Page 82 of A Baby for the Duke

Leonora laughed, which was almost worse.

“Your Grace.”

They sprang apart.

There was a woman standing about six feet away in the half dark, in a well-made gray gown, with her hands folded in front of her. She was perhaps five-and-twenty. Leonora had never seen her before.

“Forgive me,” the woman said. “I did not know how else to do it.”

“Do what, ma’am?”

“Thank you.”

Leonora frowned at her. “I am afraid you have the advantage of me. I don’t believe we have been introduced.”

“No.” The woman’s hands curled. “No, we have not.” Then, without warning, she stepped forward and said close to Leonora’s ear, “I could not have chosen a better mother for her.”

The air went still.

Leonora heard the orchestra tuning somewhere behind the wall, the crush of voices at the lit end, and Marina’s voice saying her name, but none of it seemed to be happening in the same building.

“Not even the woman who bore her?” she croaked.

The stranger’s eyes filled but did not spill. That was the part Leonora would not forget afterward: that the woman had had a great deal of practice at not letting her tears spill over.

“Is she well?” the woman asked. “I ask nothing else, only that.”

“She has cut a tooth,” Leonora heard herself say. “She has learned to get up on her hands and knees this week, but she cannot do anything with it yet, which makes her furious. She will not eat unless somebody sings to her. She is afraid of nobody in that house except the cat, and the cat adores her.” Her throat closed up. “She laughed for the first time nine days ago. At her father. He was pretending to be a sea captain.”

The woman put her hand over her mouth.

“You could come, ma’am,” Leonora offered. “You could come and see her. I would gladly arrange it. Nobody in the world needs to know⁠—”

“No.”

“There is a house at the edge of the park. We could⁠—”

“No.” It came out fast and final. “Forgive me. No. I have done it once. I stood on that doorstep for an hour before I put her down, and I have not slept a whole night since. If I see her, I would take her back, and I have nothing to take her back to.”

At the lit end of the corridor, a man’s voice called, “Agnes.”

Leonora looked past her.

The man was standing under the last lamp with his hat in his hand. He was sixty if he was a day, and he was not looking at either of them. He had the settled impatience of a man who had been waiting a great while and expected to wait a little longer and would mention it later in the carriage.

The woman in gray looked back at him.

“He has asked me,” she said. “He does not know, but he is not unkind.” She straightened her gloves. “Nobody knows. My husband was two years dying and I nursed him and saw nobody, and when he was buried I went into the country to grieve, which is what a widow does, and I stayed eleven months, which is a long grief and not a strange one. There was one woman in Shropshire who knew, and she was paid, and she is fond of the child, and she has never written to a soul.”

“And I could not be married to a man who did not know if she were in the house. Don’t you see? She would be in every room. He would look at her one day and count, and then she would pay for it for the rest of her life.”

“You have thought about this a great deal,” Leonora noted.

“I have thought about nothing else since before she was born.” Agnes’s voice did not rise at all. “I thought about it every day I was in Shropshire waiting for her. I thought about it while I was carrying her and while I had her, and I have thought about it every day since I left her on the Duke’s doorstep. There is not one scenario I have not considered. If I keep her, she is a bastard and I am the woman who made her one, and we are both finished. If I put her at a foundling hospital, she is dead within the year. You may believe that or not as you like, but I made inquiries.” She said it exactly as a woman read out a household account. “If I give her to the man whose brother fathered her, she is a duke’s daughter.”

“That is a terrible arithmetic.”

“It is the only one there is for women like me. Men do this and go to Italy. We do it and go to Shropshire.” She stepped back. “Your Grace, if she ever asks, you may tell her whatever you find kindest. I would rather she thought I was dead than believe that I did not want her, but I leave it up to you. I shall never trouble you again.”