Page 49 of A Baby for the Duke

“There were more.”

“There were seven,” Leonora said, keeping her eyes on the wall. “I refused three of them this morning, in my own hand, over your name.”

He turned his head to her. “You refused invitations on my behalf?” “Lady Ashwood’s ball, the Bellinghams’ ball, and a small dance at the Cottesloes’ which would have had three hundred people in it. I thought you’d rather be shot.”

“You thought correctly. Why?”

“Because I have watched you cross your own hall to avoid two maids and a footman. And because a ballroom means four hours of being looked at by people who have already decided what they think, and I could not find one good reason to make you stand in one so that the ton could congratulate itself on its tolerance.” She turned to him. “Was I wrong?”

Colin was looking at her with an expression she had not seen before and could not name.

“No,” he uttered.

“Good. So I brought you these three. The opera on Thursday week, the Thornbury races, and an auction at the end of the month. All of them are places where we can be seen together for two hours and leave, and all of them have the great advantage that everybody’s attention is meant to be pointed at something else.”

“You’ve thought about this.”

“I have thought about very little else since Saturday,” Leonora said, “which you would have known if you had been at the table in the morning.”

He let that stand.

“We’ll go to all three,” he decided. “They must see us together, and soon, or people will start gossiping again.”

“Then that’s settled.”

There was a bill from the corn chandler, which he set aside without reading. And under it, the letter.

He turned it over twice without opening it. Then he broke the seal and read it in silence.

Leonora watched the light flicker along the floorboards and did not look at the page, which was the hardest thing she had done all day.

“He isn’t coming back,” Colin murmured.

“Ever?”

“He says he thinks not. He says he’s bought a house outside Florence and that a friend of his has an interest in a vineyard and that he intends to be useful, which in my brother’s vocabulary is a word of very broad application.” He turned the page over. “He says he knows what was left on my doorstep. He says he’s known since November.”

Leonora put her hand over her mouth.

“He says, I can’t care for a wife and child, Brother. That’s not who I am. I’ll stay in Italy. I’m sorry.”

The tree creaked somewhere above them.

Colin folded the letter along its creases and tucked it inside his coat.

“You’re not angry with him,” Leonora said.

It was not a question, and he did not treat it as one.

“Do you ever get angry with your youngest sister?”

“Constantly. She pulls my hair and steals my dresses and reads my correspondence over my shoulder while pretending to look at the wallpaper.” She considered. “Last spring, she took my best gloves to a picnic and lost one in a river.”

Colin smiled.

Not the twitch at the corner of his mouth that came and went before anybody could put a name to it. But an actual smile, wide and unguarded and startlingly young. It went through Leonora like the first swallow of hot wine on a cold night. Alas, it vanished in about two seconds. She would have paid a hefty sum to see it again.

“He’s twenty-one,” Colin said. “Our mother died birthing him. He has never once in his life been told no, which is my fault entirely.”