Page 26 of A Baby for the Duke

Lady Huntington sat down on the end of the bed. “Now…”

“Mama.”

“Now, Nora, this is a thing mothers must do. My mother did it for me in a back kitchen in Leeds with a rolling pin in her hand, and I have never gotten over it. I intend to do it properly.” She took a breath, turned a deeper pink, and said, “Tonight, your husband will come to your chamber.”

“Mama.”

“There is nothing in it to be frightened of. It is not what the maids say, and it is not what your novels say, and if a man is a decent⁠—”

“Mama.”

“I am speaking.”

“I know, and I love you,” Leonora said in a strangled voice from behind her hands. “But I cannot survive it. If you say one more word, I shall go down to the chapel the color of a beetroot, and that is what the newspapers will publish on Thursday.”

Lady Huntington stopped. Then she laughed, which was what she always did. She reached over and pulled Leonora’s hands down from her face, holding them.

“Very well,” she relented. “Only this, then, and then I’ll stop. He is not a comfortable man, that one. I saw it at his table, and I have thought about it every night since. But he read that column and rode twenty-two miles for you before he had eaten a mouthful, my girl, and an unkind man finishes his breakfast.”

Leonora looked at her mother’s hands round hers.

“Are your valises packed?” her mother asked.

“Yes.”

“Are they? Truthfully? Because Ellen said there was still one open on the⁠—”

“They’re packed,” Leonora insisted.

Her valises were packed. They had been packed since ten o’clock last night. The last thing she had put in, folded in its tissue at the very top where she could reach it without anybody seeing, had been a nightgown of black gauze.

She felt heat crawl up her neck.

Her mother, mercifully, decided to believe it was the wedding jitters.

“Then it’s time, sweetheart,” she said. “Let’s go.”

He was standing at the chapel door.

Leonora saw him the moment the carriage rounded the curve of the drive, before the step was even down, a black figure against the gray stone, standing perfectly still. He had not gone in. There were forty people inside the chapel, and her groom was standing outside it in the wind, watching the road.

Her father handed her down. Her mother straightened a seam at her shoulder that did not need straightening.

And then Leonora was walking, with her hand on her father’s arm and the grass wet beneath her slippers. She watched Colin watch her come. He did not move at all, and he did not look away once all the while. By the time she reached him, she could not have said a single word if the Crown had asked her for one.

“Lady Leonora,” he greeted.

He took her gloved hand and bowed over it. He pressed a kiss to the back of it, which he had not done at Thorton, and she felt it through the kid leather.

“You’re beautiful,” he said, as though he were reporting the state of a road, then turned and walked her inside.

She remembered the chapel afterward in pieces.

She remembered that it was full of people, Belmonts on one side in a great warm untidy crowd and a dozen of his tenants on the other, and Mrs. Pike in the second row in black bombazine with the baby on her lap in a white gown. She remembered Augusta craning her neck. She remembered her father’s hand shaking when he gave her away, how furious he was about it, and how he glared at the altar rail for a full minute afterward. She remembered the cold ring sliding on her finger.

And she remembered Colin’s voice saying I will without any hesitation whatsoever, as though somebody had asked him whether the tide came in.

“I now pronounce you husband and wife.”