Chapter 6
Her father had told her to get dressed and she had got as far as the foot of the stairs, and then Hobbs had come through the breakfast room door with the Duke’s name in his mouth, and after that nobody in that house was going to be dressed for another hour.
So Leonora went down in her wrapper with a shawl over it and her hair in last night’s plait.
She was halfway across the hall before she understood that she did not care.
Hobbs had gone ahead of her and taken up a position by the long-case clock, which was not where a butler stood and was exactly eight feet from the front door.
The Duke was under the window beside it.
He had not sat down, and nobody had taken his hat, and Leonora had a very clear view of her own butler watching him with the expression of a man guarding a lit stove.
“Your Grace.”
The Duke turned around. His eye flicked over her—her plait, her wrapper, and her slippered feet—and settled on her face.
“You’ve read the papers,” he said.
“Cook read the papers. She told my twelve-year-old sister, who told me, so I had the whole thing at half past seven from a child who chiefly wished to know whether she would be an aunt.” She pulled the shawl tighter around her.
“Will you walk in the garden? There’s nowhere in this house we can speak without at least four people overhearing, and two of them are my brothers. ”
“Your maid.”
“Will come. Ellen?”
Ellen came. She kept the length of the rose walk behind them and pretended with great skill to be interested in a wall.
The garden at Huntington House was not large and never had been.
Her father had bought the place from a family who had run out of money, and he had kept the gravel walks and planted three apple trees because he had grown up with apple trees.
Every Season, some lady would tell her mother that the fruit was countrified.
But Leonora had always loved them. This morning, they were in blossom, and it seemed almost insulting.
“I have written to the Faculty Office,” the Duke said.
“This morning?”
“Before seven. My man took it up to London himself and will not come back without it.” He walked with his eye on the gravel.
“A special license is granted at the Archbishop’s pleasure and I am a peer, which means it is a form and a fee and nobody will ask me a single question.
I shall have it by Tuesday. I am telling you because the banns take three weeks and you do not have three weeks. You have about a week.”
“A week until what?”
“Until a woman at a card table says it out loud in a room where somebody’s mother is listening, and it stops being gossip and becomes a fact.
” He stopped walking. “Lady Leonora, I came here to say something, and I’d rather say it plainly than not at all.
I asked you for a betrothal you could break.
That’s finished. It was finished at my breakfast table this morning in four inches of newsprint. ”
“You are telling me we must marry.”
“I’m telling you I’ve made it impossible for us not to.
” He said it evenly, and she realized after a moment that the evenness cost him something.
“You wrote a foolish letter to my brother, you were in the wrong house on the wrong evening, and everything after that is mine. So you’ll marry me, and you’ll be a duchess, and nobody in England will be able to say a word about you in a room you’re not in.
That’s the only thing I have that’s worth anything to you, and you’re welcome to it. ”
Leonora stood under the apple tree and looked at him. She had a great many things to say. She had been composing them since seven o’clock, and they had been very fine. And yet she found she could not get to any of them, because she had just noticed his boots. They were splashed to the knee.
His coat was the same one he had worn at his table on Thursday, and he had not shaved.
“It’s twenty miles from Thorton to London,” she said slowly.
“Twenty-two.”
“And you were on the doorstep of that office when it opened.” She looked up at him.
“The columns weren’t on the street before seven, Your Grace.
Cook received a copy at half past, so yours came in with your breakfast. You did not finish it, and you did not change your coat, and you did not shave.
You put down the newspaper and jumped onto your horse. ”
Colin said nothing at all.
“And now you are standing in my father’s garden telling me you have made it impossible,” she continued, “as though the two of us were a sum somebody else had done. A title on your side and a difficulty on mine, and the two cancel each other out. It is not a sum, Your Grace. A sum can be done sitting down.”
The wind rustled the branches overhead.
The Duke looked at her for a long moment, and she had the satisfaction—which she was ashamed of and enjoyed anyway—of watching a man struggle to think of an answer.
“You were in a column,” he said at last, “and it was my house that put you there.”
“So you rode twenty-two miles before you had eaten anything.”
“Yes.”
“And then you came here and told me what was to happen to me, instead of asking.”
“Yes.”
She let it sit between them.
“You could have written.”
“I don’t write well.”
“You could have sent your housekeeper. I like your housekeeper.”
“Everyone likes my housekeeper.” For a moment, he looked very nearly amused, but then put it away. “Well?”
“But…” She stopped.
She thought about Augusta, who would debut in five years and would spend every night of her first Season being the sister of the woman in that column.
I cannot let them be punished for a joke I played.
“All right,” she relented.
The Duke nodded once. He did not say anything else, nor did he look pleased.
He looked at her for a moment longer than the nod required. Then he walked her back to the house. In the hall, in front of her mother and both her brothers and Hobbs, he told her father that he would obtain a special license by Tuesday and that he saw no reason to wait on it.
“The wedding is in a week,” he said, looking at Leonora.
The house went mad.
Her mother had a list before the front door clicked shut. There was to be a gown, which could not possibly be made and would be made.
There were to be flowers.
There was the question of the wedding breakfast, and whether it should be held at Huntington House or Thorton Manor. Her mother settled that one against herself in the space of a single sentence and then argued the other side for ten minutes.
Alexander offered to write to a dozen people. Evan was already at the desk in the morning room, with the marriage contract in front of him and his coat off, which he had not done in Leonora’s presence since he was nineteen.
Augusta went up and down the stairs eight times without any discernible purpose and finally sat on the third bottom step, watching it all, radiant.
Leonora stood in the middle of it with her shawl still on and understood that nobody was going to ask her anything, because everybody had a great deal to do.
Then a hand closed round her wrist and pulled her sideways through the door of the little breakfast room, before the door closed behind her.
“Right,” Marina said. “Sit down.”
“Marina.”
“Sit down and tell me the truth, because you’ve been saying all right all morning in a voice I don’t like.” Marina leaned back against the door, which was something she had been doing since they were six. “Do you want this?”
“It doesn’t matter what I—”
“It matters to me.”
“Marina.”
“I mean it, Nora.” Her sister’s chin had gone up, and there was no mirth in her eyes.
“Say the word, and I’ll ruin it. I’ll say that I wrote the letter.
I’m a far better candidate; everyone knows I’m the wicked one.
Mama will scream for a fortnight, and then she’ll marry me off to somebody dreadful, and it will be perfectly all right because I’d survive it and you wouldn’t. ”
Leonora sat down on the window seat.
“I don’t want you to ruin it,” she sighed.
“Because of the scandal?”
“Because of the baby.”
Marina blinked.
“She’s six months old and has nobody,” Leonora explained.
“Not one person in the world, except a man who’s decided to be responsible for her because there’s nobody else in the room, and a housekeeper with a bad hip.
And I keep thinking, if I say no and it all goes away, and in five years I find myself a spinster reading novels in the window seat, what will happen to her?
Who will sing to her? Who will find out that she doesn’t like being handed to people? ”
“Nora.”
“So no, I don’t want you to ruin it.”
Marina came and sat down beside her. She put her head on her shoulder, and for a while, there was only the clatter of servants outside the door, her mother’s voice rising up the stairwell, Augusta’s shrieking about the flowers.
“And the Duke?” Marina asked.
“What about him?”
“That’s what I’m asking.”
Leonora opened her mouth to say that the Duke was perfectly civil, but what came instead was the corridor at Thorton Manor, and a hand catching her wrist in the air without hurry, and a voice saying I’m not my brother six inches from her face.
She turned toward the window at once, but it was far too late.
“Nora.”
“It will be fine,” she muttered.
Her father came up at eleven that night.
She heard him on the stairs, which everyone in the house always did. He knocked, which he never did, and then came in and sat down on the end of her bed and looked at his hands for a while. The candle was nearly out. She put her book down.
“Your mother thinks I’ve come up to talk to you about the marriage contract,” he said.
“Have you?”
“No.” He rubbed his thumb across his knuckles. “I’ve come up to tell you that I have a house in Halifax.”
“You have a what?”
“Halifax. Nova Scotia. I bought it eight years ago from a man who owed me money. It’s a good house.
It has land, and nobody in it has ever heard of the Marquess of Huntington, because there isn’t one there and there never was.
” He was still looking at his hands. “We could go on Monday. All of us. Your mother would carry on until Ireland, and then she’d start enjoying herself, because she always does.
Your brothers would hate it, which would be good for them. ”
Leonora did not say anything.
“You’re my girl,” her father continued. “I was making cloth when I was fourteen, and I’ve been made a marquess.
I’ve been laughed at at my own table by men whose grandfathers were thieves, and I’d throw the whole of it in the Thames tomorrow morning.
I want you to know that there’s a door before Friday.
It’s not a good door. It’s a great long sea voyage and a cold place at the end of it, but it’s open, and it will still be open on the day itself. All you have to do is look at me.”
Her eyes had filled. “Papa.”
“That’s all,” he sighed. “That’s all I came for.”
“I’m not going to Halifax.”
“No.” He let out a long breath and finally looked up. “No, I didn’t think you would.”
He kissed the top of her head and then walked out of the room, shutting the door behind him.
Leonora lay in the dark for a long while afterward, her pulse loud in her ears, and she could not for the life of her work out why she had answered so quickly.