Page 13 of A Baby to Seal the Duke’s Fate

Honora stood at once, too sharply. “No one is to know you told me this.”

The maid nodded quickly. “No, miss.”

Honora reached for the little purse at her waist, took out what money she had, and pressed it into the maid’s hand before the girl could protest.

“You did nothing wrong,” Honora said.

The maid looked as if she might cry. “Thank you, miss.”

Honora was already walking away.

She did not go back to her room at once. She went into the parlor, then the hall, then upstairs, then back again, as though moving might somehow produce a better answer. None came.

At last, sometime after midnight, she returned to her room and shut the door.

She packed before dawn.

There was not much to take. A dress she could travel in. Her cloak. A little food wrapped in cloth. Her spare gloves. A comb. The money she had hidden beneath the sewing box. She paused only once, at the small drawer beside the bed, and took Celestine’s locket, wrapping it in a square of linen before she tucked it into the bottom of the bag.

By the time she tied the reticule closed, the first gray light of morning was beginning to show at the window.

She listened once at the door, heard nothing, and slipped into the passage.

No one stopped her.

That should have frightened her more than it did.

She left the house before her father woke. She did not leave a note.

The coach was old and rattled badly on the road, but it was what she could afford, and the man who hired it did not ask questions so long as she paid in advance. Honora had enough money for the fare and a week at an inn if she was careful. She intended to be careful.

She rode for three days away from her father and Wiltshire.

By the second day, her shoulders ached from the cold and the stiffness of sleeping upright in a coach seat; by the third, every field and village looked like the last. She ate bread when she could, drank weak tea at roadside stops, and held her bag on her lap as though someone might try to take it from her.

She did not cry.

She did not allow herself to think in full sentences.

She thought in fragments instead.

Cecily’s fingers on her sleeve.

The empty cradle.

Sweet baby girl.

Gone.

Belgrave.

By the time she reached the village nearest the estate, she was too exhausted to feel much of anything at all. She took a room at the inn, paid for a basin of water, and sat on the bed without removing her boots until nightfall.

The inn was warm, noisy, and full of people who were pleased to mind their own business. Honora ate in the common room because she could not bear to sit alone in her chamber with her thoughts.

At the next table, two women were speaking in lowered voices with the delighted confidence of those who believed the subject mattered to everyone in hearing distance.

Honora would have ignored them, except for one phrase.