Page 101 of A Baby for the Duke

“Go on.”

“I want a child.”

Marina stopped swinging her boots.

“Not for the reason everybody will assume. Not for the succession and not because Mama has underlined the word news twice in every letter she sent since May.” Leonora looked down at her hands. “But because Katherine will be lonely in a very large house with a father who was lonely in it before her, and because I have four siblings and I have never once been lonely in my life. I should like to give her that, but I am not going to be able to, and I have to stop wanting it.”

“Nora.”

“So there it is. All of it. That is my situation laid out plainly, and I shall not speak of it again.” She let out a long breath. “I am thinking of coming back home.”

Marina did not say anything.

“For a few months, not forever. I would take Katherine, because Colin would let me. And that is the horror of it, Marina. He would let me have anything I asked for. I could say it at breakfast tomorrow, and he would arrange it before luncheon and would be kind about it.” Leonora’s voice shook. “I cannot live in that house and not be able to touch him. I have tried for nineteen days. I go into rooms hoping he is in them and then I am careful for an hour, and I am so tired of being careful that I could lie down on this wall and sleep for a week.”

“Then come back home.”

Leonora turned to look at her sister. “You are meant to argue with me.”

“I know I am.” Marina’s chin was up, and her eyes were wet, which happened perhaps twice a year. “I have been arguing with you since May. I told you to set his house on fire. I told you that you were arranging to be content and that it was the worst thing I had ever heard you say. I have watched you do it, Nora. You went back into that house, fed his tenants, opened his gallery, made a child laugh, got a man who had not been seen in six years into a box at the opera, and you did it all without one single promise from him.”

“Marina—”

“So, no, I shan’t argue. If you have done all of that and he still cannot say one sentence, then come back home, and I will fight Mama for you. And you may have my room, because it is warmer.” She dragged her sleeve across her face, furious about it. “In ten years, you will be a duchess with a house and a daughter, I will bring my horses, and it will be a life. It will be a good life. It is only not the one in your desk drawer.”

Leonora leaned her head against her sister’s shoulder. They sat on the wall for a while as the last of the light faded.

“Marina.”

“Mm.”

“What did you do at the Farrow house party in November?”

Marina went absolutely rigid. “I got into a lake.”

“You got into a lake, you have told Emily about a horse three times, and you have changed the subject about your dare eleven times since May. You are the only person in this family who has never once been able to lie to me.” Leonora lifted her head. “Somebody saw you.”

There was a very long pause.

“Go home to your husband, Nora,” Marina muttered.

“That is not an answer.”

“It is the only one you are getting tonight, and you may have the rest of it in about a year. When you do, you will be extremely unbearable about having guessed.” Marina jumped down from the wall and stood in the wet grass in the dark. “Do you want the truth about the horse?”

“Yes.”

“There is no horse.” She said it steadily. “There has never been a horse. I went into a lake in November. There was a man on the bank who was not asleep with everybody else. He has said nothing about it to anybody for a year, and I do not know why. That is what I think about at four in the morning. Not the lake, but his silence.”

Leonora sat very still on the wall. “Marina.”

“No. It is your turn to be miserable, and I have had a great deal of practice at listening.” Marina put a hand up. “Come down, it is nearly dark. Or else Mama will send Alexander, and he will make a joke, and I shall have to hit him.”

CHAPTER 36

Leonora got back at half past eight, in the dark, expecting nothing at all.

That was the state she had arranged herself into on the road. She had spent twenty-two miles making a list of what she would say and when she would say it, and the list ended with the words in the morning, because there was no possible version of this that could be done tonight.