Page 98 of A Baby for the Duke

“To her mother’s.”

“For how long?”

“She did not say.”

Colin stayed where he was with the baby in his arms.

“It’s Tuesday,” he murmured.

“It is.”

“They play pall-mall on Tuesdays. All of them. Every Tuesday of the summer. She stood in a garden and told me so herself, and she made me say I would come, and I said I would.” He put his hand flat on the glass. “And she has gone without asking me.”

“She did.” Mrs. Pike sighed.

He put the baby down on the rug. He did it carefully, because he had learned to do it carefully, and then he went to the window. He looked out at the drive, where there were wheel tracks that had been left three hours ago while he was asleep upstairs.

“May I speak?”

“You have never once in thirty years asked me that and meant it.”

“I am asking now, and I shall speak whether you say yes or no, so it is a courtesy and not a question.” Mrs. Pike set the tray down on the table with a click. “Your Grace, you are going to lose her.”

Colin did not turn around.

“You are going to lose her,” she said again. “Not next year, and not in a temper. You are going to lose her the way a man loses a field—an inch a season. And by the time you notice, it will be somebody else’s. She will go to her mother’s on a Tuesday and stay a fortnight. Then a month. Then she will take the child in the summer because the air is better in Berkshire, and everybody will say what a devoted mother she is. You will have a wife in Grosvenor Square and a daughter who visits, and not one soul in England will call it a scandal. That is how it is done. I have watched it done in four houses in this county.”

“She has every right⁠—”

“She has every right in the world. But I am not speaking of her rights; I am speaking of your life.” The cane came down once on the floorboards. “Now, hear the rest of it, because I have been getting to it for thirty-one years.

“You were nine when your mother died, and you have carried this family on your back since the day of her funeral. You took the blame for what your father did to that boy on the stairs, and you took it again for what he did to himself that night. You were fifteen, and there was not one grown person in this house with the sense to tell you that a boy of fifteen does not kill a man by running away from him.”

“Mrs. Pike.”

“You have lived for your brother. Every penny, every debt, every woman he ruined and every mess he left—I have watched you pay for it and call it your duty, and you gave him a life so good he did not need to grow up in it. Then you took in his daughter, and you will pay for that too and never say a word.” Her voice had grown unsteady. “And in all of it, Your Grace, I have never once seen you do a single thing because you wanted it. And now there is a woman in this house who lights rooms,” Mrs. Pike continued. “And you have four days to decide whether you are your father’s son or your own man, because Her Grace is not one to be kept here without love. She will not ask you for it again. She asked you last night—I heard the door—and she will not ask you twice.”

The clock in the hall struck eight.

“I am sorry for speaking so plainly.”

“Don’t be.”

“Then I’ll take the child up.”

“Leave her,” Colin sighed.

It was the longest day of his life.

He had lived through some contenders. The day of his mother’s funeral. The three days after his father’s, when he had been fifteen and had to sign things. The morning William’s letter had come from Dover, saying he was already aboard.

This was worse, and it was worse for the sole humiliating reason that nothing whatsoever was happening.

He worked. That was what he did the first four hours. He took the accounts into the study and went through them the way he went through everything. He got to the bottom of the third page before he understood that he had been reading the same three lines since ten o’clock, and that what he was actually doing was listening for a carriage.

He went out and walked the north field with Beddoes, who was delighted. The man wanted to talk about culverts for an hour and a quarter. Colin let him, and heard perhaps a third of it.

“Your Grace,” Beddoes said at the gate, turning his hat over.