Page 1 of A Baby for the Duke

CHAPTER 1

“Your Grace! Your Grace, you must come at once!”

Colin Walford did not look up from the block of ash in his hands. He had been working on it for the better part of the morning. It was very nearly a horse, or it would be a horse if he could persuade the near hind leg to stop looking like a table leg.

He had come up here at eight o’clock precisely so that no voice in the world would be able to reach him.

The voice reached him anyway. It always did.

“I can hear you breathing, Your Grace!”

“Then you’re the only person in England who can,” Colin said, “since I’m forty feet up a tree and you’re not.”

“Thirty,” Mrs. Pike corrected from the foot of the ladder. “I’ve measured.”

“When?”

“When you were away in Yorkshire and I had nothing better to do.”

Colin set down the chisel. The treehouse had been built for a boy of fifteen, but he had not been fifteen for a long while. The roof beam still caught his shoulder every time he stood, which he considered a fair price. It smelled of sawdust, cold air, and faintly of the pipe he never smoked in the house. On the sill sat Mercutio, a fat orange menace of a cat who had opened one eye at the shouting and gone back to sleep.

“I made you that cane,” Colin said.

“You did.”

“I made it myself, out of my own timber. I sanded the grip. And you’ve used it every day since to walk out here and disturb me.”

“Well, and whose fault is that?”

“Mine,” Colin admitted. “Entirely.”

“I heard that.”

“You were meant to.”

There was a pause below, and then the sound of the cane shifting on the flagstones, which was the sound Mrs. Pike made when she was standing her ground and preparing to keep standing it. Colin knew that sound better than he knew his own name.

She had been in this house since before he was born, and she had grown old in it. She had never once in thirty years been frightened of him, which was more than could be said for anyone else in the county.

“I wouldn’t come out here if it weren’t needed,” she said.

He looked at the horse. He looked at the leg that would not come right.

“Has my brother come back from Italy?” he asked.

“Well, no. Not really,” Mrs. Pike replied.

Colin’s hands went still. “That’s an unusual amount of hedging for a simple question.”

“Someone’s come to see you, is what I mean.”

“Who?”

“They didn’t give a name.”

“Then send them away.”

“I don’t believe I can, Your Grace.”