Chapter 3
Her mother had chosen the gown.
That was, in Leonora’s opinion, the most alarming fact of the evening, more alarming than the length of the drive, or the fact that the lodge keeper had opened the gates of Thorton Manor without a word and stared at them as they went by, or the way the house came into view all at once at the top of the rise with only four windows lit in the whole of its front.
Her gown was the color of claret, and it was cut lower than anything she had worn in her life.
She had said so twice, and her mother had said both times that a girl of one-and-twenty who dressed like a governess would be treated like one, and had then tugged down the neckline by a further half inch in the carriage.
“Stop pulling at it,” her mother chided.
“I’m not pulling.”
“You are pulling it about like a fishing net. Sit up. Chin. Marina, your gloves.”
“I have my gloves.”
“You have one glove.”
The carriage stopped. Leonora heard the step drop down and her father thank the footman in his ordinary voice, which was too loud for the front of a house like this, and she was suddenly painfully glad of it.
Then they were escorted into the hall.
It was cold, and there were far fewer candles than there ought to have been. A footman took their cloaks, and behind him, waiting with her hands folded, stood an elderly housekeeper leaning on a black cane.
Leonora had one moment to notice that the cane was beautifully made, the grip carved in a spiral and worn pale with handling, before she felt it.
She was being looked at.
The Duke was standing at the bottom of the stairs where the shadows were deepest. He had been standing there, she understood, since before they came in.
He was very tall and wore black, and his hair was too long.
Over his right eye, there was a patch of black silk.
His left eye flicked from her to her sister and back again. Once. Twice. Narrowing.
Nobody had thought to tell her that he was handsome.
That was the part that undid her. She had come out here braced for a monster, because London had spent six years building one up, but the man at the foot of the stairs had a hard, striking face that would have stopped conversation in any ballroom in England, if he had ever consented to stand in one.
The patch did not spoil his looks. It only made him more appealing.
It pulled her gaze straight to his face and then left her nowhere polite to put it.
They warned me he was cruel. They warned me he was a murderer. Not one of them thought to warn me about this.
Leonora looked down at the floor. When she raised her head, he was still looking between her and her sister.
She knew exactly what he was doing because everybody did it. The same height, the same long light brown hair, the same green eyes. Then they found the brown of Marina’s arms above her gloves and the whiteness of her own, settled, and stopped.
“Your Grace,” her father greeted cheerfully. “Please allow me to introduce my wife, the Marchioness of Huntington, and my daughters, Lady Marina and Lady Leonora.”
“Sit down,” the Duke directed.
And that was the whole of the greeting.
The dining table could have seated forty people but had been laid for five, all of them gathered at one end with room enough to bowl on the other. The food was excellent and arrived without a sound.
Her mother, who dealt with silence the way a bellows dealt with fire, talked for eleven minutes without stopping.
“Leonora is an avid reader,” she was saying.
“Poetry, chiefly. And she sings, though she will tell you that she doesn’t.
And Marina rides. Everybody says that she rides better than her brothers, but I do think a young woman ought to have something of her own, don’t you agree, Your Grace?
Some accomplishment, something to show for herself at one-and-twenty. ”
“Certainly,” the Duke said. He had not touched his wine. “Did either of your daughters do anything of note about six months ago?”
Leonora’s fork stopped an inch above her plate.
The room did not change. Her mother laughed and said that Leonora had been at her aunt’s in November, and her father agreed twice.
Marina, who was sitting on Leonora’s left, continued eating with the steady deliberateness of a woman who had heard the question perfectly well and was not going to give anybody the pleasure of watching her react.
Leonora set her fork down before it could rattle.
He knows. He knows, and he has sat us all down at his table to watch me find out that he knows.
She lifted her head and made herself look straight at the Duke. He was already looking back, his expression unreadable.
“Your Grace,” she said. Her voice came out light and pleasant, which astonished her. “Might I be shown something around the house? My mother has spoken of it since we received the invitation, and I confess I have been curious.”
“Nora!” her mother gasped, delighted and scandalized at once.
“Between courses,” Leonora added. “If it isn’t a trouble.”
The Duke put down his glass. “It isn’t,” he said. “We’ll begin with the study.”
He walked half a pace behind her, which meant she could not see him, which she was certain he had chosen on purpose. Mrs. Pike followed after them at a distance of ten yards, her cane tapping on the floorboards, chaperone enough for the letter of the thing.
The corridor was long and lined with doors, and none of them was a study.
Her own slippers sounded enormous. Every time the boards took his weight behind her, something went up the back of her neck, and she found she had begun to count the doors so that she would not have to think about how many were left.
She got as far as a window and a suit of armor, when she could no longer bear one more step and turned around.
“I am terribly sorry, Your Grace.”
The Duke stopped.
“I know I should never have done it,” she continued, her eyes flicking to the third button of his waistcoat because she could not muster the courage to look at his face.
“It was thoughtless and silly, and I have wished it undone a hundred times. If you will only tell me what you want of me, I’ll do it, and my father need never know about it. ”
“Wished it undone.” His voice was very quiet. “Have you?”
“Every day since.”
“I can’t believe you would do this.”
“I know.”
“To leave a child at a stranger’s door,” he added.
Leonora’s head snapped up. “A child?”
“Six months old. In a basket. Before it was light.” He did not raise his voice, and that was somehow far worse than shouting. “You might have knocked, my lady. Somebody would have opened the door.”
“Your Grace, how dare you!”
“How dare I?”
“I have never.” Her face was burning. Her stutter returned out of nowhere the way it always did, and she hated it.
Still, she pushed through it. “I have n-never had a child. I have never b-been alone with a m-man in my life. I have never s-so much as—I do not even know your b-brother. I have never been introduced to your b-brother.”
“Then it’s a great pity you wrote to him.”
Her hand was up before she knew it had moved.
He caught her wrist in the air effortlessly and held it, not hard, six inches from his face. Up close, he was very warm and smelled of sawdust, and his eye was the color of ice at the edge of a pond.
Leonora’s heart was beating so fast that she felt it in her throat.
“Careful,” he warned. “I’m not my brother.”
“I wouldn’t know. I hadn’t met either of you until this evening.”
Something moved at the corner of his mouth, but it was gone just as quickly. He let go of her wrist, reached into his coat, produced two pieces of paper, and held them out. One was a folded sheet with a broken seal of red wax. The other had a single word written in the middle of it.
For a moment, Leonora looked at the letter she had sent six months ago. Then she took it, turned it over, and saw half of her father’s crest in the wax.
“Oh,” she murmured.
“Yes.”
“It was a joke.” She heard how thin it sounded and made herself say it anyway. “There was a list and a dare. I wrote it, but I changed my hand so that it wouldn’t be recognized. I never expected your brother to read it, and I certainly never expected him to keep it.”
“He kept all of them.”
“Then how could you possibly know it was mine?”
“The crest.”
“My father has never used that seal in his life. He thinks it’s pompous.”
“I was at Westminster the day he was given it,” the Duke pointed out. “A bird with the wing raised and half a wheel. I don’t forget things I’ve been made to sit through.”
Leonora looked down at the other paper, the one with Katherine on it, and her chest tightened.
“That’s her name,” she said.
“So I’m told.”
“But the letter says nothing about a child,” she said. “Not one word. I have it in my hand and there is nothing in it but a great deal of foolishness about a man laughing across a room.”
“No. It does not.”
“Then how in heaven’s name did you arrive at—”
“A woman left a child on my step before dawn with one word written on a sheet of paper,” the Duke said, “and no direction, no date, and no name. That hand was all I had of her. So I went through every letter my brother has been sent by a woman in four years and looked for it, and one of them was near enough to stop me, and it had half your father’s crest on the seal.
” He did not look away. “It was six months old. So is the child. I am aware that is arithmetic and not proof. I had nothing else in the world to go on and a baby asleep in my drawing room, and I would do the same again tomorrow.”
“And you thought…” She raised her eyes to his. “You thought that I had written a letter to your brother while I was carrying his child and then left her on your doorstep. And instead of turning us away at the door, you invited my family to dinner and fed them turbot.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I wanted to see your face when I asked about last spring.”
Leonora did not know what to say to that.
Down the corridor, Mrs. Pike had stopped walking and was studying a painting with tremendous concentration.
“Well,” Leonora said, “you have seen it, and I hope it has told you what you wanted to know. I am sorry for the letter and sorrier still for the child, and I hope with all my heart that you find her mother so that your brother can do right by her.”
“My brother is in Italy and cannot be found.”
“When is he coming back?”
“He isn’t coming back,” the Duke said blandly. “I’ll claim the girl as my own.”
Leonora stared at him. “As your own daughter?”
“There’s no one else.”
“That is—” She stopped, because the word she wanted to say was not one she could say to a duke in a corridor. “That is a very good thing to do.”
“It’s the arithmetic. Don’t make it into a virtue.
” He turned toward the window, and the candle showed the scar peeking from under the silk.
“But a daughter needs more than a name, and the ton will not accept a girl out of nowhere from a man they call the Beast of Thorton. She needs a mother. A respectable one. Married in a church, in daylight, with her family in the pews.”
“I’m sure you will charm one in no time, Your Grace.”
“I’ve never charmed anything in my life.”
“Then you had better begin, because there are six weeks of the Season left, and then everyone goes home.”
“I don’t need charm,” he declared. “I need somebody who wants something from me as badly as I want something from them.”
He turned around and came away from the window, and Leonora took a step back before she could stop herself and put her shoulders against the paneling. The suit of armor stood at her right hand. There was nowhere else to go.
“Do you like children, Lady Leonora?”
“I—what can that possibly have to do with anything?”
“Because I’m about to make you a bargain,” the Duke said. “Your secret stays in this house. Not one soul learns which unmarried daughter of a newly-made marquess wrote a love letter to the worst rake in England and sealed it with her father’s crest.”
“And in return?”
“In return, I’ll make you my wife.”