Page 16 of A Baby for the Duke

The garden at Huntington House was not large and never had been. Her father had bought the place from a family who had run out of money, and he had kept the gravel walks and planted three apple trees because he had grown up with apple trees. Every Season, some lady would tell her mother that the fruit was countrified. But Leonora had always loved them. This morning, they were in blossom, and it seemed almost insulting.

“I have written to the Faculty Office,” the Duke said.

“This morning?”

“Before seven. My man took it up to London himself and will not come back without it.” He walked with his eye on the gravel. “A special license is granted at the Archbishop’s pleasure and I am a peer, which means it is a form and a fee and nobody will ask me a single question. I shall have it by Tuesday. I am telling you because the banns take three weeks and you do not have three weeks. You have about a week.”

“A week until what?”

“Until a woman at a card table says it out loud in a room where somebody’s mother is listening, and it stops being gossip and becomes a fact.” He stopped walking. “Lady Leonora, I came here to say something, and I’d rather say it plainly than not at all. I asked you for a betrothal you could break. That’s finished. It was finished at my breakfast table this morning in four inches of newsprint.”

“You are telling me we must marry.”

“I’m telling you I’ve made it impossible for us not to.” He said it evenly, and she realized after a moment that the evenness cost him something. “You wrote a foolish letter to my brother, you were in the wrong house on the wrong evening, and everything after that is mine. So you’ll marry me, and you’ll be a duchess, and nobody in England will be able to say a word about you in a room you’re not in. That’s the only thing I have that’s worth anything to you, and you’re welcome to it.”

Leonora stood under the apple tree and looked at him. She had a great many things to say. She had been composing them since seven o’clock, and they had been very fine. And yet she found she could not get to any of them, because she had just noticed his boots. They were splashed to the knee.

His coat was the same one he had worn at his table on Thursday, and he had not shaved.

“It’s twenty miles from Thorton to London,” she said slowly.

“Twenty-two.”

“And you were on the doorstep of that office when it opened.” She looked up at him. “The columns weren’t on the street before seven, Your Grace. Cook received a copy at half past, so yours came in with your breakfast. You did not finish it, and you did not change your coat, and you did not shave. You put down the newspaper and jumped onto your horse.”

Colin said nothing at all.

“And now you are standing in my father’s garden telling me you have made it impossible,” she continued, “as though the two of us were a sum somebody else had done. A title on your side and a difficulty on mine, and the two cancel each other out. It is not a sum, Your Grace. A sum can be done sitting down.”

The wind rustled the branches overhead.

The Duke looked at her for a long moment, and she had the satisfaction—which she was ashamed of and enjoyed anyway—of watching a man struggle to think of an answer.

“You were in a column,” he said at last, “and it was my house that put you there.”

“So you rode twenty-two miles before you had eaten anything.”

“Yes.”

“And then you came here and told me what was to happen to me, instead of asking.”

“Yes.”

She let it sit between them.

“You could have written.”

“I don’t write well.”

“You could have sent your housekeeper. I like your housekeeper.”

“Everyone likes my housekeeper.” For a moment, he looked very nearly amused, but then put it away. “Well?”

“But…” She stopped.

She thought about Augusta, who would debut in five years and would spend every night of her first Season being the sister of the woman in that column.

I cannot let them be punished for a joke I played.