Page 91 of A Baby for the Duke

CHAPTER 31

“You will wear the ivory and green,” Susan said on Thursday.

“I wore the ivory and green to the opera.”

“You did, Your Grace, and I have been thinking about it ever since. If you will forgive me, it is the only gown that made him pause on the stairs.”

Leonora turned round. “Susan.”

“I’ve said too much.”

“You have said exactly enough, and I should like you to go on saying it for the next thirty years.” She looked at the gown, then at the mirror, then at the gown again. “No. Not the ivory. The claret.”

“Your Grace, the claret is⁠—”

“The claret is the one my mother made me wear to the dinner that started all of this, and it shows a great deal more than a duchess ought to show at an auction of pictures,” Leonora cut in. “I am going to wear it, and I will not explain why to anybody in this house, including myself.”

She spent the two hours before they left on an exercise she had avoided for a fortnight, which was working out what she actually wanted.

It was harder than she had expected. She had gotten very good at wanting things on other people’s behalf. She wanted Katherine to have a father who came into rooms. She wanted Mrs. Pike to see it before she died. She wanted Beddoes to have a dry field and Mrs. Rowe to be asked for a turbot twice a year and Peg to stop dusting the hall table at half past ten.

And beneath all of that, small and mortifying and entirely her own, she wanted to be looked at by her husband in a public room, wanted everybody in it to see him do it, and wanted him to know that she saw.

She was aware that this was vanity. She had been raised by a woman who would have called it vanity and then done exactly the same.

Very well then, I shall be vain for one afternoon, and afterward I shall be sensible for the rest of my life, and nobody but me need ever know.

She was ready an hour too early, which was what came of choosing a gown out of spite, and spent that hour at the nursery window with Katherine on her knee, looking down the long field at a ditch that had been running clear since Tuesday.

“That is your father’s,” she murmured. “He dug it because I wrote him a note. That is very nearly a romance, sweetling, and you must not tell anybody I said so.”

Katherine put a fist in her mouth.

“No. Quite right. It is not a romance at all. It is a ditch.” Leonora rested her chin on her small soft head. “But I shall tell you something, since you cannot repeat it. When I was your age, nobody had ever dug me anything. Now I am one-and-twenty, and it turns out that it is the only present I have ever wanted.”

She went down at eleven.

Colin was standing in the hall with his hat in his hand, exactly as he had been on the night of the opera. He looked up, and this time, his face did not close. It stayed open for a good deal longer than two seconds.

Leonora came down the last four steps watching a man forget to compose himself, and thought with a savagery that surprised her:

Good. Look at it. Look at what you have decided to be good about.

“Ready?” she asked.

Colin cleared his throat. “Yes,” he said, and did not utter another word all the way to the carriage.

Sir Hugo Ferrand’s pictures had been forty years in the collecting and were being sold because Sir Hugo had died in March owing a great deal of money to a great many people, which nobody said out loud at any point in the afternoon.

The house was in Berkeley Square, and it was full.

Leonora had been in crowded rooms all her adult life and had spent every one of them working out where the potted palms were. She got out of the carriage on her husband’s arm, walked up a flight of stairs in her claret gown, and understood at the top of them that she would not be able to find a corner in this house, because the room turned around.

Not all of it. A quarter of it, perhaps. In a ripple, the way a field turned when a hare skipped across it.

“Steady,” Colin murmured.

“I am perfectly⁠—”