Page 72 of A Baby for the Duke

“I think I would like to lie down.” Her voice came out perfectly level, which she was proud of. “I feel as though the fever is coming back.”

It worked exactly as she had known it would. He was across the room before she had finished the sentence, with his hand at her elbow and his face changed entirely, steering her to the bed as though she were made of eggshell.

“Is it?” Colin asked, putting the back of his hand to her forehead.

“Yes,” Leonora said.

It was the first lie she had told him, and she lay there and let him send for barley water and put another log on and shut the curtains against the sun, and hated herself the entire time.

Marina arrived at three o’clock in a hired chaise, in her riding habit, having ridden as far as the posting inn and abandoned her horse there.

“I have four hours,” she said, coming up the stairs two at a time. “I have told Mama that you are contagious, that the doctor used the word miasma, and that she would very likely die of it, so she has gone to lie down with a cloth on her head and will be no trouble to anybody until Tuesday.”

“Marina.”

“I know. I’m going to hell. Where’s the baby?”

“Asleep. Mrs. Pike has her.”

“Where’s your husband?”

“I don’t know,” Leonora replied.

And then she sat down and cried until she could not breathe.

Marina did not say anything for a long time.

“Is he cruel to you?” she asked. “I have to ask it once. If I don’t ask it once, I shall lie awake all night.”

“No.”

“Nora.”

”No.” Leonora lifted her head. “He has never raised his voice at me but once, and I had earned it, and he was appalled at himself before the door closed. He carries me around like a parcel, and I loathe it. He does it because he thinks I’ll not sit down otherwise, and he is right. If he were cruel, I would have moved back to Huntington House, and you know it.”

“I do.”

“Then don’t ask again.”

“I shan’t.” Marina wiped her sister’s face with her thumb, which was something she had done since they were six. “Good. Now I can be furious with him properly, which I have been wanting to do all morning and have been keeping in, in case he turned out to be a monster after all, in which case I’d have had to be sensible, and I am extremely bad at that.”

She climbed up onto the bed and wrapped her arms round her sister, and Leonora let her.

“He’s been kind to me every day,” Leonora croaked into her shoulder. “That’s the worst of it. If he were cruel, I could hate him and go home. He carried me through the house. He washed my hair.”

“He did what?”

“It doesn’t matter.” She wiped her face with the heel of her hand. “He does everything a man in love does, and then he stands in front of the fire and tells me he can’t. And he means it, Marina. That’s what nobody understands. He isn’t playing with me. He genuinely believes there’s something in him that will come out one day and hurt us all, and he’s arranged his whole life around keeping us safe from a thing that has never happened.”

“And you’re in love with him.”

Leonora froze.

“Don’t,” she muttered. “Don’t say it. I have been very careful not to say it for a reason, and if you put it in words in this room, I shall have to look at it.”

“Nora.”

“I care for him. That is what I have allowed myself, and it is quite bad enough.” Her voice hitched. “Because the moment it is anything more than that, I shall want him to say it back, and he cannot. And then it stops being a marriage I can bear and becomes one I am waiting out.”