Page 83 of A Baby for the Duke

“Ma’am—”

“Agnes,” called the man under the lamp.

Agnes went.

Leonora watched her walk to the other end of the corridor and take the arm of a man who was already turning away, and did not move until they were gone.

“Nora,” Marina hissed. “Nora. Breathe.”

“That was Katherine’s mother.”

“I know.”

“She is about to marry a man of sixty who does not know she ever had a child, and she thanked me.” Leonora found that she was shaking. “Marina, everything has happened exactly as it had to. Every part. William goes to Italy so that Colin claims her. Colin claims her so that he needs a wife. I write one stupid letter at three in the morning so that I am the wife he finds. That woman gives up her daughter so that I may have her. It is all fitted together like a joint. None of us chose any of it, and it has come out right.”

“That’s a good thing, isn’t it?” Marina asked carefully.

Leonora looked down the corridor at the lamp where the woman in gray had stood.

“She said she stood on the doorstep for an hour,” she said. “Before she put her down. An hour, Marina, in January, in the dark, with a basket. Then she walked up the gravel drive and did not turn round, and she has not slept a whole night since. Tonight, she came to the theater and stood in a cold passage waiting for a stranger to walk past so that she might find out whether her daughter was well.”

“Nora.”

“And I have spent six days being wretched about a man who writes me notes.”

“That is not the same, and you know it.”

“It is exactly the same.” Leonora snapped her fan open. “No, it is not the same. It is smaller. I am going to go back into that box, and I am going to sit beside my husband for two hours and be extremely pleasant, because that woman gave up everything she had so that Katherine would have a mother and a name, and the very least I can do is be them.”

The bell went for the second act.

“Everything has come out right,” she murmured. “Every single part of it. Except my husband and me.”

CHAPTER 28

She told him at the second milestone.

She had not meant to. She had climbed down the theater steps and through the crush of linkboys and lamps determined to keep it to herself, on the grounds that it was not her story to tell and that a woman who had asked to be left alone was owed exactly that.

Then the carriage turned out of Haymarket, and Colin remarked, “You have been pale since the interval,” and the whole of it came out of her in one piece.

He did not interrupt. He did not once ask whether she was certain, which she had braced for. He sat opposite her in the dark with his hat on his knee and let her get to the end of it.

When she had finished, there was only the rumble of wheels for a while.

“Gray gown,” he said at last. “Fair. Five-and-twenty or thereabouts. Very still about the hands.”

“You know her?”

“I have never met her in my life, but I have read four of her letters.” He turned his hat over. “They are in a box in my study. I could have picked her out of that corridor in a moment, but I did not know she would be in the theater tonight. She was three feet from me, and I never saw her.”

“She did not want you to.”

“No.”

“She was seeking me. She waited for me to come out.” Leonora swallowed. “She stood in the cold end of a corridor during the first act on the chance that I might walk down it.”

Colin was quiet for a moment.