Page 13 of A Baby Delivery for the Duke

“Then for you to make an informed decision,” he said, “you must know what you would be walking into. So.” He shifted on the bench so that he faced her, one arm along its back. “What are your demands?”

“My… what?”

“Your demands. Your conditions. Your terms.” He said it patiently, as one might explain to a child. “What would you require of me, Lady Phillipa, in order to say yes?”

She opened her mouth. She closed it.

She had never been asked. It was the most extraordinary thing. She had been told what was required of her a thousand times, in a thousand voices, and she had answered them all correctly. But nobody had ever turned to her and said what do you want, and she found that the answer was not where she expected. It was like reaching for a book on a familiar shelf and finding the shelf bare.

The Duke waited. He did not fill the silence. He merely sat there in the sunshine with his hat on his knee, waiting, as though he had all the time in the world.

“St. Anthony’s,” she said at last. It came out of her in a rush. “I wish to be able to support St. Anthony’s. Not merely with my pin money, though I would be grateful for that. I mean truly. It needs a new roof, and a better meat supplier, and a physician who will come when the children are ill and not only when they are dying, and I cannot…” She stopped and lowered her voice. “It is the one thing I want.”

“Done.”

“You have not heard the sum.”

“Then name a sum.” He tilted his head. “I should think a sum could be added to your pin money for the charity alone, quite apart from the rest. If it proves insufficient, we may arrange more. Your dowry, of course, would remain yours, to do with entirely as you please. And I should like to make donations to St. Anthony’s myself, twice a year, in a significant amount. Say, in March and September? Would that suffice?”

She stared at him. She had come prepared to be resisted. She had come prepared, God help her, to beg. She had rehearsed on the stairs a speech in which she made herself very small and asked for very little, and here he was, offering three times what she had dared to picture with as little fuss as a man ordering the carriage.

“Yes,” she said faintly. “That would suffice.”

“Good.” He seemed pleased. “Then it is your turn to ask me for something else.”

“I do not think there is anything else.”

“There is always something else. Try again.”

“Then,” said Phillipa, gathering herself, “I suppose you should tell me what you want.”

He nodded, as though that were the answer he’d hoped for, and looked away from her for a moment, at the lavender. When he spoke it was in a different voice, plain and low.

“I would need you to raise the boy.”

She had known it was coming. She had known since the library. Still it went through her like cold water. “To raise him.”

“To be his mother. In every way that counts.”

“And you? Do you intend to be absent from his life?”

“God, no.” It came out fast, and with something almost like alarm. “I intend nothing of the kind. I mean to be his father. But a child needs a mother, Lady Phillipa, and if my sister is indeed nowhere to be found…” His voice caught. It was a very slight thing, no more than a stumble, and he covered it at once by clearing his throat and looking at the pear tree with great attention. “Then someone will have to step into that place. I would not ask it of you if I could see another way.”

“No,” said Phillipa, softly. “I understand.”

She did. She had known, in the library, when she’d laid the child in his basket and felt her arms go strangely hollow. She had known it, and she had told herself it was because the child was small and lovely and needed someone. She looked down at her hands and saw them folded in her lap, and she thought: that is not all it is.

“There is one more thing,” she said. “I ought to know now, so I can prepare myself for it.” Her face grew hot. “Will you wish for more children?”

It was a wretched question to ask a man on a garden bench. She asked it anyway, and to her credit she did not look away.

The Duke shook his head at once. “No.”

“No?”

“I never wanted children. I never intended to.” He said it without any apology at all, calmly, as though stating his opinion of the weather. “One is more than enough. An heir is what a dukedom requires, and he is what I have now, by the strangest chance. I would not ask more of you than that, or of myself.”

It should not have hurt. It was, after all, a simple and reasonable thing, and she had known the nature of the bargain when she began. But for one long moment Phillipa sat very still and felt a small, secret door quietly close somewhere inside her. She had wanted a house full of noise. She had wanted a table with too many chairs at it, and a nursery that was never quiet, and she had folded that dream away so carefully, in the last two years, that she had almost stopped seeing it. It had needed a bench in a garden to remind her it was there.