Page 41 of A Baby for the Duke

Women. Several of them. Laughing at once.

He put the chisel down.

A carriage. There has been a carriage on that drive, and I did not hear it because I have been up here since six, and my wife has not sent word because my wife does not send word to this tree.

He gave it a quarter of an hour with great determination, and got precisely nothing done. At the end, he climbed down the ladder.

The hall was worse than the lawn. There were four bonnets on the side table, along with a pair of very small gloves. Somewhere on the stairs above his head, a young voice was demanding to know whether there were secret passages, followed by Bess’s firm voice stating that there were not.

The green baize door swung, and Mrs. Pike came up out of the kitchen passage with a tray she had no business carrying.

“Your Grace,” she said.

“Give me that.”

“I will not.”

“Mrs. Pike.”

“They’re in the drawing room; they’ve been there for an hour. That is the young one on the stairs and she has been told twice. Her Grace did not send for you because she has got it into her head that you’d rather be left alone.” Mrs. Pike looked at him over the tray. “Which you would.”

“Which I would.”

“Well, there it is, then.” And she went past him and through the drawing room door with her shoulder.

Colin stood in his own hall, with his coat off and sawdust on his arms, and realized that he had two options. He could go up the back stairs and change, come down in twenty minutes, and be introduced properly to four women who had ridden twenty-two miles to look at the man in the newspapers. Or he could go in.

He went in.

The furniture had been pushed back.

That was the first thing he noticed, and it did something to him he was not prepared for. Because the last time the furniture in that room had been pushed back, his mother had been alive to order it.

There were four women on the floor and on the sofa in various states of disarray, and there was a twelve-year-old lying full length on the hearthrug with her chin in her hands. In the middle of the carpet, holding court like a very small magistrate, was Katherine.

Every face turned toward him.

Colin had spent fifteen years watching what happened to faces when they turned toward him. He was used to the shock, the glances at his eyepatch, the enormous effort of not looking, the bright voices coming a second too late.

The bespectacled, red-haired lady gave him a look of pure undisguised interest, which was new. His wife’s twin nodded to him like a man at a horse fair. The twelve-year-old on the hearthrug stared at him with her entire soul and asked, “Are you my brother now?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Nora says you can’t play pall-mall.”

“Nora is correct. I am told there are no rules.”

“There are loads of rules,” Augusta gasped, scandalized. “There are seven rules.”

“Name one.”

“You may not use a mallet on a person.”

“That is a rule about a person, not a rule about pall-mall.”

“It became a rule about pall-mall,” Augusta said darkly, “in the summer I was eight.”

“I shall want them in writing.”