Page 13 of The Cold Duke's Hired Bride

“I am only ever the messenger. It is a thankless office, but a family must keep one.” Lucien set the loose glove down flat on the table. “She is well, I hope? She writes so seldom. My cousin was always proud, even as a child, and pride and poverty make such wretched housemates. I have offered her a home a dozen times over. A widow belongs with her own people, my lord, and not on her knees in a stranger’s still-room, whatever quarrel she has talked herself into having with me.”

“She imagines very little, on my short acquaintance with her. It is among the things I have come to value in her, the imaginings of other people having long since worn thin with me.”

Lucien smiled at the dead grate. “Value. Another warm word, my lord. You are a positive hearth this morning, for a house with no fires lit in it. Will you fetch her down, or shall I go up and find her among the linen?”

“Lady Renae is under my roof, Mr. Trelawney.”

He spoke with the gentle forbearance of one correcting a child in some slight error.

“As a woman entitled to safety. The terms of her situation rest entirely between herself and me, and are, I must plainly say, beyond your province.”

Something moved behind the pleasantness, quick and cold, and was smoothed flat before it had finished surfacing. Lucien picked the glove up again and considered it as though it had handed him something he meant to keep.

“Safety.” He turned the word for the taste of it. “What a warm word to reach for over a question of wages. I asked you nothing of safety, my lord. You have answered a question I did not put, and that, in my experience, is the surest map a man draws of where he keeps his thoughts when he has forgotten to mind them.”

“You may leave Mr. Trelawney.”

“I may. I shall, even.” He gathered his hat and turned it once between his hands, in no hurry at all. “It is a pretty arrangement, this. A beautiful widow, a great empty house, a duke’s heir who speaks of her safety with his colour up. It is the sort of picture that very nearly paints itself, given the right drawing room, and I am acquainted with no end of the right drawing rooms, and I keep a long memory for a warm word once I have heard one. Pray, give my regards to my cousin. Tell her I came all this way and was not given access to see her, and that I bore the disappointment like a gentleman.”

He left a silence behind him with the shape of a threat in it, and Declan stood in it a moment too long before going to find her.

She was already in the doorway, and the set of her shoulders told him she had caught the last of it carried down the passage.

“You should not have done that,” she said quietly.

“Probably not.”

“He will make a use of it. He makes a use of everything, which is the one thing he has ever proved better at than I oncegave him the credit for.” She came into the room and set both hands flat on the back of the chair he had refused her cousin, as though she wanted something solid between her palms and the floor. “What did he say to you, before the part I heard?”

“That you are an heiress.” Declan came round the desk and halted a careful distance off. “Forty thousand pounds, by his accounting, and frozen. He said it to remind me that a poor man defending a rich woman looks, from the proper angle, exactly like a poor man defending his own designs on her. Tell me the rest of it. Plainly, the once, and I will not ask you to say any of it twice.”

“My father left me money. Not the title, that perished with him for want of a son, but money, my mother’s, settled on me in a trust so that no husband could exploit it on the principal.” Her thumb moved once along the chair-rail and stilled. “While I was wedded the income went to my husband, as the law insists it must. When my husband passed, the income should have come home to me. It has not. The trust is frozen. The man who froze it is the executor, and the executor is Lucien, and the one instrument that would thaw it is a codicil my father signed and filed in chambers, of which the filed copy has gone missing out of the very chambers it was filed in.”

“Gone missing.”

“Gone where Lucien has put it.” She let go the chair and folded her arms in a posture that held no comfort in it. “He holds the only copy a soul can lay hands on. He holds the proof of what I am owed, and he means to go on holding it until I do the one thing that makes the proof unnecessary.”

“And the signed original. Not the filed copy. The paper itself.”

“Vanished. It went out of the world with my father’s private papers, and where those went after his demise I have never been able to learn. Lucien holds the filed copy he took from chambers,and swears the original was never drawn at all, and a year and a locked study have given him every chance to make certain it stays lost. If it survives, my lord, it survives somewhere he has not found either, for a thing he had found he would long since have burned. I have no better notion of the where than you do.” Her chin held. “Which leaves the road he prefers. I enter into a matrimony with him. The money never leaves the family, the codicil need never surface, and Lucien is spared the awkwardness of explaining to anyone why a widow of means was kept a twelvemonth on sixty pounds and the escort of a footman who reported where she walked. He does not want me. He wants the principal to stay in a pocket with his own name stitched inside it, and I am only the seam it would otherwise leak through.”

“I can settle this.” He heard the sentence leave him, the old reflex in him of a life spent filing every trouble down to a sum. “Buy the codicil out of whatever drawer he has hidden it in. Every man of that make has his price, and his will not run high, because men of that make never value the thing itself, only the grip it lends them on another person.”

“No, my lord.” She straightened off the chair as she said it.

“It is the fastest road open to you.”

“It is the wrong one, and fast and wrong are not the same animal, whatever a life of careful sums has trained you to hope.” She held his eyes without temper, harder to argue with than temper would have been. “You can purchase the silence around the thing. You cannot purchase the truth of it. If I let you buy that codicil, I have not won my freedom. I have only shifted the leash from a hand that means me harm to a hand that means me well, and a leash is a leash to the throat that wears it, however gentle the fingers on the far end of it. I will not begin my freedom by letting one man buy me out of another man’s hands. That is not rescue, my lord. That is resale. I was sold the once already,by my father, for a roof over my head, and I did not in the least care for the terms.”

“Then I will not buy it.”

“Thank you.”

He stayed on his feet, though the fight in him had already sat down and folded its hands. “I am not finished. I will not buy it, because you have asked me not to, and because you are right, which I dislike on principle and grant on the merits. But know what you are choosing. You are choosing the long road, the lawful one, the one that wants the original found and proved, against a man who has had a year to bury it and ample practice at the burying. The fast road was at least a road. The honest one may prove to be a wall.”

“Then I shall learn the shape of the wall, and where the mortar in it has gone soft. I have spent nine years studying the weak mortar of worse walls than my cousin.” Her voice stayed level through the whole of it. “I am not afraid of a long road, my lord. I am afraid of reaching the end of a short one and finding I have paid the whole fare with the one thing I set out to keep.”

“And what is that? The thing you set out to keep.”