Page 102 of A Baby for the Duke

She had made the list at Hounslow and gone over it twice by Slough.

In the morning, not tonight. Tonight I shall go up and sleep, because I have not slept properly since Sunday and there is nothing in the world so certain to make a woman say the wrong thing.

In the morning, I shall ask him to sit down, and I shall tell him that I am going to stay at my mother’s for two months, that I should like to take Katherine, and that I shall come back at Michaelmas. And he will say yes.

That is the issue. He will say yes before I have finished speaking. He will arrange the carriage himself and be kind about it, and I shall have to sit in a room and watch him be kind.

And then I will have done it. Nineteen days will become two months, and two months will become the way we live.

She was so absorbed in the list that she was halfway across the hall before she registered the light spilling out of the drawing room. Then she heard the singing.

She stopped with her bonnet half untied.

Somebody in that room was singing the verse about the cat and the fishing boat. Badly. In an accent that came from no county in England.

She walked down the corridor without breathing and stopped in the doorway.

The furniture had been pushed back against the walls, and every candle in the room was burning. Katherine was sitting upright in her chair with a cloth round her neck and her mouth slightly open, and walking around her chair in a wide stamping circle, with a bowl in one hand and a spoon in the other, was Colin.

He was the gull. He had one arm out, and he was wheeling.

Leonora put both hands over her mouth.

He mimicked the sea, which involved considerably less skirt than her version and was the worse for it. He arrived at the mast in four enormous strides and delivered the spoon, and Katherine took it without appearing to notice.

“That is the fourth. There are two more, and then I shall be permitted to stop,” he declared in the voice of a man reading out a total.

Then he turned around and saw her.

They looked at each other across the candlelit room for a moment.

“How was the pall-mall?” he asked, out of breath.

“I lost.” Leonora’s voice came out almost steady. “Nobody else in that family is remotely keen on letting me win.”

“No.”

“Alexander lost eleven shillings and blamed a cloud.”

“That sounds correct.”

He put the bowl down on the armrest.

Leonora stepped into the room, and the two of them stood on the carpet with the baby between them and about four feet of air. Neither of them spoke for long enough that Katherine got bored and shouted at them.

“She has had five spoonfuls,” Colin said. “I have kept count.”

“Of the pap?”

“Of the pap. Mrs. Ellis had her at four and she fed well enough, so we are not talking about a child going hungry. We are talking about the spoon, which she has refused from every person in this house since Sunday, and she has taken five of them from me this evening.”

“Five is a great many.”

“I know. I asked.” He wiped his hands on a cloth that had plainly been doing that job for some time. “Mrs. Pike had her at noon and got two into her. At four, she got none at all. At six, she came and told me so in a voice that I have been hearing since I was four years old and have never once been able to ignore.”

“So you sang.”

“I did not sing at first. I attempted to reason with her.”