Page 23 of A Baby for the Duke

You should not feel shy in them.

Her first feeling was not the one she had expected.

Her mother had said no to the claret gown. Leonora had heard her say it across the shop, in the voice she used for negotiating prices. And the Duke had stood at that counter and overruled her in front of a modiste and two assistants, had demanded the bill be sent to his estate, and had not asked one single person in that room whether it was welcome, least of all the woman it was for.

He does that. He decides, and then he tells you afterward. He is usually right, and that is the worst part of it.

Leonora put her hands over her face and stayed like that for some time.

She would have to be in a church with him on Friday, and then she would have to be in a house with him. He had stood in the modiste’s shop and looked at her through six inches of gauze, then had gone home and thought about it long enough to have a black one made.

He is doing it on purpose. He is doing it entirely on purpose, and he knows I know it, and that is the whole of the⁠—

The door banged open.

“Nora, Mama says that you are ill. Are you? Because if you’re ill, I’m to fetch⁠—”

Leonora threw the counterpane over the bed in one movement that she would have thought impossible.

Augusta stopped in the doorway with her hand still on the knob and looked at the bed, which now had a great deal of counterpane on it, arranged with the artistry of a woman throwing a coat over a fire.

“What’s that?”

“Nothing.”

“It’s something.”

“It is a wedding matter,” Leonora said, with enormous dignity. “And you are twelve.”

“I am nearly thirteen. Plus, everybody keeps saying that in this house. Nobody will tell me anything. I have been very good, and I have not listened at a single door since Thursday.” Augusta advanced two steps. “Is it a nightgown?”

“Augusta Belmont.”

“Ellen says brides get nightgowns.”

“Come here,” Leonora said.

“Why?”

“Come here.”

Augusta, who was not a stupid child, took one look at her sister’s face and ran. She reached the washstand before Leonora caught her around the ribs. Her shrieks could be heard on the stairs and probably in the mews.

She was released after a while, red and gasping and entirely satisfied, and bolted out of the room to tell their mother that Nora was not ill in the slightest.

Leonora shut the door and leaned back against it. Then she lifted the counterpane and looked at the black gown for a while longer.

Colin ruined the hind leg on Monday morning.

He had been working on it for the better part of an hour, and it had been very nearly right. Then his hand slipped past where it should have stopped and took out too much at the hock. Now the horse had one leg thinner than the other three, and it would not stand square on the nursery floor.

He sat looking at it.

He had cut that shape correctly perhaps a hundred times in his life. He had made a cane for a woman with a bad hip and got the spiral of the grip right by eye. He had built the ladder he climbed up every morning and the bench he was sitting on, and he was not a man whose hands erred.

Bruton Street…

Colin put down the gouge and pressed the heels of both palms into his eyes, and then remembered, as he always did about half a second too late, that he had only one eye to press.