Chapter 5
“Say it again.”
“Marina.”
“Say it again slowly. I want to be sure I have it. You went to look at a study.”
“I did not go to look at a study. He offered a tour, and I accepted because I was frightened, and I thought if I were going to be ruined I would rather it happened in a corridor than in front of the turbot.”
“And you came back betrothed.”
“Yes.”
“To the Beast of Thorton.”
“To the Duke of Thorton. And it isn’t a real betrothal; it’s an arrangement. It ends the moment somebody finds the baby’s mother.” Leonora took the pins out of her hair and dropped them one by one into the dish on the dressing table. “Stop looking at me like that.”
“I’m not looking at you like anything.”
“You are looking at me exactly like Papa looks at a ledger.”
Marina drew her knees up under her chin. She had been sitting on the end of Leonora’s bed for forty minutes in her shift with her hair down, and she had asked a great many questions and laughed at most of the answers. Now, she had gone quiet the way she only ever did with her twin.
“He caught your wrist,” she said.
“He did.”
“Nora, if he hurt you…”
“He didn’t.” Leonora looked at herself in the mirror and found her face flushed. “He held it for a moment and then let it go. He was almost civil. He made me a bargain like a man buying a horse, and then…” She stopped.
“Then what?”
“Then his daughter would not stop screaming for anybody in that house, and they gave her to me, and she stopped.”
Marina said nothing.
“She is six months old,” Leonora continued.
“Somebody dressed her in her best gown, folded a second one under her, packed her doll, left her on his doorstep in the dark, and then walked away up a drive. I keep thinking about the walking away. How far do you suppose you get before you turn round? A hundred yards? The gates?”
“Nora.”
“I’m perfectly well.”
“You’re crying.”
“I’m perfectly well and crying,” Leonora rasped, “which a person can be.”
Marina got up off the bed and went to put her arms about her, and neither of them said anything else for a while.
Augusta roused her at half past seven the next morning.
She did not knock. She never knocked. She barged into the room, jumped up onto the mattress, and landed on her knees beside Leonora’s head with the force of twelve years behind her.
Leonora startled awake, convinced the house was on fire.
“Nora. Nora. Is it true?”
“Gus.”
“Is it true?”
“Is what true, sweetling?”
“That you have a baby with the Duke.” Augusta’s face was three inches away and entirely serious. “Cook says so. She says it’s in the papers. I want to know if it’s true because I thought I was the only baby you would ever pamper.”
Leonora sat up. “What papers?”
“The gossip ones. Ellen fetched them.” Augusta was already burrowing under the counterpane, having gotten the important business out of the way.
“Can I see her? The baby? Because if I am going to be an aunt, I should like to begin at once, and then I shan’t mind about the pampering.
I have decided I shall be the best aunt in England! ”
“Gus, what did the papers say?”
But Augusta had rolled over and was talking about names for kittens, and had reached the point of arguing both sides of Marmalade against Wellington when the whole house shook.
The sound came up the stairwell from the hall. It was a sound Leonora had heard four times in twenty-one years, and every one of those times had involved a man losing money.
“Nora! Here. Now.”
Augusta sat bolt upright. “That’s Papa,” she whisper-hissed.
Leonora got out of bed with her heart pounding hard. She put on her wrapper and went down the stairs barefoot. Voices drifted from the breakfast room to her ears before she even reached the bottom.
She paused on the last step.
There was her mother’s voice, high-pitched; Alexander’s, laughing, which was not the same thing as being amused; and Evan’s, low and quick, saying numbers. And her father’s, above all of it, saying the same word twice.
She pushed the door open. There were four newspapers on the table. Her mother had one, and her brothers had two more between them. The fourth lay open in the middle of the table beside the toast rack, where her father had thrown it down.
She came around the table and read it upside down, and then right way up.
LADY L.B. HAS A BABY WITH THE BEAST OF THORTON!
Our readers will recall that a certain new-made marquess’s daughter has for four Seasons worn gowns of a fullness unbecoming to a lady of her figure, and has been much given to retiring early.
We now venture to supply the reason. A female infant of six months has been seen this week at Thorton Manor, the house from which no invitation has been sent since the old Duke’s death, and whose threshold only one family has crossed in six years.
That family dined there on Thursday. We do not say more.
We do observe that the lady in question spent three months at Bath last summer, and that Bath is famous for its waters and for other things besides.
The room had gone quiet around her.
“It’s ridiculous,” Leonora scoffed. Her voice sounded far away. “Everyone knows I have not had a baby. It is something people would have noticed.”
“You were at Bath,” Evan reminded her.
“To swim!”
“You stayed there for three months, at your aunt’s, and nobody in London saw you.
That is all the ton needs.” Her brother did not look up from the column.
He had a pencil in his hand and was underlining some words, which was the most frightening thing Leonora had seen in her life.
“They don’t need it to be true, Nora. They need it to be possible.
Once it’s possible, they will build the rest themselves, and it will be a better story than the truth, and it will follow you for thirty years. ”
“Then we deny it,” Alexander declared. He had his boots on the fender and a piece of toast in his hand.
He was the only person eating in the room.
“Loudly. Everywhere. I’ll be at White’s by two, and I’ll be very flippant about it.
By Thursday, it’ll be a story about how absurd the papers have become, and I’ll let three separate men win money off me while I’m doing it. ”
“Denial confirms it,” Evan argued.
“Denial from you would confirm it. Nobody has ever accused me of being in earnest about anything in my life, which is exactly why it will work.”
“It confirms it because the moment we answer a column, we have agreed that the column is a thing worth answering.” Evan had not put down his pencil.
“There is one answer. She marries the Duke, and she marries him now. She does it in daylight, in front of every person we can drag into a church. A woman who has borne a duke’s bastard is hidden in the country.
A woman who is married to him in the middle of the Season is a duchess, and the ton will spend the summer saying that it has always been a love match. ”
“That is a cold way to speak about your sister.”
“It is an accurate way to speak about my sister’s next forty years.”
“And what if the man is what they say he is?” Alexander had stopped eating. “You have all read the same stories I have. We are debating how quickly to hand her over to him.”
“He is not,” Leonora interjected.
Both her brothers looked at her.
“He is not what they say he is,” she said, her voice steady.
She found that she meant it more than she had expected to.
“He is rude, and he is unbearable, and he says things that would empty a drawing room. But he took in someone else’s child and told a lie at his own table to keep a frightened woman from being hunted down, and he has not once asked what he was going to get. ”
Her mother, who had been silent for an extraordinary length of time, put down the newspaper. “Whose is she?” she asked.
“Mama.”
“That poor mite. She belongs to somebody, Nora. Somebody carried her and named her. Somebody stood in the dark before dawn and walked away up a gravel drive. I have been sitting here for a quarter of an hour listening to my sons discuss the calendar, and not one of you has asked.”
Nobody had an answer for her.
“Papa.”
Her father had not spoken since she came in. He was standing at the window with his back to the room, his shoulders raised to his ears. When he turned around, his face was ashen.
“Get dressed,” he ordered.
“Papa, I did nothing.”
“I know what you did and didn’t do.” He walked over and took her face in his calloused hands.
For a moment, he was only her father and not a marquess.
“That’s not what’s on the table, my girl.
What’s on the table is what forty thousand people will believe by Sunday.
Now, go and get dressed, because I am going to Thorton Manor at eleven o’clock to have a conversation with the Duke about whether he is a man of his word, and I want you—”
The door suddenly opened to reveal Hobbs standing very straight, with the particular flat expression of a butler who had received news he did not care for.
“My lord,” he said. “The Duke of Thorton is in the hall.”