Page 117 of A Baby for the Duke

Leonora’s hand tightened on her husband’s arm.

“It is,” Colin confirmed. “Fifteen years. Was there anything else?”

The man, who had come expecting either a growl or retreat and had been handed a civil sentence instead, stood there with his mouth slightly open, before saying something about running bets and scurrying away.

“That was extraordinary,” Leonora remarked.

“That was the whole trick, and I have only just learned it.” Colin was watching the man retreat. “They have nothing to say. Not one of them. They have been frightening me for fifteen years with a thing they have never once had to put into words, and the moment you say it for them, they are left standing in a field with their hats in their hands.”

The Belmonts arrived in a body at noon and made the whole business easier by being incapable of tact.

Augusta looked at his face for four straight seconds, said, “Oh, it is nothing like they said,” and asked whether he had brought the rules. Lord Huntington shook his hand and did not glance at it once. Evan glanced, nodded, and said, “Right,” and then asked him about the fourth race.

Only Marina got it right. She came up to his other side at the rail and said without a preamble, “It suits you better. And that is not a kindness, that is an opinion, and I have never given anybody a kindness in my life.”

Leonora went looking for the chestnut mare before the fifth round. She had the card out before the runners came down.

“She is not in it.”

“Who is not in it?”

“The chestnut mare with the white leg, the one who came last by twelve lengths last month. I have read this card three times, and she is not entered.” She turned it over. “Colin, she is not here.”

“Perhaps she is being rested.”

“Nobody rests a horse like that. They run her every fortnight until she cannot, and then they sell her, and I know exactly what she is sold for.” Leonora rose. “She had her ears forward the whole way round. She thought it was a treat. And now she is not on this card, and I am never going to find out what happened to her. I shall think about it for the rest of my life.”

She stopped, because she had said all of that at a public rail with six hundred people within thirty feet, and because her entire family was standing behind her.

“Oh,” she gasped into her glove. “For heaven’s sake.”

“Here.”

“I am perfectly⁠—”

“Here.” Colin put a handkerchief in her hand and stood between her and the rest of the world.

And Leonora, one-and-twenty years old, a duchess of six weeks, blew her nose at the Thornbury races about a horse she had seen once.

“You must think me ridiculous.”

“No,” Colin assured her.

“You are being very calm about this.”

“I am being extremely calm about it.”

Leonora looked up at him, and his expression gave her pause. “What have you done?”

“Nothing.”

“Colin Walford.”

“I have done nothing,” Colin said. “And I would be obliged if you would stop looking at me like that in a public place, because your mother is forty feet away and she is extremely quick.”

They got back home at six, and it took the two of them and Mrs. Pike ten minutes to establish that a crawling baby and a running cat could not be caught at the same time by fewer than four people.

“She is under the sofa,” Leonora said, on her knees.