The Duke's Baby Bride

Chapter 1

“Your Grace! Your Grace, you must come at once!”

Colin Walford did not look up from the block of ash in his hands. He had been working on it for the better part of the morning. It was very nearly a horse, or it would be a horse if he could persuade the near hind leg to stop looking like a table leg.

He had come up here at eight o’clock precisely so that no voice in the world would be able to reach him.

The voice reached him anyway. It always did.

“I can hear you breathing, Your Grace!”

“Then you’re the only person in England who can,” Colin said, “since I’m forty feet up a tree and you’re not.”

“Thirty,” Mrs. Pike corrected from the foot of the ladder. “I’ve measured.”

“When?”

“When you were away in Yorkshire and I had nothing better to do.”

Colin set down the chisel. The treehouse had been built for a boy of fifteen, but he had not been fifteen for a long while.

The roof beam still caught his shoulder every time he stood, which he considered a fair price.

It smelled of sawdust, cold air, and faintly of the pipe he never smoked in the house.

On the sill sat Mercutio, a fat orange menace of a cat who had opened one eye at the shouting and gone back to sleep.

“I made you that cane,” Colin said.

“You did.”

“I made it myself, out of my own timber. I sanded the grip. And you’ve used it every day since to walk out here and disturb me.”

“Well, and whose fault is that?”

“Mine,” Colin admitted. “Entirely.”

“I heard that.”

“You were meant to.”

There was a pause below, and then the sound of the cane shifting on the flagstones, which was the sound Mrs. Pike made when she was standing her ground and preparing to keep standing it. Colin knew that sound better than he knew his own name.

She had been in this house since before he was born, and she had grown old in it. She had never once in thirty years been frightened of him, which was more than could be said for anyone else in the county.

“I wouldn’t come out here if it weren’t needed,” she said.

He looked at the horse. He looked at the leg that would not come right.

“Has my brother come back from Italy?” he asked.

“Well, no. Not really,” Mrs. Pike replied.

Colin’s hands went still. “That’s an unusual amount of hedging for a simple question.”

“Someone’s come to see you, is what I mean.”

“Who?”

“They didn’t give a name.”

“Then send them away.”

“I don’t believe I can, Your Grace.”

“You’ve done it four hundred times. You’re remarkably good at it. Last spring, you sent away a bishop.”

“He was rude about the roses.”

“Mrs. Pike.”

“You’d best come down,” she urged.

Colin put the chisel in the box and closed the lid, then picked up the cat, who objected to being picked up and expressed the objection by hissing at the general direction of the ground.

He climbed down the rope ladder one-handed, which he had done ten thousand times, and landed on the dewy grass beside a woman half his size who came up to the middle of his chest and had never, in his memory, taken a single step backward.

“Well?” he prompted. “What did they say?”

“Not much, really.”

“Nothing at all?”

“Very little.”

“Mrs. Pike, you’ve walked out here on a bad hip to fetch me for a caller who has neither a name nor anything to say. Am I to guess?”

“I’ve put them in the drawing room.”

He stopped walking. “You let them in.”

“Of course I let them in.”

“You know the rule. Nobody crosses the threshold until I’ve seen them.”

“I could hardly leave them standing out there on the step all alone!” Mrs. Pike argued with such genuine horror that he turned and looked at her.

“Why not?”

“Why, because it’s a baby.”

There were three maids in the drawing room, and not one of them was working.

They had arranged themselves around the sofa in a half circle, and they were making a sound Colin had never heard in this house in his life—a sort of low cooing, the noise a dovecote made at dusk.

Sarah had a finger extended. Bess was on her knees on the carpet. The new girl, whose name he could never remember, was holding her apron in both fists and looking like she might weep.

In the middle of the sofa sat a wicker basket, and in the basket sat a baby.

She was perhaps six months old, and had a great deal of dark hair and cheeks like two apples. She was not crying or laughing. She was looking at each of the maids in turn with an expression of profound and unhurried assessment, the way a magistrate looked at a witness he had already decided about.

As Colin watched, the baby reached both hands toward Bess and opened and closed them twice, in a manner that could not have been clearer if she’d spoken.

The maids scattered.

He hadn’t said anything, but they scattered anyway and formed a line along the wall. The cooing stopped as though a door had shut on it.

“Your Grace,” Bess greeted.

Colin crossed to the sofa. Mercutio leapt out of his arms and onto the back of it in one motion and sat there. The baby turned her head and regarded him with the same courtroom seriousness. Mercutio, who had bitten a footman on Tuesday, began to purr.

“How long has she been here?”

“Half an hour, Your Grace. Perhaps a bit more. Tom found her on the porch when he came round with the coals.”

“Nobody saw who left her?”

“No, Your Grace.”

“Nobody saw a carriage? A cart? A woman walking away up the drive?”

“No, Your Grace. It was still dark.”

Colin stood over the basket with his hands tucked behind his back.

The child was wrapped in blankets, good ones, and looked clean.

Somebody had dressed her carefully and packed a second gown at the bottom of the basket and folded it.

There was also a cloth doll with an embroidered face tucked in beside her, and the sight of it lodged somewhere beneath his ribs that he chose not to examine.

Whoever had left her had not left her carelessly. Which was worse. Careless would have meant a woman in trouble. This meant a woman who had made a decision.

“There was a note, Your Grace,” Sarah said.

“Where?”

“Under her blanket, folded.”

She brought it to him, and he opened it. There was only one word, in a woman’s hand, written small in the middle of the page.

Katherine.

He turned it over and found nothing on the back. No date, no direction, no explanation, no plea, nothing that a woman leaving a child on a doorstep before dawn might reasonably be expected to write.

“That’ll be her name, Your Grace,” Mrs. Pike called from the doorway. “You’d not send a child anywhere without her name.”

“No,” Colin agreed. “I wouldn’t.”

He looked at the note for a moment longer. Then he folded it, put it in his waistcoat pocket, and crouched down beside the sofa so that his face was level with the basket.

Up close, the baby was smaller than he’d thought. Her hands were the size of walnuts. She had a crease across the bridge of her nose from frowning, which was not a thing he’d known babies could have, and her eyes were an unmistakable, unmerciful, familiar blue.

His own eye. His brother’s eyes. His father’s eyes.

“Where did you come from?” he murmured.

The baby’s face crumpled like paper in a fist. She drew in a breath that seemed far too big for her, held it, and then let out a wail that knocked the three maids off the wall at once and sent the cat straight up onto the mantelpiece.

Colin rose to his feet, and she screamed harder.

Mrs. Pike came forward with the cane going like a metronome, scooped her out of the basket, and settled her against her shoulder. Within a moment, the screaming had dropped to a wet, offended hiccup against the housekeeper’s neck.

“There, my lamb. There now.”

“She was perfectly content,” Colin noted.

“She was.”

“She was content until I spoke to her.”

“She was,” Mrs. Pike agreed, and had the decency not to look at him while she said it.

Colin stood in the middle of his own drawing room with his hands hanging at his sides and a headache starting behind his ruined eye, and he thought about William.

William in Italy. William, who had gone abroad in April with three trunks and a great many debts and a letter for him that had said nothing at all in four pages. William, who never in his life had ended a thing cleanly.

Somewhere in this house was a bundle of his correspondence that Colin had been given at various times, by various men who wanted various debts settled, and he had never read a line of it because reading it had seemed a squalid thing to do.

He would be reading it this morning.

“Mrs. Pike.”

“Your Grace?”

“Feed her. Warm the north nursery. Send Tom to the village and have him ask quietly whether any woman was seen walking on the Thorton road before dawn.” He was already moving toward the door.

“And nobody speaks of this outside the house. Not to a sister, not to a sweetheart, not in the churchyard on Sunday. Not one word.”

“And where will you be, Your Grace?”

Colin paused with his hand on the doorhandle. “Finding out which of my brother’s lovers writes like that.”