Page 92 of A Baby for the Duke

“Your fingers are digging into bones, Duchess. Now, I have no objection whatsoever, but I am telling you so that you know I have noticed.”

She loosened her grip by a fraction.

“They are looking at me.”

“They have been looking at you since the opera. This is the first time you have been in a room where they are permitted to come up and say so.” He steered her to the left, off the main sweep, and along the wall. “Breathe. I shall stand here and be extremely forbidding, and nobody will come within ten feet of you.”

“That is not what I want.”

“No?”

“No.” Leonora lifted her chin and released his sleeve. “I have hidden behind furniture for four Seasons, Your Grace, and I have just discovered that I am tired of it. I should like to make the rounds. Will you come?”

Colin looked at her. “Yes.”

And so they walked the length of the crowded room together.

Nine people spoke to them, and old Lady Cottesloe said that she had always maintained the Duke was much misunderstood, to which Leonora responded, “Have you indeed, ma’am?” in a voice of such perfect sweetness that Colin had to look at a picture.

“That was unkind,” he chided softly, when the old woman had gone.

“It was extremely unkind. I have been saving it since May.”

“She wrote to your mother about you.”

“She wrote to my mother in May to say that she could not receive me. My mother cried in the stillroom where she thought nobody could hear her, and she has never cried about anything in her life except her wedding and a dog.” Leonora plucked a glass off a passing tray with great composure. “So yes, that was unkind. I intend to be unkind to nine more people this afternoon, and then I shall be finished forever, and you may hold my glass.”

“I shall hold your glass,” Colin said, “and I should like it noted that I have never enjoyed anything so much in my life.”

They went around the rooms.

It was, Leonora had to admit, a remarkable collection for a man who had died owing money. There were Dutch things, brown and small and full of weather. There was a great deal of Italy. There was an entire wall of portraits of the Ferrand family, four generations of them, hung so close that they touched. She stood in front of it for a while, not saying a word. Beside her, her husband did the same.

“Sir Hugo’s grandchildren are selling those,” Colin said at last.

“I know.”

“Somebody will buy the lot for the frames.”

“I know that too,” Leonora sighed, and moved on.

The private gallery was upstairs and was shown in parties of eight. They went up at two with a Mr. Gedge of the auction house, who had the manner of a man conducting a funeral he had arranged himself.

It was a long room at the back of the house with northern light, and it held the pictures Sir Hugo had not hung. It was better than everything downstairs put together.

“He kept these for himself,” Colin noted.

“How can you tell?”

“Because there is nothing here a visitor would recognize and nothing at all he could have boasted of.” He had stopped in front of a small dark study of a hare. “That is a superb thing, and no man alive has heard of the painter. He put it in a back room where only he could see it. He liked pictures. It is remarkable how few collectors do.”

Behind them, a man in the doorway said, “Thorton? Good God. Is that Thorton?” and Colin’s whole back changed, and Mr. Gedge, who had plainly spent thirty years watching people want to leave rooms, said smoothly that the drainage of the Berkshire clays was a subject his lordship had strong opinions about, and had them out on the landing inside a minute.

Leonora was left alone at the top of a long room with north light.

She crossed the length of it slowly.

At the far end, over a shrouded table, hung four feet of a garden in June. There was nothing clever about it. There were no gods in it, no ruins, nobody’s ancestors. Only a walled garden with the light coming in low, fruit trees, and a gate standing open at the end of a path. It was so full of green that it seemed to be making noise. Somebody had set a straw hat down on the grass and gone away, and was plainly coming back.