Page 86 of A Baby for the Duke

“If I went down, they would not be so happy.”

Mrs. Pike was quiet for so long that he turned around.

She had set the tray down on the window seat at some point without his hearing it, and she was standing in the middle of the gallery with her hands empty at her sides, and she was crying. He had only seen her cry twice in thirty years, and both of those times there had been a coffin in the house.

“Mrs. Pike.”

“That is the stupidest thing I have ever heard a man say, and I nursed your father.”

“Don’t.”

“I shall say it, and then I shall go, and you may ring if you want anything.” Her chin wobbled. “That child laughed for the first time at you. Not at her. At you, in a drawing room, with a spoon in your mouth. I was in the passage with the linen and I heard it through a closed door, and I stood there and cried like a fool, and I have carried it around with me ever since, and it has been the great comfort of my old age. Now, you are standing at the window, telling me that the two of them do better without you in the room.”

“They do.”

“They are waiting for you,” Mrs. Pike stressed. “Both of them. One of them is too young to know it, and the other is too proud to say it. And one day soon, they will stop.”

She went out.

Colin stood at the gallery window in the long light, with sixty Walford ancestors at his back and a canvas eleven feet wide under a black Holland cover behind him, and watched his wife carry his niece into the house.

CHAPTER 29

The Thornbury races were held on a Saturday in a field with a river at the bottom of it, and every Belmont in England came.

“You will not enjoy the first hour of it,” Leonora said in the carriage. It was the first sentence she had aimed directly at him in two days. “I want that understood before we arrive. I chose the races because they are two hours out of doors and everybody’s eyes are meant to be pointed at a horse, and I stand by every word of that. What I did not sufficiently consider is that my entire family will be there. There will be a very great deal of shouting. My father will lose money, and my mother will pretend he has not. Augusta will be sick from the pastry stall, which happens every year and which nobody prevents because it has become a tradition.”

“You are trying to scare me.”

“I am trying to prepare you. Last year, Alexander was carried the length of the field by a horse he had backed and did not own.”

“Why?”

“Nobody has ever established that.”

“And what does one wear?”

“Anything. It is a field. My father wears the same coat he has worn since I was nine. My mother has spent a decade attempting to lose it. Last year, she gave it to a man in the village, and my father bought it back for six shillings and has never mentioned the matter since.”

“I have that coat,” Colin revealed.

“You have what?”

“I have a coat like that. I’ve had it for fourteen years. My valet left over it five years ago.” He looked out the window. “It is in a press at Thornton, and I did not bring it because I assumed it would be an embarrassment to you.”

Leonora sat forward. “Turn the carriage around.”

“Duchess.”

“Turn the carriage around. We have twenty minutes. My father will talk to you for the entire afternoon and you will never once have to find a subject.”

“You are not serious.”

“I have never been more serious in my life.”

But Leonora was laughing.

It was the first time she had laughed at him in a fortnight, and he sat and looked at her for a moment as though somebody had opened a window.