Page 99 of A Baby for the Duke

“Yes?”

“My wife said I was to ask after Her Grace. I said I’d not, and she said I would.” He looked at the hedge. “She’s taken a great deal of trouble for us.”

“She has.”

“There’s a thing I’d say if this were a different house.” Beddoes turned the hat over twice more. “There’s sixteen of us had our tea in your drawing room, Your Grace, and there’s not one of us ever set foot past your step before. My father worked this land and never once saw the inside of it. And she never asked us for anything nor made a speech about it. She only asked what was wrong with the field.”

Colin did not say anything.

“It ain’t that sort of house. I know it ain’t.” Beddoes put his hat on. “But I’ve said it anyhow. Good day, Your Grace.”

With that, he walked off up the lane.

Colin stood at the gate for a while. Then he went back inside and played with Katherine on the drawing room carpet.

That was the worst part. Katherine had gotten very good at crawling and could cross the room now at speed. She wanted to be chased, and she squealed in delight every time he caught her.

Colin caught her nine times and then found that he had stopped and was sitting on the floor of his own drawing room with a baby in his lap and no idea how long he had been there.

“She is not coming back at three,” he told her.

Katherine put her hand flat on his eyepatch.

“No. Nor at four.” He did not remove it. “You do not understand a word of this, and I am extremely glad, because I would not want it repeated. Your mother has gone to her family, and she was quite right to. At this moment, she is being shouted at by six people who love her, and there is a lake and a great deal of cheating.”

The baby patted his cheek.

“I could have gone,” Colin added.

The cat sauntered out from under the sofa and sat down, looking at both of them with unmistakable contempt.

“I could have gone,” Colin said again. “I have been asked twice. I stood in a doorway on Sunday for seven minutes because I could not think of a way to come in that would not spoil the room.”

He looked up. The painting was still where she had left it. It had stood against the wall since last night, four feet of a walled garden in June, with a hat on the grass and a gate standing open at the end of the path.

Colin sat on the floor with the baby and looked at it for a long time.

Then he stood up, balanced the baby on his hip, went to find Mrs. Pike, and asked, “How long does it take to carry a painting up to the gallery?”

CHAPTER 35

Nobody at Huntington House asked her a single sensible question until four o’clock, which was the reason she had come.

She was shrieked at on the gravel by Augusta. She was put in a chair and given cake she did not want. Her mother said that she looked thin, and then said it again forty minutes later as though it were a new observation. Her father took her out to look at a wall he was having rebuilt and talked about brick for twenty minutes. Alexander lost eleven shillings at pall-mall and blamed the weather.

They did not ask where her husband was.

That was what undid her. None of them asked. Her mother came within a yard of it twice and turned away both times. Evan, who never spared anybody anything, looked at the empty place beside her at luncheon and continued eating.

They have decided among themselves. At some point this morning, in a hall, my family agreed not to ask me. They are all being careful with me. I have become a woman people are careful with.

She lost at pall-mall. She lost badly, in four minutes, and did not mind in the least.

“That was on purpose,” Augusta said at her elbow.

“It was not.”

“You let Evan take your ball, and you were looking at the hedge.” Her youngest sister squinted up at her. “Where is my brother-in-law?”