Page 64 of A Baby for the Duke

“That isn’t the pressing question.”

“How long?”

“Since about two,” Leonora replied. “She was crying, and I couldn’t think what else to⁠—”

Colin crossed the room and pressed the back of his hand against her forehead. She was burning.

“Right,” he said.

“I’m perfectly⁠—”

“Right.”

He bent and picked her up out of the chair.

There was a great deal of noise about it. She informed him that she could walk. She informed him that she had walked a good deal further than this yesterday, up a rope ladder, one-handed. She managed to add that a duchess of five days carried through her own corridors in front of the staff would be in the columns by Friday, before her head fell onto his shoulder, which rather made his argument for him.

“Mrs. Pike,” Colin called, on the landing. “Send Tom to Reading for Dr. Aylmer, and tell him to say it’s for the Duchess and the child both. Then bring up whatever you’d give a person who has been sitting in a draft since two o’clock in the morning.”

“Broth.”

“Broth. And bring the cot into the blue room.”

“Both of them in the same room, Your Grace?”

“She will get out of her bed and go sit with the child within the hour,” Colin said, “and I would rather not spend my day carrying my wife back and forth across a landing.”

“Ah,” Mrs. Pike murmured, “you’re learning.” Then she took off down the stairs at a speed her hip had not permitted in years.

The doctor came at eleven and was not much use, which Colin had expected.

He was a decent man with a bad wig and twenty miles of road on him. He listened to the baby’s chest for a long time and then to Leonora’s, and asked how long, how hot, and whether either of them had been in wet clothes.

“Both of them,” Colin replied. “Tuesday. My fault.”

“Your Grace⁠—”

“It was my fault. Say the rest of it.”

“There is no rest of it,” Dr. Aylmer said, packing his bag. “Children catch colds. Grown women catch colds. This one has gone at them both hard because they have been passing it back and forth between them like a plate, and the child is small, and the mother, if you’ll forgive me, has clearly not slept since it started.”

“She isn’t the mother.”

Dr. Aylmer paused with his hand on the clasp.

“Your Grace,” he said, “I have been in that room for forty minutes. I have watched her hold that child’s head while I listened to its chest, and I have watched her lie to me about how long she has been sitting up with it, and I have delivered four hundred children in this county and I know what I am looking at. You may call her what you like on the parish register. I shall go on calling her what I saw.”

Colin did not answer.

“Now. Keep them warm and keep them fed, and send for me tonight if the breathing changes in either of them. And before you ask me what I shall do when I come: very little. I shall listen, and I shall tell you whether it has gone to the chest, and that is a thing worth knowing at two in the morning, because if it has we act and if it has not you go to bed. That is what you are paying me for. Not medicine. An answer.”

It was a cold, and a bad one, and the child was small. Colin paid him three guineas and saw him to the door with genuine courtesy, because the man had ridden for twenty miles.

Then he went back upstairs and shut the door and gave his entire day to it.

He had not looked after anybody since he was fifteen. He discovered, over the course of that Wednesday, that he had forgotten less of it than he expected. He got Katherine to take water off a spoon by being, once again and to his lasting shame, a captain with an enormous hat. He got broth into his wife by simply sitting on the edge of the bed with the bowl and refusing to discuss anything else until it was empty.

“This is undignified.”