Page 113 of A Baby for the Duke

“Don’t wait for it.”

“I have minded being looked at for fifteen years.”

“They are not looking at you,” Leonora countered. “They are looking at the house. There is a difference, and you have never once had the chance to learn it. When a household is unhappy, it goes quiet, and this one has been quiet since before I was born. Yesterday, it was quiet for the last time, and every soul in it worked that out before we did.” She sat down opposite him. “There are flowers on the table. Somebody went out to the kitchen garden early this morning to cut them and made an appalling job of it. I would give a great deal to know which of them it was, but I am not going to ask.”

“Tom,” Colin said.

“How can you possibly know that?”

“Because I have just come in from the kitchen garden, and there is a bed of pink roses out there that looks as though it has been attacked by a badger.”

Leonora put the coffee down in front of him. “Eat something before Mrs. Rowe comes up, because she will, and then you will have to be gracious for eleven minutes, and neither of us will survive it.”

Mrs. Rowe came up.

She came up at half past twelve with a dish of buttered eggs that nobody had asked for and nobody was going to eat, and stood in the doorway of the breakfast room in her apron with her hands folded.

Colin rose to his feet, which Leonora had never seen him do for anybody in that house. “Mrs. Rowe.”

“Your Grace.”

There was a pause of about four seconds in which nobody could think of one single thing to say.

“The turbot,” Colin said.

“Your Grace?”

“The turbot,” Colin said. “Both of them. The one you sent up the night the Belmonts first dined here, and the one that Thursday. I have eaten your turbot twice this summer and said nothing about it either time, and it is the best thing I have eaten in this house since I was a boy. I should have said so the first time, and I did not, because I have never in my life said such a thing to anybody, and I did not know how to begin.”

Mrs. Rowe turned the color of a brick.

“Well…” She cleared her throat. “Well, I can cook turbot on Friday if you want, Your Grace.”

“I do.”

“Then you’ll have it.” Mrs. Rowe put the eggs down and left.

They heard her walk down the corridor and through the green baize door. About ten seconds after that, somebody in the kitchen let out a shriek, a pan went over, and Tom’s voice said something that was cut off halfway by what could only have been a cloth thrown at his head.

Leonora put her napkin over her face.

“Don’t,” Colin warned.

“I have not said anything.”

“You are going to say something for the next thirty years.”

“I am going to have it engraved,” Leonora said.

She found Mrs. Pike at eleven in the stillroom, doing the accounts she did not need to do.

“May I sit down?”

“It is your stillroom, Your Grace.”

“It is your stillroom, and we both know it.” Leonora sat nonetheless. “I want to say something, and I want to say it before I lose my nerve, because it has been five weeks and it has never been the right moment.”

Mrs. Pike put down the pen.