Page 47 of A Baby for the Duke

So he had come out here instead, on Saturday at four o’clock, and again on Sunday, and again this morning, to the one room in England where nobody could follow him.

Which meant he had spent the third morning of his marriage exactly as he had spent the two before it: on a bench, thirty feet up, with a candle and a chisel, while a woman he had promised a week to sat downstairs in front of a place laid for a man who did not come.

I told her I’d give her a week to prepare. I have given her two mornings of an empty chair and a gallery I walked out of, and I came down twice on Sunday only because I could not make myself stay away, and she has given me a daughter who ate her breakfast.

The horse stood on the sill where he had left it, finished at last, and he could not look at it without thinking of who it was for and who had got her to eat.

Colin looked at it for a while and thought about going down.

He did not go down. He picked up the rasp and rubbed the last of the tool marks off the near hind hoof instead, which took the better part of an hour. By the end of it, he had made up four reasons why the morning was better spent up here.

Below him, the yew hedge rustled.

He put down the rasp.

The last time he counted, there were eleven servants in this house, and every one of them knew the rule. The rule had held for fifteen years through two deaths, a roof fire, and an assize summons.

“What,” he said to nobody, “is unclear about the words do not disturb me?”

He ducked out onto the platform and looked down.

His wife was four rungs up on the rope ladder. She was wearing a dress the color of butter that had no business within forty feet of a tree, and she had a bundle of correspondence clamped in her right hand, which meant she was climbing a rope ladder one-handed, which meant she was climbing it badly.

“That’s dangerous,” Colin cautioned.

“I’ll manage.”

“You have one hand.”

“I’m aware of the number of hands I have, thank you.” She climbed another rung, listing sideways. “Mrs. Pike says the second one is loose.”

“It is loose.”

“You could have mended it.”

“I could have.”

“Why haven’t you?”

Because when he was fifteen, he had gone up that ladder with a knife wound down his face and his brother screaming above him, and the second rung had held, and he had never since been able to put a hand on it without his whole body understanding exactly where he was.

He had a great many answers of that kind. He gave none of them.

“Climb down,” he ordered.

“No.”

“Duchess—”

“Here,” Leonora said, “let me just.” She threw the bundle of his correspondence at his face.

Colin caught it with both hands. Three invitations, a bill, and a letter on foreign paper, snatched out of the air a foot from his nose while thirty feet of nothing waited underneath her.

Leonora climbed up the rest of the rungs and hauled herself over the edge of the platform, pink and out of breath and entirely pleased with herself. She stood in his treehouse in her butter-colored dress, a leaf in her hair.

“See?” she said. “Easy.”

Colin discovered that he had no idea what to do with his face.