Page 116 of A Baby for the Duke

“It is about a boy who was frightened of turning into his father.”

“Yes,” Leonora acknowledged. “But he did not.”

They stood in the gallery a while longer as the light shifted across the floorboards.

“There is one more thing,” Colin added, “and you are not going to care for it.”

“Say it.”

“The ballroom.”

Leonora turned her head.

“Your friend said something to you in it, in June,” he said. “You said you would write it down, and you did, because I have found it on a sheet of paper in the household ledger and I have no shame whatsoever about having read it.” He was looking straight ahead. “Four hundred people. On our terms and not theirs. At the top of the room, together, and every one of them obliged to be civil to my face.”

“Colin, I wrote that in May. I was being fanciful.”

“You were being correct,” he countered. “I should like to do it at Christmas. I have been thinking about it since Tuesday. I have got as far as the shutters; I would be obliged if you take over the rest of it, because I have not the first notion how one asks four hundred people to come to a house they are frightened of.”

Leonora put both hands over her mouth. “You are going to open the ballroom.”

“I am going to open the entire house,” Colin declared, “and you are going to tell me how, and I am going to be extremely disagreeable about the flowers.”

EPILOGUE

One Week Later

He did not wear the patch to Thornbury.

Leonora had been braced for an argument about it and did not get one. He came down on Saturday morning in his coat with his face bare, stopped in the hall, and said, “Well?”

“You will be looked at.”

“I am aware.”

“Not the way you have been looked at before. This will be worse, because they will be doing it kindly.” She straightened his neckcloth, which did not need straightening. “You may put it on in the carriage, and nobody in this house would think a word of it.”

“I know. That is rather why I am not going to.”

The county looked. Of course, it looked. There was a bad ten minutes at the rail near the tents during which a woman Leonora had never met spoke the words Your Grace, how very and then stopped dead in the middle of the sentence with her mouth gaping open, and Colin said, “It is fifteen years old, ma’am, and it does not hurt. You may look at it as long as you like,” and the woman burst into tears and had to be led away by her husband.

“That went well,” Leonora drawled.

“It did, actually.”

“You made a woman cry at the races.”

“She was not crying over my face. She was crying because somebody had said something true out loud at a public event and she had not expected it and did not know where to put it.” He tucked her hand in the crook of his arm. “It is much easier than I was led to believe. I have been assured for fifteen years that the world would not stand it, but the world does not seem to have noticed.”

“The world has noticed,” Leonora said. “The world is going to talk about nothing else until Michaelmas. But it is going to talk about it behind you, which is the only version anybody gets. I am extremely proud of you, and I intend to say so at intervals all afternoon.”

“Please don’t.”

“At intervals.”

There was a worse moment an hour later. Leonora saw it coming and could do nothing about it.

A familiar stranger came along the rail with two others, stopped, looked, and said in the dramatic voice of a man performing for his friends, “Good God. So it is true.”