Chapter 18
Leonora climbed down the ladder first, because he had insisted, and stood at the bottom of it in the yellow light with her legs still not entirely her own.
“We should go back,” he had said up there. She had heard the we and decided to be shameless about it.
“We?”
Colin climbed down the last four rungs and turned round. There was sawdust on his shirt.
“You climbed thirty feet of rope one-handed to tell me you wanted my company,” he said. “I assumed the word wouldn’t come as a surprise.”
“It did come as a surprise. You have used it once in a fortnight.” Leonora put her hands behind her back. “And since we are surprising each other, there is a thing you must know about this marriage that nobody has yet told you and that I’m afraid I can no longer avoid.”
“Go on.”
“Every Tuesday of the summer, my family plays pall-mall.”
“Pall-mall.”
“On the lawn at Huntington House. All of us. My mother keeps the score, and my father disputes it.” She watched him. “We take it seriously.”
“And tomorrow is Tuesday.”
“Tomorrow is Tuesday,” Leonora agreed. “You are coming, and so is Katherine. My mother will snatch her out of your arms within nine seconds of the carriage stopping, and you will not get her back until we leave.”
“Am I permitted to refuse?”
“You are permitted to try.”
He looked at her for a moment. The light was dimming above the yew hedge, there was a leaf in her hair still, and she was standing in the garden with him, which she could not have predicted twenty minutes ago.
“Very well,” Colin relented. “Go back to the house. I’ll put the tools away and follow.”
“You have said that before and stayed up here until four in the morning.”
“I have,” he agreed. “I shall be down before the last feed, and you may send Mrs. Pike out with her cane if I am not.”
She turned to go, but then turned back, went up on her tiptoes, and kissed his cheek.
It was the first time she had ever touched him first.
She did not stay to see his reaction. She ran, undignified, all the way to the kitchen garden wall, and only when she was safely around the corner did she stop and press both hands flat against the warm brick and laughed at absolutely nothing.
Mrs. Pike was in the hall.
“There you are, Your Grace. You’re just in time for the last feed of the day, which I’m glad of because she’s had nothing since the pear and she’s in a mood about it.”
“I’ll come straight away.”
“Your Grace.” Mrs. Pike had stopped. “Your gown.”
Leonora looked down.
Leonora looked down at herself, and then, because Mrs. Pike was still looking, turned her shoulder to the hall glass.
Her gown, which had left the house that morning the color of butter, was gray to the knee with sawdust and marked at both hips where two hands had held her.
There was a long green smear all the way down the back of it that she had not known was there until that moment, and rather wished she had gone on not knowing.
“I fell,” she offered.
“Did you?”
“Off the ladder. The second rung. As you warned me.” Her whole face was burning, but she went on regardless, because there was nothing else to be done. “It was very undignified, and I would consider it a kindness if we never spoke of it again.”
Mrs. Pike studied her.
“The second rung,” she said gravely, “has a great deal to answer for.”
“It does.”
“It has for many of us over the years.”
“Mrs. Pike.”
“I’ll have hot water sent up, Your Grace,” Mrs. Pike said, then walked off down the corridor.
Leonora could hear her laughing all the way to the green baize door.
Colin heard it from the far end of the corridor and could not, for the life of him, identify it.
There was singing. That was the first thing.
Somebody in his drawing room was singing a song about a cat that went to sea, and doing it badly, in an accent that came from no county in England.
There was a second noise underneath it that took him another six steps to place because he had not heard it in this house since his mother died.
Somebody was stamping in time.
He came to the doorway and stopped.
Every candle in the room was lit. The furniture had been shoved back against the walls. In the middle of the carpet, Katherine sat upright in her chair with her fists on the tray and her mouth slightly open, and walking in a wide circle around that chair was his wife.
She had a bowl in her left hand and a spoon in her right, and she was performing.
There was no other word for it. She sang the verse about the cat and the fishing boat, and then she was a gull, wheeling, one arm out.
Then she was the sea, which involved swishing her skirt.
Then she was the cat again, arriving at the mast in four enormous stamping strides, and at the top of the mast the spoon went into the baby’s mouth as though it had always been going there.
Katherine swallowed without seeming to realize it.
Colin had never in his life seen anything like it.
He had also, he realized, been standing in the doorway for a while.
“Husband!”
He had been spotted.
“No,” he huffed.
“I haven’t asked you anything.”
“You have that face.”
“I have this face,” Leonora said, flushed to the ears, entirely out of breath, “because I have been a cat and a gull and the Bay of Biscay for ten minutes, and she has eaten two-thirds of a bowl, which has not happened once since she came into this house. And I am not stopping now. Come here.”
“Duchess.”
“There is a verse where the cat meets the captain, and I cannot be both.”
He looked at the baby.
Katherine had gone still the moment he appeared in the doorway. She had her chin tucked down and her eyes on his eyepatch, exactly as she had at breakfast.
Colin stood there and did the arithmetic he had done a hundred times since January and always come out the same way.
She’ll cry. She’ll cry, and the whole thing will collapse. It will be my fault again.
“Colin,” Leonora pressed, as though he were a child refusing to climb the stairs.
He stepped into the room.
He was not going to sing. He resolved not to do that as he crossed the carpet.
But then Leonora handed him the spoon and said, “You are the captain, and the captain is extremely stern and has a giant hat,” and something happened that he was unable to account for afterward.
He affected an extremely stern expression, touched the tip of his fictitious hat, and informed the cat, in a voice that had frightened a bishop out of this house in the spring, that there were no cats permitted aboard this vessel, that he was overruled by the sea.
At his wife’s insistence, and against his better judgment, he made the noise of a foghorn.
Leonora came around the last verse, lifted the spoon over her head and down, and delivered it straight into his mouth. It was pear. It was, as advertised, dreadful.
Katherine laughed.
It was a small sound, and it came out of her all at once, a startled wet crow of a laugh with her whole body behind it. Then she lifted both hands from the tray and clapped.
Colin and Leonora went still.
“Did she—”
“Yes,” he said.
“Has she ever—”
“No.” His voice was strained. “Not once. Not since she came. And never when I’ve been in the room.”
Leonora put down the bowl. Then she lifted Katherine out of the chair, turned around, and held her out to him.
Colin took a step back before he had decided to.
“No.”
“Yes.”
“She doesn’t—”
“She just laughed at you,” she said. “Take your daughter, Colin.”
So he took her.
He had done it twice before and made a poor job of both, and this time she came up crooked again and then sorted herself out against him with a great deal of purpose, and settled, and stayed.
That was the new part. She had never once stayed.
She did not cry. She looked up into his face with her father’s blue eyes and studied him for what felt like a very long time.
Then she reached up and pressed her small palm against his eyepatch.
Colin stopped breathing.
She patted it twice, the way one patted a dog. And then, having settled the matter to her satisfaction, she moved her hand down to his cheek and left it there, and rested her head against his shoulder.
Colin found he was smiling. He could feel it happening, and he had no notion what to do about it.
He looked up at Leonora. She was watching him, both hands pressed over her mouth, her eyes shining. There was nothing guarded in her face; whatever was in it was so soft and so vulnerable that he had to look away.
“Well,” Leonora said in a voice that was not quite steady, “Father and daughter have a great deal to discuss, and I have sawdust in my hair. I shall see you both in the morning.” She was already moving toward the door. “Don’t forget the pall-mall.”
Then she was gone, and the door clicked shut behind her.
The room fell quiet.
Something orange bolted out from under the sofa.
“You,” Colin said.
Mercutio, who had bitten a footman, a groom, and the vicar’s dog twice since January and was not sorry about any of it, crossed the carpet, put his front paws against Colin’s leg, looked up at the baby, and began to purr like a boiling kettle.
Katherine reached down. The cat permitted it.
“You’ve tamed him as well,” Colin praised. “That’s a huge accomplishment, Katherine. Grown men have failed.”
The baby patted the cat’s head and then turned her head and looked at the door Leonora had gone out of, her mouth turning down at the corners.
“I know,” Colin murmured, shifting her to the other arm. “She’s quite something, isn’t she?”
The baby curled her fist into his collar and did not answer.
He walked her up and down the length of the room for a while, because it seemed to be what she wanted, and Mercutio followed them at a distance of four feet like an escort.
Colin found himself doing something he had not done since before his mother died—talking out loud in an empty room.
“Your father is in Italy,” he chattered. “He is not coming back. I am not going to lie to you about that when you are old enough to ask, and you will ask. You will very likely be angry with me for a year or two about it.”
Katherine breathed on his neck.
“You are going to be told a great many things about me,” Colin continued. “Some of them by people who mean well. I will tell you now that most of them are true and the worst one is not, and when you are grown, I will let you decide which is which.”
The clock in the hall struck ten.
“She will tell you they are all false,” he murmured. “That is what she does. You will want to believe her, and I would not blame you in the least.”
Then he remembered that the next morning he was to be driven twenty-two miles to her family home.