Page 34 of A Baby for the Duke

That is not control. That is the opposite of control. That is a rope in somebody else’s hand.

The pacing next door stopped. Colin stood very still and found himself listening for it to start again. When it did not, he somehow felt worse.

Then he heard the bed take her weight, the small ordinary sound of a woman turning over, and after a while nothing more.

The last carriage went down the drive at a quarter past one. He heard it from his own window, and gave it another half hour, and then went down through his house in his shirt with a candle in his hand, past a gallery that had been swept and shuttered and was quite dark again.

He got as far as the hall and stopped, because there was a sliver of light where there ought not to have been one.

The drawing room. Somebody had left four candles burning in it, and the whole yellow square of it lay out across the flags like a spill.

He stood for a moment and looked at it.

Mrs. Pike would have said it was the maids. It was not the maids. Nobody had been in that room all day; the whole business had been held in the gallery, and this room had been shut up since the morning. Somebody had come in here on the way to the stairs, on purpose, and lit four candles in an empty room and left them burning.

She lights up rooms. That is what she does. She has been in this house for half a day, and she has already started lighting it up.

He put them out, one by one, because a house could burn.

Then he went back up for his boots, and stepped out of the house, and crossed the lawn in the dark, and climbed thirty feet of rope ladder to a room built for a boy of fifteen, and sat in it until dawn broke.

CHAPTER 12

The baby got her first.

Leonora walked into the breakfast room at nine o’clock with a speech prepared, a short civil one, suitable for a husband, but there was no husband in the room to hear it. However, there was Mrs. Pike with a napkin over her shoulder, and Katherine in a padded chair with a bowl in front of her.

The moment she stepped inside, a streak of mashed pear flew through the air and caught Mrs. Pike on the cheek.

“Oh, you wicked thing.” Mrs. Pike laughed until she had to put the spoon down. Then she spotted Leonora and rose to her feet with the napkin still on her shoulder. “Your Grace. Forgive me. She has been at it since eight.”

“Sit down, please. Does she always do that?”

“Every morning, Your Grace. His Grace did the same thing at that age, only he threw it further.” She wiped her face with the napkin without any particular hurry. “When he was two, a nursemaid resigned over a bowl of coddled apple, and his mother laughed until she had to be helped out of the room.”

Leonora sat down. There was hot chocolate, toast, and a place at the head of the table with nothing on it.

“Where is my husband?”

“He’s at the treehouse, Your Grace.”

“At eight in the morning?”

“He has been there since last night. I saw the lamp come on.” Mrs. Pike’s smile had turned slightly crooked. “We don’t disturb him there. That’s the rule of the house. It’s been the rule since before I had this cane, and I’ll plainly say that nobody’s ever asked me to explain it.”

“Nobody informed me of the rule.”

“No, Your Grace.”

“I have been the mistress of this house since the words were said over me in that chapel, and I have been given the rule about the treehouse by the housekeeper over the toast, on the day after my wedding.”

Mrs. Pike said nothing to that, which in itself was an answer.

Leonora looked at the empty place at the head of the table for a moment longer than was dignified.

One week to prepare. One week. He said it as though he meant to spend it with me. And he has been up in a tree since last night.

“May I try?” she asked.