Page 2 of A Baby Delivery for the Duke

So when the invitation to the Duke of Brawnhite’s ball arrived, Phillipa had looked at it and thought only, three hundred people, all in one room, with nothing to do.

“Phillipa?”

She turned, seeing her mother approach. The Countess of Creighton was regarding her daughter with one eyebrow already raised.

“Mother,” she hummed.

“Lord Averley,” said Lady Creighton, “was seen leaving you in some haste. Did he ask you to dance?”

Phillipa gave her a nonchalant shrug. Knowing her mother, she was already prepared with a whole litany of questions for her daughter.

“Well, did he?”

“He might have, yes,” Phillipa answered reluctantly.

“And?”

“I was too occupied with other matters to accept.”

Her mother closed her eyes briefly, as though counting to ten. “He asked, and you refused him. Oh, I already knew and I just wished to it from you first. Phillipa, from across the room. I watched you refuse the youngest, the wealthiest, the most eligible….”

“I was speaking to him about the roof,” some of her frustration seeped in through her tone.

“The roof?” Lady Creighton said the word with some surprise. “This has gone far enough. All this silliness with the orphans was very well to occupy you when you were… unsettled, but you are twenty-two years old, my girl, and I will not stand by and watch you turn yourself into a spinster. It is time you began looking for a husband again. In earnest.”

“Mother,” she said quietly, “please not here.”

“Then, where else? I told you, this has already gone on long enough and it is time I start to intervene.”

Phillipa wanted to interject, and say that there is little that you haven’t intervened in but she restrained herself.

“There is a gentleman I wish you to meet. Lord Ashworth’s nephew, very sound, very steady. You will stay exactly where you are, Phillipa, not one inch, and I shall fetch him.”

She swept away through the crowd, while Phillipa stood exactly where she was for the length of three breaths. Then she did something her parents had spent twelve years teaching her never to do.

She left.

The terrace doors stood open at the far end of the ballroom, and she slipped through them into the cool of the night. For the first time all evening she could hear herself think.

She walked around the area for a few moments. There was still a small scattering of people around her and so she stepped into the veranda, which appeared to be more secluded.

This was the Duke of Brawnhite’s house, she reminded herself, and the Duke of Brawnhite, so far as anyone could tell, had not been seen in it since the ball began. She had not spoken to him tonight and only as one knew people through friends or friends of friends.

The most impossible man in London, Augusta liked to say. You would like him. Everyone does.

Phillipa had glimpsed him once at the start of the evening, a tall figure at the far end of the ballroom before the crowd closed over him and he vanished.

A host who could not be found at his own ball? It seemed to her the only sensible thing anyone had done all night.

She was very nearly smiling at that when she heard the cry.

“What was that noise?”

Phillipa stopped so suddenly that her skirts swung forward around her ankles. There was no one on this stretch of the veranda but the cry came again.

She was standing beside a pair of French doors, which had been left slightly open. She turned her head and looked in to find a library.

Shelves to the ceiling, a fire burning low in the grate, a single branch of candles on the mantel.