Page 22 of A Baby for the Duke

There was a drawer in her escritoire that did not open unless she lifted the front of it. There were eight years of her in that drawer, and not one person alive had read a line of it. Stories about women who went to sea. Stories about women who told the truth in a ballroom and were not destroyed by it. A great many pages torn in half and kept anyway.

She took out paper and cut a new pen, telling herself she was writing about a shipwreck.

The lady had been stranded on the island for three days, she wrote, and on the fourth day, the man came up out of the surf.

That was perfectly sensible. She had been meaning to write about a shipwreck for a year.

He was very tall and did not trouble to explain himself. When she asked him a question, he looked at her as though asking were an impertinence and answered it anyway.

Leonora dipped the pen.

He wore a strip of black silk across one eye.

Her hand stopped.

She read the line four times. Then she read the paragraph above it and the one above that, and understood, with the particular horror of a person who had been caught out by nobody but herself, that she had been writing about the Duke since the first sentence.

The height was his. The rudeness was his. The way the man came up the beach without hurrying, because hurrying was for people who were worried about being refused, was so like him that she put the pen down.

It is only a story. It is a shipwreck. It has nothing to do whatsoever with the upcoming wedding.

She wrote for another hour and a half.

At the end, there was a page and a half more, and one line at the bottom that she struck through so hard that the nib pierced through the paper. She did not burn it, which she noticed and thought about very little.

Then she put the pages in the drawer, lifted the front, and shut it, and went to bed and did not sleep for a long while.

The parcel arrived at breakfast.

“For Lady Leonora,” the footman announced, and set it down beside the toast rack.

Leonora looked at it and felt the entire morning tilt. It was long and flat and tied with silk ribbon, and there was a card on top of it. The seal on the card was black wax with no crest at all, which was somehow worse than a crest.

“Well, open it,” her mother prompted.

“Later.”

“Nora.”

“Later, Mama. I haven’t finished my hot chocolate.”

“You have not touched your hot chocolate.”

“Then I should like to touch it,” Leonora said, “before I do anything else.”

She stood up, scooped the parcel under her arm, and walked out of the breakfast room with as much dignity as a woman could manage under her family’s watchful eyes.

She closed the door to her bedchamber and hurried to the bed. She put the parcel on it and stood there for a moment, looking at it.

Then she untied the ribbon.

On top, folded in tissue, was the gauze gown she had stood in at the modiste’s with her hair hanging down her back while the Duke stared at her. Under it was another in ivory. Under that was one the color of claret, which she lifted out, let fall open, and immediately dropped.

There was a fourth. It was black, and it had almost nothing on it above the waist. She had certainly not seen it at the modiste’s, because she would have remembered dying on the spot.

She plopped down on the edge of the bed.

The card had seven words on it, in a hand that was upright and heavy, like that of a man who had been taught to write by somebody strict and had never once enjoyed it.