Chapter 20
Mrs. Pike met them in the hall with the face of a magistrate.
“You are wet.”
“I am aware,” Colin said.
“You are wet to the thighs, Your Grace, and Her Grace has been sitting in a carriage with you for two hours in the state you’re in. Peg! Hot water in both rooms. Bess, take the child.”
“She’s asleep.”
“She’ll wake for a bath and go down again. She’s soaked where Her Grace has been holding her, and I’ll not have her in a wet gown all night.”
Leonora surrendered Katherine, who woke, objected, and was carried off nonetheless.
“Your housekeeper,” she said when the hall was empty, “has just told you off in front of your wife.”
“She has been doing it since I was four.”
“She was magnificent.”
“She was insubordinate.”
“She was both. That is the only way anybody in this house gets anything done, and you have known it for thirty years.” Leonora shook out her skirts, which were damp all down the front where a wet baby had slept on her for twenty-two miles, and discovered that she did not particularly want to go upstairs. “Where are my balls?”
Colin stopped with his hand on the newel post. “I beg your pardon?”
“My five pall-mall balls. They were in the carriage. I intend to put them somewhere prominent so that Evan can see them at Christmas.”
“You handed them to me at the door with the rugs, Duchess, and then Mrs. Pike began on my boots and you did not look back. They are in the gun room.”
“Why are they in the gun room?”
“Because it was nearest, and because I have been carrying five wet wooden balls about this county since four o’clock and I would like it noted.” He turned round. “Your brother tried to buy them off me at the carriage door. He offered me nine shillings.”
“He did not.”
“He offered me nine shillings and a spaniel.”
“That,” Leonora said, “is the most Evan thing I have ever heard, and I am going to be insufferable about it for a year.”
Colin laughed.
It was the second time. It came out of him low and unwilling, and he stopped it almost at once. But she had heard it, and she stood in the hall in her damp gown and thought that she would push a great many people into a great many lakes to hear it again.
“Go up,” he urged. “You’re standing in a hall in a wet gown arguing about balls.”
“I am not arguing. I am savoring. There is a difference. A very important difference.”
“Go up, Duchess.”
She went up.
She was out of the wet muslin and into a dry gown, and had her hair down her back before a knock sounded at the door. When she opened it, there was nobody in the corridor.
On the floor outside, in a neat row against the wall, were five wooden pall-mall balls.
Leonora stood looking at them for a long moment. Then she gathered them in the skirt of her gown, carried them in, and set them out along the mantelpiece in the blue room in order of size, where the first person through the door would see them.
The fire in the blue room had been going for an hour, and she stood in front of it with her hands out and could not get warm.
She had been out of the wet gown for half an hour and it had made no difference whatever.
Susan had taken it away and brought her a dry one, and the cold had stayed exactly where it was, somewhere behind her breastbone, and her fingers had gone past aching into stupid.
She was still standing there when she heard the connecting door open.
He had changed. That was all she took in at first: dry breeches, a dry shirt open at the throat, and his hair pushed back off his face and still wet.
“You’re shaking,” he noted.
“I’m perfectly—”
“Give me your hands.”
She gave him her hands.
He took them and turned them over. His palms were rough and so warm that Leonora had difficulty taking a full breath.
“You’re cold like ice.”
“I have been cold since the lake and I cannot get warm, and I have had a bath and a dry gown and both of them were useless.” She looked up at him. “You left them outside my door.”
“I left what outside your door?”
“Five wooden balls. You knocked, and then you went away, which I would like to point out is a thing people do when they are leaving a note for somebody they are afraid of.”
“They were wet. I did not want them in the gun room overnight.”
“You may tell yourself whatever you like about the gun room, Your Grace, but you carried five balls up a flight of stairs at ten o’clock at night and then ran away, and I have decided that it is the nicest thing anybody has ever done for me, and I intend to say so at breakfast in front of Mrs. Pike. ”
“You will not.”
“I shall put it in a letter to my mother.”
“Duchess.”
“I shall have it engraved.”
“Then stand closer to the fire.”
“I have been standing close to the fire since I came up, and the fire has been extremely disappointing.”
He lifted her hands and pressed them flat under his open collar, against bare skin.
Leonora made a sound.
“Better?” Colin asked.
“That is not,” she said, with what she considered admirable steadiness, “a recognized medical treatment.”
“No.”
“You have very likely killed us both. We will be found in the morning.”
“Very likely.”
She looked up at him. The fire was behind her. There was nothing on his face but the flat attention he brought to everything, the same face he had worn over a bowl of broth and a chisel and a rope ladder. It undid her completely.
She rose onto her tiptoes and kissed him.
He met her the way he had in the treehouse—without a hurry, one hand going into her damp hair.
This time, it was Leonora who backed him up, Leonora who pulled her gown down one shoulder, Leonora who moaned.
At some point, he lifted her off her feet and lowered her onto the edge of the table by the fire.
“Wife.”
“Don’t ask me if I’m certain.”
“I’m going to ask you every time.” His mouth was on her throat. “You may find it tiresome.”
“I find it unbearable, which is not the same. And if you stop now, I shall throw you in the lake myself.”
“You can’t lift me.”
“I shall get Marina. She has been looking for an excuse since Tuesday.”
“Your sister,” Colin said against her collarbone, “would do it for ninepence.”
“My sister would do it for nothing, which is what makes her dangerous. And I would very much like you to stop discussing my family.”
He stopped discussing her family.
He pulled her gown off her other shoulder and down to her elbows, which pinned her arms to her sides and which she discovered she did not mind in the least. Then he kissed the line of her collarbone, the hollow at the base of her throat, where he lingered long enough that she said something incoherent about the fire.
He kissed her lower through her shift, until the linen was no use and she arched up off the table without meaning to.
He made a low approving sound against her skin.
“Colin.”
“Mm.”
“That is my shift.”
“It is.”
“You are ruining it.”
“I’ll buy you nine.”
She lost track of most things after that, including the position of the fire, the state of her hair, the hour.
She learned that a man who had spent his life with his hands on wood had a particular way of learning a shape, trailing his palm over her body as though he were reading grain, finding the spots that made her breath hitch and then going back to them on purpose.
She learned that she could take his composure apart by doing almost nothing at all. She got one hand free, pressed it against his chest, and felt his heart thundering. Then she moved it lower, slowly, all while watching his face, and had the satisfaction of hearing him groan.
She learned that she had been in this house for four days and had already become a person her mother would not recognize.
Most importantly, she learned that she wanted all of it, and that wanting all of it was going to cost her on Friday.
Her hands were warm now. That was the last coherent observation she made for a while: that her hands had gotten warm and her spine had not, that she had spent twenty-one years being told that a lady endured this and every single person who had told her so had been lying, and that on Friday she would be expected to stand in a room and be pleasant about him.
“Colin.”
“Mm.”
“On F-Friday.” Her stutter returned, and she pushed through it because she was not going to be stopped by her own mouth. “When the week is up, what happens?”
His hands went still.
She could have wept. She had had one whole minute of not thinking about it, one minute in a fortnight, and she had spent it on a question.
“Leonora—”
Suddenly, the door swung open.
“Your Grace. Begging your pardon, Your Grace, only—”
Peg stopped in the doorway with a candle in her hand and her mouth gaping open, and the entire universe rearranged itself in about a second and a half.
Leonora scrambled off the table and got her gown back up onto her shoulder and her hands into her hair, none of which improved matters in the slightest. Colin turned to the fire.
Peg turned the color of a brick and looked at the ceiling, the floor, the fire poker, and finally at a point six inches above her candle.
“I’m really sorry, but Mrs. Pike says to come. It’s the baby.”
“What about her?” Colin asked.
“She’s hot, Your Grace. She’s ever so hot, and she’s gone quiet. Mrs. Pike says it’s the quiet she doesn’t care for.”
They were out of the room before Peg had finished speaking.
And it was only hours later, sitting in a chair too small for her beside a cot at two in the morning, that Leonora noticed her own hands had started to shake again, and that the fire had been built up twice, and that she was still cold.