Page 25 of A Baby for the Duke

They came to the gallery last. It ran the whole north side, and the curtains were drawn. At the far end of it, propped against the wall where it had been since the funeral, was a canvas eleven feet wide under a black Holland cover.

Colin stopped in the doorway.

“That room as well?” Mrs. Pike asked.

“Curtains open. Floors polished.” He turned away. “Leave the cover where it is.”

“Your Grace.”

“Leave it.”

She let him get four steps down the corridor. “And if Her Grace asks what’s beneath it?”

Colin did not turn round.

“Then she’ll be the first person in six years to ask,” he said. “But it doesn’t mean she’ll receive an answer.”

CHAPTER 9

“Hold still.”

“I am holding still.”

“You are vibrating,” Marina said around three pins. “Emily, isn’t she vibrating?”

“She is.”

“I am getting married in an hour,” Leonora reminded them, “in a chapel, in front of my entire family and a great many people who read newspapers, to a man I have spoken to on four occasions, one of which involved my wrist. I believe I am permitted to vibrate.”

“Nobody said you weren’t permitted,” Emily said comfortably from the window seat. “We only need you to do it in a fixed position.”

There were five of them in the room, and it was much too small. Marina was at the hem. Emily had taken possession of the best chair and had her feet tucked under her, married dignity having lasted her the better part of a year. Sybella was at the dressing table with the flowers, sorting them by stem length, because Sybella sorted things when she was worried and had never once admitted to being worried in her life. Ellen was doing Leonora’s hair. And Lady Huntington was everywhere at once.

The gown was ivory silk with a little silver at the hem. It had been made in six days by four women working in shifts, and it was the loveliest thing Leonora had ever put on her body.

She had also not laid eyes on the man who had sent it for five days.

He had sent four nightgowns and a card with seven words on it, and then he had vanished as thoroughly as if the ground had swallowed him. No call. No note. Nothing on Thursday, when her mother had spent the entire afternoon arranging herself in the drawing room just in case.

Leonora had told herself on Sunday that he was a man with a great deal to arrange, and on Monday that he was not a man who wrote well. By Wednesday, she had stopped making up excuses on his behalf and started being angry, which was at least more comfortable.

“You look like the frontispiece of something,” Emily remarked.

“That’s not a compliment.”

“It is entirely a compliment, and you know it. You’ve read books that have frontispieces more than any of us.”

“Sybella reads more than I do.”

“I read about volcanoes,” Sybella piped up, without looking up. “It isn’t the same, and it isn’t as much fun, but I have been telling myself otherwise for four years.”

“Out,” Lady Huntington suddenly said. “All of you. Out.”

“Mama.”

“Out, out.” She was making shooing motions with both hands and turning pink. “I must speak to my daughter, and I cannot do it with three young women in the room and one of them a duchess.”

Emily went out grinning. Marina walked out backward, making a face. Sybella put the last flower down, squeezed Leonora’s shoulder once as she passed—which from her was a full embrace—and shut the door behind her.