Page 90 of A Baby for the Duke

He never once touched her. Not once, in fourteen days. He handed her into carriages, took her arm on the terrace, and passed her things at the table, but every time his hand arrived exactly where it was needed and withdrew exactly when it was no longer required, with the courtesy of a man handing a lady down from a coach in the rain.

He is being good. That is what this is. He has decided what he is permitted, and he is being extremely good about it, and it is going to go on for forty years.

On Friday, the whole household went into the ballroom.

It was not planned. Leonora had gone in to look at the shutters, with Katherine on her hip, and the child had taken one look at four hundred square yards of empty floor and made a noise of such naked ambition that there was nothing to be done but set her down.

She got six feet before she noticed the echo. That stopped her entirely.

She sat back on her bum in the middle of the enormous gray room and shouted once experimentally. When the ceiling shouted back, her whole face changed.

“Oh,” Leonora murmured. “Oh, no. We shall be here all afternoon.”

They were there all afternoon.

Bess came to see what the noise was and stayed. Peg came to find Bess. Mrs. Pike arrived with the mending, sat down on a shrouded chair, and did not do any of it. At some point, Leonora looked up to find her husband standing in the doorway, with his coat off and a chisel in his hand, listening to his daughter shout at his mother’s ballroom ceiling.

He did not come in. He stood in the doorway for seven minutes, by the clock over the chimney. Then somebody called his name from the corridor about the Reading man, and he went. The room was noticeably worse afterward. Every woman in it knew it, but not one of them said so.

Leonora got up, lit a candle, took the notes out of the escritoire drawer, and read them again, which she had promised herself on Tuesday she would stop doing.

There were thirteen now. Colin had written on Monday about the settlement, three lines, entirely dry, and at the bottom of it: It is arranged. Twice a year, through Fenwick at Ludlow, and no letter. You were right about the town. He had also written on Thursday, about a book he had found on the third shelf that he thought she might be interested in. She had gone down and grabbed it at six in the morning before anybody was up.

She put the notes back in order and shut the drawer.

This is a courtship. That is the joke of it. I am being courted in writing, at a distance of forty feet, by a man I am already married to, and he does not know he is doing it. And if I tell him, he will stop.

On the Wednesday before the auction, she found him in the nursery at seven in the morning.

He did not know she was there. He was sitting on the floor with his back against the cot and Katherine standing up against his knee, both fists in his shirt, doing what she had learned that week, which was to bounce and shout at somebody until they agreed with her.

“That,” Colin was saying, “is a strong opinion for a seven-month-old.”

Katherine bounced.

“I don’t dispute it. I merely observe that you have made it four times this morning and I have agreed with you on every occasion, and there is a case for moving on.”

Katherine pressed her hand flat against the black silk over his eye. She did it the way she always did now, without ceremony, the way one touched the latch of a familiar door. Colin did not even flinch.

“Yes,” he said. “It’s still there.”

The baby patted it twice, before losing interest and going for his collar instead.

“You are the only person alive who is permitted to do that,” Colin told her, “and you have no notion what it is worth. I should like it on the record that I have never once refused you anything, which is exactly how your father was ruined.”

Leonora quietly stepped away from the door. She reached the top of the stairs and had to sit down, which no duchess did in her own house at seven in the morning. She sat there with the heels of both hands pressed against her eyes.

He is a good father. A wonderful father. And he only shows it in an empty room at seven o’clock so that nobody has to be grateful to him. One day, Katherine will be nineteen and will have no idea what it cost him, and he will prefer it that way.

But I shall know. That is what I have. I shall be the one person in the world who knows, and I shall not be allowed to say it to him. I shall sit at the other end of a table for forty years being the only witness.

Mrs. Pike found her there four minutes later and did not say anything about it, which was, Leonora reflected afterward, the greatest tact in the history of English service. She simply sat down on the stairs beside her, with great difficulty and a good deal of noise from her hip, and stayed there until Leonora stopped crying.

“There,” she soothed. “That’s the worst of it out.”

“It is not the worst of it.”

“No,” Mrs. Pike agreed. “But it’s out.”