Page 2 of A Baby to Seal the Duke’s Fate

Leopold leaned back in his chair and exhaled through his nose. The headache that had been circling his temples since before breakfast pressed a little harder.

“Very well,” he said. “Bring it in.”

Wilfred did not move.

Leopold narrowed his eyes. “Or do I need to go outside and inspect the basket myself?”

“That would be preferable, my lord.”

Leopold gave him a look.

Wilfred gave none back. That in itself was answer enough.

Leopold stood, shut the ledger with one hand, and came around the desk. As he did, the sleeve of his right wrist caught the inkwell. It tipped, slid, and then spread the dark liquid quickly across the page he had been reading, soaking into the numbers and blooming over the corner of his father’s neat script.

Leopold swore under his breath.

Wilfred’s eyebrows rose a fraction. “Shall I fetch another ledger?”

“No,” Leopold said, already irritated at the page, the ink, the morning, and the air itself. “Just show me this basket before I decide to set something on fire.”

Wilfred inclined his head. “As you wish, my lord.”

He turned and led the way out.

The front hall was still, the sort of polished, cold stillness that belonged to great houses before the rest of the household had fully woken.

Leopold crossed it with Wilfred at his shoulder and wondered, not for the first time, whether his father had ever noticed how empty Belgrave could feel when the servants moved like shadows, and the walls stood listening.

That thought was not one he cared to keep.

He stepped through the front door.

The morning air was brisk enough to sting. A thin layer of frost still clung in the shade near the steps, and the grounds beyond were silvered with cold. Leopold glanced down automatically, expecting some parcel, some forgotten delivery, some fool’s mistake.

Instead he saw a basket large enough to be set beside the front step as if it had always belonged there.

For one absurd second, he thought it had been left by a farmer.

Then he looked closer.

There was a baby in it.

Leopold stared.

The child was wrapped in a pale wool shawl, tucked so tightly that only her face and one small hand were visible. She was perhaps a year old, maybe a little more. Dark hair.

Gray eyes, wide and alert. Pink cheeks from the cold. A mouth that had the unimpressed set of someone who had not yet been informed that she had been abandoned on a duke’s doorstep.

Leopold did not move.

The baby looked back at him with mild interest, as though he were the one who had arrived unannounced.

“This,” Leopold said slowly, “is not what I expected.”

“No, my lord,” said Wilfred from behind him.

“Why did you not bring it in straightaway?”