Chapter 7
Colin rode back from Huntington House the long way, through the park and out along the water. He was in no particular hurry.
It had gone as well as such a thing could go.
He had said what he came to say. Leonora had said all right in a small flat voice under an apple tree, had not wept, and had not asked him for a single reassurance he would have been unable to give her.
He had walked away thinking that she had more nerve in her than every man he had sat with at Westminster.
Which was a problem. Because she was one-and-twenty.
Because she read poetry. She had stood in his corridor last night and told him that she wanted to fall in love, and had blushed to her ears saying it, and now she would spend the rest of her life in a cold house at the end of a long drive with a man whose own tenants stepped off the road and found something to look at in the hedge until he had gone by.
She wanted a love like the ones in her books, Colin thought, watching the road come up between his horse’s ears. She stood in my corridor and said so out loud with her face on fire, and she is going to get me instead.
Somebody ought to have deserved that letter. Whoever he was, he ought to have written back.
He turned in at his gates and did not look at the lodge keeper, who did not look at him.
Mrs. Pike was in the small parlor with the baby on her knee and a bowl in her hand. From the doorway, it looked as though the bowl was winning.
“Come on, my lamb. It’s only pears.”
Katherine turned her head away with the finality of a child refusing a proposal.
“It’s pears.”
“How long has this been going on?” Colin asked.
“Twenty minutes. I have another hour in me, and she knows it.” Mrs. Pike kept her eyes on the bowl. “Well?”
“Friday.”
“Friday.”
“Special license. In the chapel here. Her family will come.”
Mrs. Pike put the spoon down in the bowl. She sat for a moment looking at the far wall, and Colin saw, with some irritation, that her chin was not entirely steady.
“She’s beautiful,” she remarked.
“Yes.” He took off his gloves. “That’s the problem.”
“That is not what a problem is, Your Grace, and you’d know it if you’d ever had one that wasn’t of your own making.”
“Mrs. Pike.”
“There’ll be a duchess in this house on Friday, and I have a hundred things to do and no notion where the linen is.” She picked the spoon back up. “It’s the best day’s work you’ve ever done, and you’re standing there with a face like a wet Thursday.”
Colin crossed the room, which was his mistake.
Katherine saw him coming. He watched it happen, the way he had watched it happen twice before—her small head turning, and her eyes going up to his face and finding the black silk and the white line of the scar running out from under it.
Her mouth opened, and she drew in a breath.
Then she screamed into Mrs. Pike’s shoulder and stayed there.
Neither of them spoke.
“She’s tired,” Mrs. Pike sighed.
“She isn’t.”
“Your Grace—”
“I’ll be at the treehouse,” Colin said, and went out.
Katherine had decided to have his breakfast.
Colin had been reading the same paragraph in a letter from his steward for six minutes, and the reason he had been reading it for six minutes was sitting in a padded chair to his left with a cloth tied round her neck, ignoring the bowl in front of her entirely and watching his plate with an intensity he had not seen since the last time he had been at a hanging.
“That is a coddled egg,” he said.
The baby leaned forward.
“You have no teeth.”
She leaned further, making a small businesslike grunt, and reached out one hand.
“You are four feet from your breakfast, which Mrs. Pike spent twenty minutes on, and which you have looked at once.” He turned a page he had not read. “You are also, I am told, six months old. This is a matter of physical possibility, not preference.”
Katherine’s fingers opened and closed.
There was a very long pause in which Colin was looked at steadily by an infant and lost.
He put down the letter, scooped a very small bite of egg on the tip of his spoon, and held it out. Katherine snatched it off the spoon with the concentration of an officer defusing a mine and made a face at him that was so like his brother’s at that age that something in his chest turned over.
“Don’t tell Mrs. Pike,” he said.
She hit the tray with the flat of her hand twice, which he chose to take as agreement.
Bess came in with the post, set it at his elbow, and backed out of the room, which the maids had started doing lately.
Colin turned the letters over. The third one had no address on it and no seal.
He knew what it was before he opened it. He was aware of his hands slowing down, of the baby beside him kicking her heels against the chair, and of the ticking of the clock in the hall.
Your Grace,
You must have her by now. I am told you are a hard man, but I have decided not to believe it, because a hard man would have put her out on the parish by Tuesday, and I do not think you have.
I will not tell you my name. If you knew it, you would be obliged to do something with it, and there is nothing to be done. She cannot be mine. My husband was sixty-one and had been ill for two years, and there is not a person in England who would count the months and be kind about it.
She would be a bastard, and I would be the woman who made her one, and neither of us would be forgiven for it. I have watched what this world does to women who are not forgiven.
She is not fond of being passed around. She has been fed by a good woman at Ludd’s Cross since the week she was born and is very nearly weaned, and you must find her another or she will not thrive; she will take pap from a boat if somebody sings while she has it, and not otherwise.
She loves to be sung to, which I hope is a thing you can manage.
I have no right to ask you for anything, but I am asking you for everything. Give her a name and a life and let her be somebody’s daughter, and I will not write again. I will not come, and you need never be afraid of me appearing on your doorstep.
Be kind to her. She is very serious, but she is not unhappy.
Colin read it twice. Then he folded it and put it in the breast pocket of his coat, next to the note that said Katherine, and sat for a while looking at the window without seeing anything beyond it.
Somewhere out there, there was a woman in black having breakfast and being told that she looked tired.
“Well,” he muttered.
The baby had got hold of the hem of his sleeve and was pulling it.
“I suppose you’re mine, then.”
He read the direction at the head of the letter twice, and then rang.
“Ludd’s Cross,” he said, when Mrs. Pike came. “There is a woman there who has been feeding her since she was born, and I want her name by tonight and her in this house by Friday, on whatever terms she likes.”
“She’ll not leave a village for a house like this one, Your Grace.”
“Then find me one who will, and pay her double, and if there is nobody within twenty miles you will tell me so this evening and not on Saturday.” He folded the letter into his coat. “She has had one woman taken away from her already. She is not losing the other one because I did not think to ask.”
Mrs. Pike stood in the doorway a moment longer than the instruction required.
“Yes, Your Grace,” she said.
With that, Colin got up and told her that he was going to town.
He bought too much, and he knew it.
A wooden horse on a stand, which was absurd, because he was making one.
A coral and silver rattle. A picture book of animals with the letters underneath, which Katherine would not be able to read for four years.
A ball. Two dolls, because the seller pointed out that the second one was for when the first was in the wash, and Colin had never in his life considered that a doll would need washing and found himself unable to argue with any of it.
He stepped out of the toy shop in Holborn with three parcels and a promise to have the rest sent. He stood on the pavement and realized that the child had almost nothing to wear. Which was how he found himself standing outside a modiste’s window on Bruton Street at two in the afternoon.
He got as far as the door.
Through the glass, he saw a good deal of green silk on a stand and a woman with a tape measure round her neck.
Behind them, in the middle of the shop, stood the Marchioness of Huntington with her back to the window.
Lady Marina in a riding habit stood beside her, and beyond both of them, there was a screen.
Behind the screen, lit by a window on the far side of it, was a shadow.
He should have walked on. He should have walked twenty yards up the street to the next shop and asked for a child’s linen and gone home. Instead, he stood at the door of the modiste’s shop and watched the shadow lift its arms above its head.
The gown came off in one motion. He watched the line of it go, shoulder and waist and the shadow of a loosened plait falling forward as she bent her head, and every rational thought in his head went out like a candle in a draft.
A hackney sped past him. He did not hear it.
Leave, man.
Instead, he opened the door and stepped inside.
The bell rang, and three faces turned.
“Your Grace!” Lady Huntington greeted in the tone of a woman witnessing the Second Coming.
“Lady Huntington.” He bowed. “Lady Marina.”
“Your Grace.” Lady Marina looked at him, then at the screen, then back at him.
Colin realized that he had been in the room for eight seconds and had already been read by a woman of one-and-twenty in a riding habit.
“I am buying linen for my daughter,” he explained.
It came out of him like a man laying down a card he knew to be too low.
“Oh, the dear little—”
“Mama,” called a voice from behind the screen, “who is it?”
Leonora stepped around the screen with her hair hanging down her back, in a nightgown of white gauze so fine that he could see her curves, and stopped.
Nobody said anything at all.
Colin was aware of the shop. He was aware of the woman with the tape measure, and of Lady Huntington’s hands going up, and of the fact that his own hand had closed hard enough on the string of a parcel to cut it.
He was aware, most of all, of the pulse in his ears, and of a stretch of bare collarbone and one bare foot on a Turkish carpet, and of the color crawling up Leonora’s throat as she realized what she was standing in.
She made a strangled noise and went back behind the screen so fast that the whole frame rocked.
“Well,” Lady Huntington said faintly. “Well.”
Colin turned to the modiste. “Madame, everything the lady has been shown today, everything she has tried on and everything she has said no to, have it made and send the bill to Thorton.”
“Your Grace, the lady has not—”
“Everything,” he repeated, dropping a few coins on the counter to stop the woman from talking, before picking up his parcels.
He turned toward the screen. Behind it, Leonora had gone utterly still.
“It was a pleasure running into you, Lady Leonora.” He heard his own voice come out lower than he had intended and did nothing about it.
There was a pause.
“And you,” replied the screen. Then one eye and a fall of light brown hair appeared around the edge of it, no more than three inches.
Colin caught the look before she could take it back, held it, and watched her go scarlet all over again.
“I’ll see you at the wedding,” he said, then walked out into Bruton Street.