Chapter 12
The baby got her first.
Leonora walked into the breakfast room at nine o’clock with a speech prepared, a short civil one, suitable for a husband, but there was no husband in the room to hear it. However, there was Mrs. Pike with a napkin over her shoulder, and Katherine in a padded chair with a bowl in front of her.
The moment she stepped inside, a streak of mashed pear flew through the air and caught Mrs. Pike on the cheek.
“Oh, you wicked thing.” Mrs. Pike laughed until she had to put the spoon down. Then she spotted Leonora and rose to her feet with the napkin still on her shoulder. “Your Grace. Forgive me. She has been at it since eight.”
“Sit down, please. Does she always do that?”
“Every morning, Your Grace. His Grace did the same thing at that age, only he threw it further.” She wiped her face with the napkin without any particular hurry. “When he was two, a nursemaid resigned over a bowl of coddled apple, and his mother laughed until she had to be helped out of the room.”
Leonora sat down. There was hot chocolate, toast, and a place at the head of the table with nothing on it.
“Where is my husband?”
“He’s at the treehouse, Your Grace.”
“At eight in the morning?”
“He has been there since last night. I saw the lamp come on.” Mrs. Pike’s smile had turned slightly crooked. “We don’t disturb him there. That’s the rule of the house. It’s been the rule since before I had this cane, and I’ll plainly say that nobody’s ever asked me to explain it.”
“Nobody informed me of the rule.”
“No, Your Grace.”
“I have been the mistress of this house since the words were said over me in that chapel, and I have been given the rule about the treehouse by the housekeeper over the toast, on the day after my wedding.”
Mrs. Pike said nothing to that, which in itself was an answer.
Leonora looked at the empty place at the head of the table for a moment longer than was dignified.
One week to prepare. One week. He said it as though he meant to spend it with me. And he has been up in a tree since last night.
“May I try?” she asked.
“Try what, Your Grace?”
“The pear.”
“You’ll want your oldest gown.”
“I’m wearing my newest one, and I shall regret it in about a minute and a half.” Leonora came around the table and held out her hand for the spoon. “Give it here.”
What followed was, by any reasonable measure, a disaster.
She began sensibly, which was her first mistake, for the child regarded the approaching spoon with the flat contempt of a magistrate and turned her head away.
She tried singing, which worked for exactly as long as it took Katherine to realize that singing did not have to be paid for with pear.
She tried holding the bowl out of sight. She tried eating some herself and pronouncing it delicious, which was a lie, because it was pear and nothing else and it tasted of wet paper.
Then she made the spoon into a swallow.
She had done this for Augusta years ago, on a nursery floor in a house that smelled of her mother’s lily water. She did it now without thinking, lifting the spoon up and round and down in a long swooping curve with a vroom vroom. Katherine’s mouth opened in pure astonishment, and the bird went in.
“Ha!” Leonora exclaimed.
Katherine, knowing she had been tricked, took immediate revenge. Leonora received the entire second mouthful across the chin and the front of her newest gown.
She sat back on her heels and laughed until her eyes ran. “Oh, that’s fair. That is entirely fair. I’d have done the same.”
“Your Grace, your dress.”
“It’ll wash.” She wiped her chin with the back of her wrist, scooped a fresh spoonful, and sent the swallow round again.
“My youngest sister would not eat a mouthful in her second year unless she was entertained, and my mother was not a woman to be beaten by a person of eighteen months, so the whole house was put to work. In the end, my brothers took to boxing in front of her while Mama fed her. Two grown men in shirtsleeves knocking each other about the nursery, and Augusta would sit there opening and closing her mouth like a little bird.”
Mrs. Pike laughed out loud.
“Oh dear,” Leonora snorted. “I do hope I shan’t have to box with my husband.”
“I hope the same, wife,” Colin said from the doorway.
Leonora twisted around on her knees with a spoon in one hand.
Colin was in his shirtsleeves, with sawdust on his forearms. He had clearly been up all night.
And it was clear that he had been standing there for a while.
Leonora was suddenly horribly aware that she had pear on her chin, down the front of her gown, and in her hair. She wiped at her chest with the napkin.
Colin looked at the ceiling.
“Still not fond of fruit, then,” he noted.
“She is not, and she is very rude about it. She has beaten every person in this house who has tried.” Leonora got up. “But I will win.”
“Others have said that.”
“I am not others, Your Grace. I have twelve years of experience with my sister and no shame whatsoever.” She set the bowl down. “Are you going somewhere?”
She asked because he had already turned toward the corridor. She saw him pause for one beat, a man deciding.
“My chambers,” he said.
“You’ve not eaten.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“You’ve been out since last night.”
He turned back at that, and whatever crossed his face was gone before she could read it.
“Aren’t you going to stay?” she asked.
“Katherine prefers it when I’m not in the room.” He said it flatly, the way a man reported the price of wheat.
That was what undid her, more than the eye patch and more than the corridor and more than any of it.
She looked at the baby. Katherine had gone still in her chair, both fists closed on the tray, and she was watching Colin across the room with her chin tucked down. Her eyes had gone to the black silk eyepatch and stayed there.
“Oh,” Leonora murmured.
“You see, then.”
“I see a child who has known you for a fortnight and has been given no reason to think you are anything but a very tall stranger who appears in doorways.” She bent, picked Katherine up, and settled her on her hip.
The baby’s hand went straight to her hair, which had pear in it. “You might win her over instead.”
“That isn’t how it works.”
“That is precisely how it works. It’s how it works with everybody.” Leonora crossed the room and stopped in front of him. She had to tip her head back further than she had expected. “You may begin this morning.”
“How?”
“By showing us the house.”
Colin looked at the pear in her hair and then at his niece on her hip. Leonora watched the refusal arrive at his mouth and die there.
“Fine,” he relented.
It was the worst tour ever given by an Englishman.
“The ballroom.”
That was all of it. He stood in the doorway with his hands tucked behind his back while Leonora walked into a room the size of a parish church, shuttered, sheeted, and gray as a wet Sunday. She stopped in the center with the baby and looked up at a ceiling painted with clouds.
“Katherine, this is a ballroom.” She went to the nearest window and pulled the shutter back, and light spilled in across the dust sheets.
“This is where the ton comes to be looked at. Everybody stands at the edges pretending to be too warm, and the musicians are always put in the coldest corner. If a lady wishes to speak to a gentleman, she must first find three other people to stand near, or somebody’s aunt will write about it. And here, in the middle, they dance.”
Katherine said nothing, only grabbed a fistful of the nearest dust sheet.
“Your father is going to open this room one day,” Leonora continued, “and we shall see what the ton does about it.”
Silence ensued. Then the click of Colin’s boots on the floorboards, continuing down the corridor. She gathered the baby closer and followed the sound.
“The library.”
She opened the curtains in there too. There were maybe four thousand books and the smell of a room shut for too long. She walked Katherine down the shelves with one hand out, touching the spines.
“These are books. Every one of them is a person talking, and most of them are dead, which does not stop them in the least. Your father has a great many, and I intend to read every one, starting with whichever is the most improper.”
“Third shelf,” Colin called from the door. “Behind the Herodotus.”
Leonora turned round. “I’m sorry?”
“You asked which was the most improper. It’s behind the Herodotus. My grandmother’s.” He had not stepped into the room. “She hid it there because nobody in this family has ever voluntarily opened a Herodotus.”
“Your Grace, was that a joke?”
“No,” Colin said, and stepped out into the corridor.
Leonora looked at the baby. “That was a joke,” she whispered. “But we shall say nothing about it.”
“The gallery.”
This was the one she had been waiting for.
She had eaten her own wedding breakfast in it, and had seen almost nothing: sixty people, a great deal of noise, and a long room full of candles with the shutters closed and the far end of it in the dark. She had spent four hours in there and could not have told anybody what was on the walls.
She went in ahead of him, drew the first curtain open, and stopped.
It ran the whole north side of the house.
Portraits of Walford ancestors hung on either side, sixty of them, dukes and duchesses and boys in velvet with hunting dogs, going back to a woman in a stiff white ruff who had Colin’s cold blue stare and looked as though she would have successfully led a siege.
“Look up, sweetling. That is a painting. It’s a way of keeping somebody after they’re gone.”
She walked along the wall with the baby, naming things. A horse. A dog. A little girl in yellow with a bird on her finger, whose face Katherine studied gravely for some time.
“What color do you like best?” Leonora asked her. “Mine is green. Marina says that’s because I’m vain about my eyes, which is slander and also true.”
Katherine clapped.
“Green it is.”
Leonora came to the end of the room, where the last twenty feet had no pictures on the wall, and where a canvas eleven feet wide stood against the paneling under a black Holland cover.
She stopped in front of it. “Well, apparently your father’s favorite color is black. I can’t say I’m surprised.”
“Does that trouble you?”
Colin was further down the gallery, by the window she had opened. His voice had not changed in the slightest, and Leonora, who had spent four Seasons learning to hear what people did with their voices when they were pretending, went very still.
“No,” she said. “Only I’ve been thinking about the week.”
“Have you?”
“You said you’d give me a week to prepare.
I’ve decided that’s not what you meant.” She turned around with the baby on her hip.
“I think you meant a week to get to know one another. I want you to know that I am perfectly willing to, and that I have been trying since nine o’clock this morning, but it will not work if you say five words a day and one of them is fine. ”
Silence followed.
“You want conversation,” Colin rumbled.
“I want to know one true thing about you that isn’t in a scandal sheet.”
“Then ask.”
“Anything?”
“Ask, and we’ll see.”
Leonora looked at the shape under the black cloth. She was aware, even as she opened her mouth, that there were forty better questions to ask and that she had four thousand books and a treehouse and a wooden horse to choose from.
She asked the wrong question anyway.
“Why is this painting covered?”
The change was not slow.
She watched his hands close. She watched him go somewhere else entirely. The face that turned toward her was the one from the corridor on the night of the dinner, and worse, there was nothing behind it now.
“This was a mistake,” Colin said.
“Your Grace—”
“Put the sheets back the way you found them.”
Then he walked out, leaving her among sixty dead Walfords with a baby on her hip and the dust turning gold in the light of the window she had opened.
She heard a door close somewhere at the far end of the house with a great deal of care, which was worse than if he had slammed it.