Page 58 of A Baby for the Duke

It took Colin four minutes to understand the game and another six to understand that he was going to lose it.

The rules, so far as he could reconstruct them, were the following:

You strike your own ball toward the hoops. If your ball touches another player’s ball, you take possession of that ball and carry it, and the winner is the player holding the most balls at the end.

Apparently, there was also no condition on how a ball might touch another ball. Alexander achieved it three times in the first ten minutes with a face of complete innocence. Marina achieved it by running. Augusta, who was not playing, achieved it once from the judges’ chairs and was warned.

“That is not pall-mall,” Colin protested.

“It is the Belmont version,” Evan said, taking his ball.

“It has no rules.”

“It has one rule, and you have just had it explained to you twice.”

Colin looked at the lawn. Then he looked at all of them, the shrieking, the Marchioness calling out scores she could not possibly have kept, the Marquess in his shirtsleeves arguing with his youngest daughter about a boundary, the baby being handed from lap to lap.

“Very well,” he said, and took his coat off.

He was, it turned out, extremely good at it.

He had spent fifteen years alone with a set of tools, so he could judge an angle across forty feet of uneven ground. By the third quarter of an hour, he had taken two balls off Alexander, one off Marina, and, in a stroke that elicited genuine outrage from three directions at once, Evan’s.

“That was a foul!”

“On what grounds?”

“On the grounds that you did it on purpose.”

“Doing it on purpose is the rule,” Colin pointed out. “You explained it to me. Twice.”

Alexander laughed so hard that he had to sit down on the grass.

The Marquess chose that moment to approach Colin with two glasses of something and the expression of a man who had been waiting all afternoon.

“You’ll take a glass.”

“I will.”

“Good.” The Marquess handed it over and drank half of his own. “Now, Your Grace, do you know what a fulling mill is?”

“I do.”

“Do you really, or do you only know the word?”

“I know that it is where the cloth is beaten and shrunk after weaving, that it needs a great deal of water and used to need a great deal of urine, and that you must have gone from one to twelve of them in about fifteen years.” Colin drank. “I read your evidence to the committee three years ago. It was the only sensible thing in four hundred pages.”

The Marquess stared at him. “Nobody read that.”

“I read it.”

“Nobody in the Lords read it. I have sat with men who own half of Lancashire and have never in their lives seen a loom, and they will tell you across the mutton that the laboring man is idle.” His voice rose. “Idle. I was fourteen. I did fourteen hours and thought myself fortunate, and a man whose grandfather stole an abbey tells me⁠—”

“James, I’ve been meaning to tell you⁠—”

The Marchioness had her husband by the elbow and away across the lawn before he could speak again.

Colin watched them go and understood that he had just seen a maneuver performed a thousand times.