Page 106 of A Baby for the Duke

Leonora looked at her hands. “You were on the ladder.”

“Yes.”

“You were fifteen years old, bleeding out of your face, halfway up a rope ladder, running to a six-year-old who was locked in a treehouse because you had told him to lock himself in it, and a drunk man hit his head.” She turned her head. “And you have called yourself responsible for that for fifteen years.”

“I made him chase me.”

“You made him chase you away from your brother.”

“I went over it a great many times.”

“I am certain you have. I imagine you have gone over it every day since, at about four in the morning, up in this tree.” Leonora’s voice had gone very steady, which surprised her. “And I imagine that somebody did try to tell you,” Leonora said. “I imagine a woman of four-and-thirty with a bad hip sat you down in a kitchen at some point that winter and told you it was not your doing, and I imagine you were fifteen and did not hear one word of it, because there was nobody else in the world to hold it against.”

Colin did not answer.

“So I shall tell you again,” Leonora continued, “and you will hear it this time, because you are thirty and not fifteen and you have nothing left to hold it against. You did not kill your father. Your father killed himself over the course of six years with a bottle, and on the last night of it, he chased his own children with a knife. The only thing in that room that behaved well was a boy of fifteen who has been apologizing to this household in wood ever since.”

He turned his head and looked at her. “Mrs. Pike said that to you.”

“Mrs. Pike said it to me in a stillroom in May, and I have been carrying it with me ever since, waiting for you to let me give it to you,” Leonora murmured. “I would be obliged if you take it, because it is extremely heavy.”

CHAPTER 38

“Ihave something to say,” Colin announced. “I have been rehearsing it since Sunday, but I am going to say it badly.”

“Say it anyway.”

“I kept you at arm’s length.” He was looking at the floor. “You know why. I have told you why in a room upstairs, with my hand on a mantelpiece, and I meant every word of it at the time. I thought that if I let myself love you the way he loved her, it would come out of me the same way in the end, because it is the only love I have ever watched close enough to learn. I thought it was in my blood. I thought I was carrying it around the way a man carries an illness, and that the decent course—the only decent one—was to keep it away from you and Katherine.”

“I know.”

“Let me finish, or I will not manage it.” He drew in a breath. “Then you came into this house and lit it up. You fed my tenants in the hall, you opened my mother’s gallery, and you learned the name of every servant within two days, which I have never done in thirty years. You made Katherine laugh. You wrote me a note about a ditch.”

His hands closed and opened. “And this morning you went to your mother’s without asking me, and I sat on the floor of the drawing room with the child and understood that I had spent five weeks protecting you from a man who was never going to appear, and that in the meantime I had done every single thing to you that I was frightened of doing. I made you unhappy. On purpose. With my own hands and the best intentions in England.”

“Colin—”

“I am not finished. This is the part I have been preparing.” He turned to face her. “I have loved you since the lake. Since you threw your arms around me on your father’s lawn with water in my boots, and I stood there like a post because I had no idea where to put my hands. I have known it for a month. I let you go on thinking it was an arrangement—I even let your brother think it; I said it plainly to him at the opera—and that is the worst thing I have ever done to anybody. I am asking you to forgive it.”

Leonora could not speak at all.

“I have nothing to offer you that you do not already have,” Colin exhaled. “You have the house and the name and the child. There is nothing left in my possession except the thing I have been holding back, and it is yours. It has been yours since a lake in June, and I am sorry it has taken me until now to put it on the table.”

The candles flickered along the beam.

“Say something,” he urged. “Anything. You may hit me.”

“You lit a path,” Leonora said.

“What?”

“Across the lawn. Six lamps. You went out into the dark and lit six lamps so that I could find my way to you, and you were never going to mention it. I stood at the window and watched you do it, and I knew.” She was crying and laughing at once and made no attempt to stop either. “You cannot say anything, Colin. You are the worst speaker in England. But you have never once in five weeks told me a lie. I have loved you since the lake as well, and I have been holding it in both hands for a month because I thought that if I said it out loud, you would put yourself out of the room.”

“I am not going anywhere.”

“No,” Leonora sniffed. “You are not.”

Then she cupped his ruined face in both hands and kissed him.