Page 97 of A Baby for the Duke

He stopped instantly. He always stopped instantly. It was, she thought wildly, going to be the end of her.

“No,” she said again. “Not like this. Not because I have made you feel something in a drawing room with a picture. It isn’t fair to you, Colin, and it isn’t fair to me.” Her voice broke. “We want different things. You have told me so plainly, and I believe you. I will not take a kiss from a man who is grateful and call it a marriage. Nobody should have to settle. Not you. Not me.”

“That is not what this is.”

“Then tell me what it is.” Her hands had begun to shake, so she folded them behind her back. “Say one sentence, Colin. It does not have to be a promise. It does not have to be love. I am not asking you for the thing you told me you cannot give. Say one true sentence about what you want, and I shall stand here all night for it.”

She waited.

She waited longer than she had ever waited for anything, in a room full of candles, with four feet of June behind him, and she watched her husband open his mouth and find no words.

“That’s what I thought,” she sighed.

She rose on her tiptoes and kissed his cheek. She did it slowly, exactly as he had done it to her at the altar in front of forty people. She felt him go absolutely still, before stepping back, picking up her candle, and making for the door.

“Goodnight, husband,” she said. “It’s a beautiful painting. I hope you hang it.”

She pushed the door to the blue room shut. Then she sat down on the floor with her back against it, which no duchess did, put her forehead on her knees, and stayed there for a long while in the dark without making much noise about it.

He could not do it. I gave him every possible way out. I told him it needn’t be a promise or love, and he could not find one sentence. He is the most honest man I have ever met, which means there was nothing there to find. Or there was, and he has decided I am safer without it. And I do not know which.

That is my marriage in a nutshell. I shall be sixty and still not know which.

Down the corridor, on the other side of two inches of oak, she heard her husband’s door and then nothing for what felt like an hour. Then his boots retreated along the corridor and down the stairs.

Leonora sat on the floor and listened to him step out into the garden in the dark.

Go on, then. Hide in your treehouse.

She did not sleep until four.

At eight o’clock, she got up, put on a traveling dress, and sent for the carriage. She did not leave a note, because she could not think of one single thing to write that would not have been either a lie or too much of the truth.

CHAPTER 34

He woke at seven with a plan.

That was unusual enough to be worth noticing.

Colin had not woken with a plan since he was fifteen. Usually, he woke with a list, which was a different animal. But he woke on Tuesday morning with a speech ready. It was four sentences long; he had built it somewhere in the small hours while looking at the ceiling.

I am going to say it badly, he thought, getting up. I am going to say it before breakfast, and I am going to say it badly. She will have to make what she can of it.

The house was quiet. He noticed that on the stairs and thought nothing of it. He noticed it again in the hall, where there was no bonnet on the table, and once more in the breakfast room, where the table was not laid.

Katherine was on the carpet in the small parlor with the cat. She had gotten hold of Mercutio’s tail, which had never once been permitted, and Mercutio was allowing it with the expression of a martyr. When Colin came in, she let go and set off across the rug toward him at a speed that would have been alarming in a horse.

He picked her up. “Where is she?”

The baby seized his collar.

“Mrs. Pike,” Colin called.

Mrs. Pike came in with a tray. He realized at once that she had been waiting for the question somewhere out of sight, which meant she had known he would ask it, which meant she had decided in advance what she was going to say.

“Her Grace went out at half past eight, Your Grace.”

“Went where?”