Nancy blinked. “Roses? At this hour?” The stems were still dewy; the color, deep and aggressive as blood.
She opened the note:
When the moon rises, I dream of nothing but your grace and beauty.
When it sets, I yearn to behold your emerald eyes.
Nancy frowned. She was not in the habit of receiving sonnets, and she was certainly not in the habit of receiving them at Scarfield Manor, signed only: Your devoted admirer.
She turned the card over, as if more sense might be found on the other side, but there was nothing. Then she looked up, caught Wilks studying her, and said, “Who delivered these?”
He cleared his throat. “A young boy, Your Grace. Not a servant I recognized. He said only that they were urgent.”
“Very well. Thank you, Wilks.” She placed the note face down and stared at the roses.
“Are they from the Duke?” Clara asked, climbing onto her lap for a better look.
Nancy laughed. “I doubt it. He is not much given to florid expressions of affection.”
Henry poked the petals with one finger. “Maybe they are from the gardener.”
“Oh, I doubt that,” Nancy chuckled, but the thought stuck. Who, in all of England, would dare send such a thing to the Duchess of Scarfield? And why now?
CHAPTER 14
“‘Three dozen eggs at one and six the dozen,’” Nancy read aloud, squinting at the wobbly script in the household ledger. “Which, multiplied by… Mrs. Tullock, is that a four or a nine?”
Nancy sat at the long table with an ink-stained thumb and a personal grudge against the account books of Scarfield Manor.
“Four, Your Grace.” Mrs. Tullock’s answer was dry enough to crack porcelain. “It is always a four. The cook has not managed a nine in this house since the invention of the egg.”
Nancy blotted her forehead with the heel of her palm, leaving a faint comma of ink above her brow. She reset the abacus, this time managing to launch two beads directly onto the floor. “I see. So, four. That is… seventy-two?”
“Seventy-two eggs, yes.” Mrs. Tullock inspected the tally as if searching for counterfeit currency.
“And at one and six the dozen, that’s…” Nancy attempted to align her sums, but the number mutated mid-column and she had to start again. “That’s… It’s not important. Next item.”
A sound, somewhere between a sigh and a snort, escaped the housekeeper.
Nancy forced a smile. “This is going remarkably well, don’t you think?”
Mrs. Tullock neither agreed nor denied, but arranged her spectacles with a look that suggested she had already updated her will to account for Nancy’s mathematical crimes.
The lesson limped onward. Nancy tackled the meat account next, then the candles, then a short but nasty skirmish with the laundry bill. Each new calculation seemed to breed errors by division, and every page of the ledger bore silent witness to her defeat. By the time she reached the coal delivery, Nancy’s head buzzed with a migraine’s worth of misplaced decimals.
She leaned back and massaged the bridge of her nose. “It cannot possibly be so complicated to keep a house running. How does anyone survive it?”
“Most young ladies learn before the wedding breakfast,” Mrs. Tullock observed, with the faintest suggestion of charity.
Nancy bristled, then caught the edge of humor in the housekeeper’s eyes. “Is that so? Well, perhaps I am only a slow learner.”
“Perhaps her Grace is very stubborn,” Mrs. Tullock said, “which is the next best thing.”
Nancy allowed herself a laugh. “Thank you, Mrs. Tullock. I shall take that as encouragement.”
She bent over the ledger, tongue caught between her teeth, and squared her shoulders. For the next twenty minutes, she wrote numbers, erased them, wrote them again. She dipped her pen too deeply, and ink pooled in a perfect black circle on the table. She mopped it up with the corner of a handkerchief, then promptly knocked the entire ledger off the desk with her elbow.
It landed spine-down, scattering receipts and a single dried pansy across the floor.
