Page 60 of Five Nights to Claim His Duchess

“Your courses.” The old woman said it plainly and without a flicker. “Have you had them?”

“They are due.” Diana turned the cup on her knee. “Soon. Any day. They come late sometimes, they always have, since I was a girl. It has been a busy few days, with Bella and the house and His Grace away, and I have hardly kept count of the⁠—”

She stopped.

Mrs. Fletcher waited.

“I think,” said Mrs. Fletcher, “that you are with child, Your Grace.”

The kitchen went a long way away.

“What?”

“Sick in the mornings and not at night. Off your food this week and no fever with it. Courses gone by.” She was beginning, unmistakably, to beam. “And you not able to abide the smell of that pot, and it a pot you asked for yourself not a half hour since. I have seen it a great many times in this house and in my own family. I would lay my quarter’s wages on it.”

“No.” Diana heard her own voice from somewhere outside herself. “No, that is not — it cannot be so soon.”

But it can.

She knew perfectly well that it could. There had been a good deal since the night he had told her they need not have a child. A great deal more than she had ever imagined there would be, and none of it his doing more than hers; she had gone to him, twice, and had not even had the decency to be ashamed of it afterward.

She had simply not thought that a thing done a handful of times in a handful of days could arrive at this, this quickly, with no more warning than a pot of soup on a Thursday.

“Shall I send for the physician, Your Grace?”

Diana sat with her hands in her lap.

“Yes,” she gasped. “Please.”

He came at four, and was very grave. He asked a number of questions in a low voice with his eyes on the wall out of delicacy. He felt her pulse and asked the same questions again in a different order.

Then he closed his bag.

“I congratulate Your Grace,” he said. “I should say some five weeks. You will want quiet, and beef tea. Also no jolting about in carriages more than you must, and I shall look in again at the month’s end.”

Mrs. Fletcher put both hands over her face and burst into tears. Betsy, standing by the door with her chin up but her eyes were streaming and she did not trouble to wipe them.

And the door opened a foot and a small face came round it.

“Are you having a baby?”

Diana looked at her sister and put on a smile from somewhere and made it hold.

“I suppose I am,” she said, feeling her heart sink.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

“Diana.”

He came in on the last of the dusk with the cold still on his coat and his hair wet from the ride. There was a look on his face she had not seen there before, troubled as though he had come up the stairs three at a time and had been told something on the way.

He sat down on the edge of the bed and gathered her in without a word.

Diana put her face into his shoulder and breathed him in, road and horse and wet wool and, under it all. One tear went down her cheek and into the cloth of his coat before she had the least idea it was coming.

“Diana.” His hand came up under her chin. “What is it? What has happened?”

She swallowed.