Page 95 of A Baby for the Duke

“Lot one hundred and four,” the auctioneer called. “A garden, in the manner of the Dutch school, artist unrecorded.”

Leonora put her hands in her lap and curled her fingers.

Two men bid; that was all. A fat man near the front who wanted it for a staircase and said so audibly, and Mr. Gedge, standing against the left-hand wall with his little book, who bid the way a man consulted a timetable.

It went up to eleven guineas. Then thirteen.

Stop, Leonora thought at the fat man’s back. Stop, you don’t want it. You have said out loud that you want it for a staircase, but you cannot have it for a staircase. There is a gate standing open, and you have not looked at it once.

The fat man bid fifteen, and Mr. Gedge, without hurrying, bid sixteen. There was a pause of about two seconds in which Leonora forgot to breathe entirely, and then the hammer came down.

“Sixteen guineas,” the auctioneer boomed. “Gedge.”

Leonora uncurled her fingers. Her hands had gone entirely numb, which she had not known could happen to a person over sixteen guineas.

She was aware, with the part of her mind that was still functioning, that she had just spent sixteen guineas of her husband’s money on a present for him, that this was in every sense absurd, and that she did not care.

She turned to make a perfectly ordinary remark about the room being warm, only to find Colin looking at her. Not at the stage. Not at the fat man, or at the picture being carried off, or at Mr. Gedge closing his little book against the left-hand wall. He was sitting half turned in his chair with one arm over the back of it, looking at her face. He had plainly been doing it for a while.

“You held your breath,” he noted.

“I beg your pardon? I did not.”

“Duchess, you held your breath during the bidding, and when the hammer came down, you let it go. I felt the chair move.”

Leonora’s heart was fluttering like a bird in a cage.

“There was a great deal of dust upstairs,” she lied. “It has affected my lungs.”

“Your lungs.”

“It is a delicate condition. My mother has always said so, and nobody has ever believed her. It is very hard on us both.”

“Duchess, you climbed thirty feet of rope ladder one-handed.”

“That was a dry day,” she scoffed.

And Colin, who had not laughed twice in a fortnight, put his hand over his mouth in the middle of a public auction room and did not take it away for some time.

Leonora looked determinedly at the stage and thought that she would remember the shape of that, whatever else happened to the two of them, for the rest of her life.

CHAPTER 33

The picture was delivered on Monday by two men, in a crate with a good deal of straw.

Leonora had them take it up to the blue room and prop it against the wall, before sending them away. She sat down on the edge of her bed and looked at it for the better part of an hour with her hands folded.

It was better than she remembered. That was the frightening part. Away from the northern light and the other pictures, it had gotten bigger somehow. The green in it seemed to stretch on and on, and the gate at the end of the path seemed to lead to a mysterious place.

This is either the best thing I have ever done or the cruelest, and I shall not know which until about eight o’clock this evening.

She nearly lost her nerve twice.

The first time was at four o’clock, when Peg came up to ask about the shutters and found her still sitting on the end of the bed. Leonora heard herself say that perhaps it might be better kept for his birthday, and then had to ask Peg what month his birthday was in. To her surprise, nobody in the house knew.

The second time was at half past six, when she caught her face in the mirror and understood exactly what she was about to do, which was to put a thing in front of her husband that said I have looked at you in four feet of green, and then stand in the room while he decided what to do about it.

He may hate it. He may look at it and see his mother’s wall and sequester himself in the treehouse for a week, and I will have done that to him with sixteen guineas and the best intentions in England.