Page 42 of A Baby for the Duke

“I shall write them down for you,” she declared, entirely delighted, and went off to find paper as though a duke had asked her to draft a treaty.

Then the small dark head in the middle of the carpet turned round.

Colin stopped breathing. He knew this part. He had done it every day for a fortnight, and he knew the sequence to the second: the stillness, the chin coming down, the eyes finding the black silk eyepatch and staying there, and then the cries. He had learned to get through the whole of it without moving, because moving made it worse.

Katherine went still. Her chin came down. Then she extended both hands toward him and made a sound like an outraged duck.

Nobody in the room said anything at all.

“She wants you,” said the fair-haired lady, who he was certain was the Duchess of Huxley.

“She does not.”

“Duke, I have three nephews, and I know that noise. She wants you, and she is furious about the delay.”

Colin crossed the carpet, which took too long, bent down, and picked up the baby.

He did it badly. He always did it badly. She came up crooked and hung there for a moment like a parcel. But then she curled her fist into his collar, rearranged herself against his shoulder with a great deal of purpose, put her cheek down, and glared at the assembled company as though daring any one of them to make a comment.

Not one of them spoke. The four ladies found four separate things to look at at the same moment.

Colin stood in the middle of the room with his niece breathing on his neck and understood that he had just been handled by experts.

He looked up. His wife was standing by the window with her hands folded in front of her, not looking at the baby. Rather, she was looking at him, her expression unreadable.

Colin immediately looked down at the carpet.

“You’ll stay for dinner,” he said.

“Your Grace⁠—”

“My cook trained in Bath under a Frenchman and does a turbot that your friend can vouch for, since she ate one at this table on Thursday.” He shifted the child to the other arm. “She has also been sending up the same eleven dishes in rotation for six years, because nobody in this house has ever once told her to do anything else. My wife has discovered it. My wife has done something about it, and I am told there is to be another turbot on Thursday, and nobody has consulted me about any of it.”

There was a silence of a very particular quality.

“We would be delighted,” the Duchess of Huxley said.

Colin nodded, put Katherine back down on the carpet, and stepped out. He got as far as the corridor before he heard the noise start up again behind the door.

He stood there for a moment with his hand flat against the wall.

That is what this house sounds like with people in it. I had forgotten. I was nine when I last heard it, and I had entirely forgotten.

Leonora had gotten the tour out of the way before he came down, which was as well, because Emily asked twice as many questions as she could answer.

“How many bedchambers?”

“I don’t know.”

“Nora.”

“Twenty-two, Mrs. Pike says, and eleven of them have not been opened since the old Duke died. I have decided not to think about it until Michaelmas.”

Emily gasped as they stepped into the ballroom. She walked to the middle of four hundred square yards of shrouded floor and turned around twice with her head tipped back, looking up at the painted clouds.

“Nora. Nora. You could put four hundred people in here.”

“I could put four hundred people in here, and every one of them would come to look at my husband’s face and not speak to him. So, no, thank you.”