Page 18 of A Baby for the Duke

“That’s what I’m asking.”

Leonora opened her mouth to say that the Duke was perfectly civil, but what came instead was the corridor at Thorton Manor, and a hand catching her wrist in the air without hurry, and a voice saying I’m not my brother six inches from her face.

She turned toward the window at once, but it was far too late.

“Nora.”

“It will be fine,” she muttered.

Her father came up at eleven that night.

She heard him on the stairs, which everyone in the house always did. He knocked, which he never did, and then came in and sat down on the end of her bed and looked at his hands for a while. The candle was nearly out. She put her book down.

“Your mother thinks I’ve come up to talk to you about the marriage contract,” he said.

“Have you?”

“No.” He rubbed his thumb across his knuckles. “I’ve come up to tell you that I have a house in Halifax.”

“You have a what?”

“Halifax. Nova Scotia. I bought it eight years ago from a man who owed me money. It’s a good house. It has land, and nobody in it has ever heard of the Marquess of Huntington, because there isn’t one there and there never was.” He was still looking at his hands. “We could go on Monday. All of us. Your mother would carry on until Ireland, and then she’d start enjoying herself, because she always does. Your brothers would hate it, which would be good for them.”

Leonora did not say anything.

“You’re my girl,” her father continued. “I was making cloth when I was fourteen, and I’ve been made a marquess. I’ve been laughed at at my own table by men whose grandfathers were thieves, and I’d throw the whole of it in the Thames tomorrow morning. I want you to know that there’s a door before Friday. It’s not a good door. It’s a great long sea voyage and a cold place at the end of it, but it’s open, and it will still be open on the day itself. All you have to do is look at me.”

Her eyes had filled. “Papa.”

“That’s all,” he sighed. “That’s all I came for.”

“I’m not going to Halifax.”

“No.” He let out a long breath and finally looked up. “No, I didn’t think you would.”

He kissed the top of her head and then walked out of the room, shutting the door behind him.

Leonora lay in the dark for a long while afterward, her pulse loud in her ears, and she could not for the life of her work out why she had answered so quickly.

CHAPTER 7

Colin rode back from Huntington House the long way, through the park and out along the water. He was in no particular hurry.

It had gone as well as such a thing could go. He had said what he came to say. Leonora had said all right in a small flat voice under an apple tree, had not wept, and had not asked him for a single reassurance he would have been unable to give her. He had walked away thinking that she had more nerve in her than every man he had sat with at Westminster.

Which was a problem. Because she was one-and-twenty. Because she read poetry. She had stood in his corridor last night and told him that she wanted to fall in love, and had blushed to her ears saying it, and now she would spend the rest of her life in a cold house at the end of a long drive with a man whose own tenants stepped off the road and found something to look at in the hedge until he had gone by.

She wanted a love like the ones in her books, Colin thought, watching the road come up between his horse’s ears. She stood in my corridor and said so out loud with her face on fire, and she is going to get me instead.

Somebody ought to have deserved that letter. Whoever he was, he ought to have written back.

He turned in at his gates and did not look at the lodge keeper, who did not look at him.

Mrs. Pike was in the small parlor with the baby on her knee and a bowl in her hand. From the doorway, it looked as though the bowl was winning.

“Come on, my lamb. It’s only pears.”

Katherine turned her head away with the finality of a child refusing a proposal.