could live like that. That is what frightens me. I have begun to think that a drawer of notes might be enough. But it is not enough.”

Marina put both arms round her and did not speak.

“What would you have me do?” Leonora wiped her face with the back of her wrist, which was not what one did at the opera. “Go home to Mama? She would have me in the blue bedroom by Friday, and the ton would have the whole of it by Saturday, and then he would be exactly what they have always said he was, and it would all be because of me.”

“You are allowed to be unhappy without arranging everybody else’s evening around it.”

“I am not, though. That is what nobody tells you before you marry a duke.” She snapped her fan open and closed it again. “Everything I do now is about him. If I laugh in this corridor, it means our marriage is a success. If I cry in it, it means he beats me. I cannot simply feel anymore, Marina, because it will all go straight out into the room and become a fact about my husband.”

“Then feel it all here, with me,” Marina urged. “That’s what I’m here for. I have come twenty miles into town this evening to be the person you are allowed to be wretched with, and I intend to be extremely good at it. And later, I shall put something in his wine.”