Chapter 4
She did not faint, she did not scream, and she did not run down the corridor to her father.
Colin had braced for all three. What he had not braced for, however, was that she would stand there with her back against the window and her chin coming up by degrees, like a flag going up a pole.
“Excuse me?” she scoffed. “What in heaven’s name makes you think I would accept?”
“The fact that you’d gain more than I would.”
“I cannot imagine what you think I’d gain.”
“My name. My title. My income. My connections.” He counted them off without any particular feeling, because they were simply the goods on the table and he had never seen the sense in pretending otherwise. “Your mother would weep for a week.”
“She would weep for a month, which is worse.” Leonora pressed her palms flat against the wall behind her. “And I didn’t know you had any connections, Your Grace. I was given to understand you had a tree.”
He looked at her.
She bit her lip hard and turned scarlet, but she did not take back her words.
“Everything I have said is true,” Colin said. “You have nothing to lose.”
“I have everything to lose.”
“Name one thing.”
“I want to fall in love.” She said it the way another woman might have confessed to a debt. Her voice had dropped almost to nothing, and she was looking at the floor between them.
Colin felt the words lodge somewhere below his ribs and stay there, which was not a thing he had any use for.
“No marriage in the ton is based on love,” he pointed out.
“Not one. Not this year, not last year, not in recent history. If it isn’t me, it will be whichever man your father judges most useful.
He will be forty and have gout, and you will smile at his friends across a table twice a week until one of you dies. ”
“That is a hateful thing to say.”
“It’s an accurate thing to say. You’re free to find it hateful as well.”
“I would rather wait for something better than to take something certain.”
“Then you’re a romantic,” Colin said, “and I’m sorry for you, because the world is not arranged for romantics, and it will cost you more than it costs me.”
Her mouth opened. Whatever she had been about to say, he never heard it, because at that moment, a thin exhausted wail sounded somewhere above their heads and drifted down the stairwell into the corridor.
Leonora went still.
The door at the end of the corridor opened, and Bess stepped through it sideways, holding the baby at arm’s length like a saucepan that had caught fire.
“Begging your pardon, Your Grace, but she won’t settle.
She’s been at it since eight, and she’ll not take the pap boat from me, and Sarah’s tried, and I don’t know what else I’m supposed to—” Bess got as far as Mrs. Pike, standing in the corridor with her cane, and stopped dead.
“Oh. Mrs. Pike. I didn’t know you were down here. ”
“Give her here,” Leonora cut in.
Colin did not have time to say anything at all. The maid crossed the corridor and handed the baby to Leonora as though she had been waiting all evening for somebody to relieve her of it.
Leonora settled the baby against her shoulder in one practiced movement and turned away from both of them, toward the window, and began to walk.
The crying stopped.
It did not fade. It stopped, in the middle of a breath, the way a kettle stopped whistling when it was lifted off the heat.
Colin stood there and watched his brother’s daughter, who had screamed at the sight of him twice in one day, take a handful of a stranger’s hair in her fist, rest her wet red face on a stranger’s shoulder, and settle.
“Oh,” Leonora said softly. “Oh, look at you. Look at the state of you.”
The baby made a small hiccupping sound.
“I know. It has been a perfectly dreadful day, and nobody has explained any of it to you, which is the worst part, isn’t it?
Nobody ever explains.” Leonora was swaying without seeming to know she was doing it, one hand rubbing slow circles between the baby’s shoulder blades.
“There. There. You are very cross, and you are entirely right to be.”
Colin found himself holding the back of a chair.
“She doesn’t do that,” he said.
“Do what?”
“Any of it. She screams at me. She screams at the maids. She settles for Mrs. Pike, but Mrs. Pike has been holding infants since the Flood.” He heard his voice go flat. “You have had her for forty seconds.”
Leonora looked down at the small dark head under her chin before looking back up. Her eyes were strangely bright and wet at the corners.
“Who would give you up?” she whispered.
Colin did not answer, because he knew the answer, and because his throat had closed up.
Leonora stayed like that for a long moment. Then she drew a breath, squared her shoulders, and looked at him over the top of the baby’s head with an expression he was sure he would never forget.
“I can’t marry you, Your Grace.”
“You’ve said—”
“I haven’t finished.” She lifted her chin.
“I won’t marry you, but I will agree to a temporary betrothal.
I’ll stand up with you in front of the ton and let them see that a respectable woman is not afraid to be in a room with you.
I’ll help you with the baby, and I’ll do it properly, until you have found her mother or her mother is found for you.
And then we will part ways as friends, and you will say the fault was yours.
My reputation will survive it, and so will yours. ”
“A betrothal you intend to break.”
“A betrothal I intend to honor for exactly as long as she needs it.”
“And when the ton asks why the Duke of Thorton could not keep a wife he never got to the altar?”
“Then they will say what they were always going to say about you,” Leonora said. “You’ll go back to your tree, and you will not have to marry a stranger to keep a baby, which I should think is worth something.”
Mrs. Pike had appeared at the end of the corridor with the pap boat in her hand and had come to a halt.
Colin looked at the woman in the claret gown holding his niece against her chest in the middle of a corridor where nobody had stood in six years.
“Very well,” he agreed.
Leonora had barely sat back down and unfolded her napkin before she felt it, the way one felt a change in the weather through a shut window.
Her mother was looking at the Duke.
Her mother was looking at the Duke, then at her, then at the Duke again. She had put down her wine, and Olivia Belmont had never in her life put down a glass of anything for a reason short of a fire.
“Lady Leonora and I have come to an understanding,” the Duke announced.
The footman stopped in the middle of the floor with the soup.
“We are getting married. Lord Huntington, I’ll speak to you properly in the morning about the settlement, but I would rather you all heard it from me tonight than from somebody else on Thursday.” He set down his glass. “Lady Leonora has also agreed to help me raise my daughter.”
Silence ensued, so thick it was almost tangible.
“Your—” Her father broke off. “I beg your pardon. Your what?”
“My daughter. Katherine. She is six months old. Right now, she is upstairs. The ton has not heard of her yet, but I imagine that will not last the week.”
Marina’s foot found Leonora’s under the table and pressed down hard.
Leonora watched her mother’s face cycle through so many emotions that she could not catch one of them.
“Your Grace.” Her father put both hands on the table, and his voice had gone back to the one he used on the mill floor, the one that had never quite been sanded off him.
“I am a plain man, and I’ll speak plainly at your table.
Why bring my daughter into this? If there’s a child, there’s a mother.
Marry the poor girl who fell for you and be done with it. ”
The Duke did not look away from him. “If she were alive and in this house, I might.”
Nobody said anything after that.
The silence lingered for so long that the footman, who had frozen halfway to the sideboard, gave up and set the tureen down on the nearest flat surface and stood facing the wall with his hands clasped behind his back.
Leonora looked at the Duke’s hands, thinking.
That is a lie, and he told it for a woman he has never met so that nobody at this table would go looking for her.
Her mother recovered first, because her mother always did.
“Well,” she began. “Well, then there is a great deal to be done, and none of it can be done from Grosvenor Square. When will you have the banns read, Your Grace?”
“Sunday.”
“Three weeks.” Her mother nodded to herself, already counting. “Three weeks.”
“I’d like your family to spend them here.”
Her mother let out a loud laugh. Then she clapped a hand over her mouth and said from behind it, “Your Grace, you have no idea what you are asking for. We are seven at breakfast when the boys are home, and nine when they bring friends. My husband shouts. My youngest listens at doors and is quite unrepentant about it. My daughters sing in the corridors. You would not survive a fortnight.”
“Perhaps I’d like the change.”
“You would not.”
“Perhaps I should like to find out.”
“But we might annoy you,” her mother stressed. “And one does not wish to annoy a duke.”
The Duke looked down the length of the enormous table. “I promise not to kill anyone.”
Leonora heard her father inhale. She heard Marina make a small, strangled noise into her glass. And then her mother laughed again, delighted, scandalized, entirely won over, and reached out and patted the Duke’s sleeve as though he were a nephew who had said a clever thing.
“Well, that settles it,” she declared. “We shall come. Leonora and I, and I shall chaperone every single moment, Your Grace, and I mean every moment, so you may put that out of your mind at once.”
“Mama.”
“I am being perfectly proper and your father is nodding. Now.” She gathered her gloves. “Have you a great many blankets?”
“I have no idea,” said the Duke.
“Then I shall bring my own,” said the Marchioness of Huntington, “for I feel the cold dreadfully, and I would rather not spend three weeks being brave about it in a house that size.”
As they prepared to leave, the Duke walked them to the door himself. He took Leonora’s gloved hand at the step and bowed over it. His mouth did not touch it, but she felt the warmth of his breath through the kid leather all the same, and she was extremely glad of the dark.
“Lady Leonora.”
“Your Grace.”
“You are certain of this arrangement?”
“I am not certain of anything at all,” she said. “But if my presence helps the child settle, then I would proceed with it.”