Page 84 of A Baby for the Duke

“Then she is braver than I am,” he declared. “Which I did not expect to say tonight.”

“What will you do?”

“Nothing.”

“Colin”

“There is nothing to do.” He said it without any coldness, which was worse. “You have given me her Christian name and a village in Shropshire, and that is precisely enough to find her and not nearly enough to be careful with her. If I write to Shropshire, somebody opens the letter. If I send a man, he asks in an alehouse. A duke making inquiries about a widow is not a normal thing, and she has a wedding in front of her and a husband of sixty who does not know.” He turned the hat over. “I could ruin that woman by Michaelmas simply by wanting to be generous to her.”

Leonora sat with that.

“There is one thing,” she spoke up.

“Go on.”

“Katherine is not in the marriage contract,” Leonora said. “She cannot be. That paper covers the children of this marriage and she is not one of them, which means every penny she will ever have has to be put there by you, on purpose, in a separate instrument.”

“It is drawn already. Fenwick had it in March, before I had ever heard your name.”

“Then let there be a second sum,” Leonora suggested. “Small. Paid through a solicitor in a town she has no connection to, to a woman he need never name to anybody, arriving twice a year without a letter. Nobody would have to know where it came from. Only she would know.”

Colin was silent for a moment.

“You have thought about that since the interval.”

“I have thought about nothing else since the interval.”

“It can be done.” He turned the hat over. “It will be done on Monday. And it will not be small.”

“Colin.”

“What did she ask you for?”

“Nothing. That is the extraordinary part. She asked me for nothing at all. She asked whether Katherine was well, and I told her about the tooth, and the crawling, and that she will not eat unless somebody sings to her.” Leonora’s eyes had filled again, and she let them, because it was dark. “And I told her that she laughed at you first.”

She heard him breathe out.

“You should not have told her that.”

“Why?”

“Because it was mine,” Colin said. “I would have given it to her, and now I cannot.”

He turned his face to the window, and Leonora understood, with a small cold shock, that her husband was very close to weeping and had turned to the glass pane so she would not have to sit opposite it.

She did not reach for him. That was the hardest thing she had done in a fortnight. Her hands were in her lap; it would have taken nothing to reach across the eighteen inches between them. Instead, she sat on both of them, looked at the window, and counted milestones.

If I touch him now, he will remember what he thinks he is. He will put his hand over mine and be grateful, and then he will be somewhere else by Friday. I would rather have him weeping at a window than gone.

“She asked me to tell Katherine whatever I found kindest,” she said. “When she is grown. She said she would rather the child thought her dead than believed she was not wanted, and she left it to me, to a woman she had never spoken to before tonight.”

“And what will you tell her?”

“The truth. When she is old enough to bear it.” Leonora wiped her face. “That she was loved by three people before she could speak, that one of them gave her up in the dark because it was the only way to keep her, and that it cost her everything and she has never once stopped paying for it.”

The carriage rumbled on for a long while.

“Leonora.”