Page 28 of A Baby for the Duke

“Katherine’s asleep,” he said.

“Already?”

“She had a great deal of cake put in front of her by your mother, and she has been carried about by nine separate Belmonts. She has had an excellent day.” He turned his glass by the stem. “Are you tired?”

Leonora was so tired that the room had begun to hum.

“A little.”

“Then I expect you upstairs in ten minutes.”

Everything in her went still.

“I…” she stammered. “There are sixty people here.”

“Indeed.”

“I ought to say goodbye to them. My family. Your tenants. It would be very rude to⁠—”

“Ten minutes.” He stood up and set down his glass.

Leonora looked up at him, her mouth dry, and said the first thing that came to her mind. “What about you?”

Colin looked out over the length of the gallery, at sixty people eating his food in a house nobody had entered in six years.

“Not one of them is here for me, Duchess,” he said.

CHAPTER 10

The goodbyes took nineteen minutes, and Leonora counted every one of them.

Emily held her by both shoulders and said a bracing sentence that she did not hear.

Sybella said, “Send for me if you want a person who will not be sentimental about it,” and meant it, and Leonora nearly cried on the spot.

Augusta had to be detached from her skirts by Alexander, twice. Her mother wept, which was expected, and her father did not, which was worse. He stood at the foot of the stairs with his jaw set like a man watching a ship leave.

Marina came last. She put her mouth against Leonora’s ear.

“Tuesdays,” she said. “Whatever else happens in this house, you come home on Tuesdays, or I shall come and get you.”

“Marina.”

“Say it.”

“Tuesdays,” Leonora agreed.

Then a maid she had never seen before led her up a staircase she had walked past once, and the noise of the gallery fell away behind them. By the second landing, the house had gone entirely quiet.

The Duchess’s chamber was at the front, looking over the drive. Somebody had made an effort. There was a fire, candles—a great many more than she had seen anywhere else in the house—and a bowl of apple blossom on the table by the window that had certainly come from a Huntington hedge, which meant that her mother had put it in the carriage.

Her valises stood at the foot of the bed. And in the wall to the left of the fireplace, painted the same green as the rest of the room and fitted so neatly that she looked at it twice, was a door.

She looked at that door for a while.

“Shall I unpin you, Your Grace?”

She had forgotten the maid entirely.