“You do not need to —”
“I was not asking permission.”
She pulled the bell before he could object. A maid set the tray between them with nervous efficiency and fled.
Rosamund poured—one cup, then the other—and held out his.
Tristan took it. “Thank you.” And then, with a bewilderment so genuine it nearly undid her: “No one has poured me tea in this room before.”
“Surely Mrs Alcott —”
“Mrs Alcott sends trays. I pour my own.” He turned the cup in his hands. “It is a different thing entirely to have someone sit beside you and do it.”
She drank her tea and said nothing, because the truthfulness of it had lodged somewhere she could not reach with a ready answer.
“Clara has a theory about you,” Rosamund said, after the silence had stretched past comfort. “She believes you live in the library and only emerge when summoned by the smell of breakfast.”
“Clara has excellent observational skills and a distressing lack of discretion. What else has she told you?”
“That you read her three chapters of Thornwick’s adventures last night instead of two, and that when she asked for a fourth, you said ‘absolutely not’ and then read it anyway.”
“That is a gross mischaracterisation. I read three and a half. The fourth chapter is still outstanding.”
“She also told me you do different voices for the characters.”
Tristan set down his cup with the careful precision of a man buying time. “Clara is prone to exaggeration.”
“She demonstrated. Your villain voice is, apparently, this.” Rosamund dropped her chin and produced a strangled growl that emerged from the depths of her throat like a badger with indigestion.
“That is a grotesque distortion of what is, I assure you, a perfectly serviceable dramatic interpretation.”
“She fell off the rocking horse laughing.”
“The horse has poor balance. I have spoken to Mrs Alcott about replacing it.”
“The horse is not the problem, Your Grace.”
He looked at her. She looked at him. The rain drove against the windows, and for a moment the library held nothing but the fire’s murmur and the particular quality of a silence shared between two people who had discovered, despite formidable efforts to the contrary, that they enjoyed each other’s company.
Rosamund set her cup aside. “Tell me about the Kent estate. The drainage you mentioned at dinner—is the situation as bad as the surveyor suggests?”
He blinked. It was the first time she had seen surprise arrive on his face without being immediately suppressed.
“You wish to discuss drainage.”
“I wish to discuss whatever occupies you at seven in the morning and keeps you in a library without food until noon. If that is drainage, then yes.”
He studied her for a beat that lasted longer than it should have. Then he reached for the surveyor’s report, turned it the right way up, and began to explain. The eastern fields. The tenant cottages along the river. A system of ditches built by his grandfather thathad been adequate for sixty years and was now failing under the weight of three consecutive wet springs.
She followed. She asked questions. She did not pretend the details were beneath her, because they were not, and because the tenants who lived in those cottages were real people whose roofs leaked while a duke sat in a London library and wrestled with the numbers that would fix them.
“The lower fields could be diverted through the old mill channel,” she said, tracing the surveyor’s map with her finger. “My father did something similar at our estate in Hertfordshire. The western pasture flooded every spring until he redirected the stream through a channel cut along the boundary wall. It cost a fraction of what the engineer proposed.”
Tristan went very still.
“You know land management.”
“I grew up on an estate, Your Grace. Before it was taken from us, I spent every autumn at my father’s side while he reviewed the accounts and walked the fields.” She withdrew her hand from the map. “Just because a life was destroyed does not mean the knowledge gathered in it was destroyed too.”
