Page 15 of The Cold Duke's Hired Bride

“Then I am at a disadvantage, and counting sheets while I am at it.”

“He sent a tray up to you the other night. No note on it.” She let the words find their mark. “You will not pretend the kitchen failed to mention it.”

“The kitchen mentions nothing so often as the people who imagine it does not, my lady.”

“Prettily said, and it tells me precisely nothing, which is itself the answer.” Beatrice turned her rings, one and then the next. “I knew a girl once who answered everyone exactly that well. She kept a whole matrimony behind a pleasant face, and the face held to the end, and the matrimony was the death of her by inches behind it. No one at her funeral could think of one true thing to say of her, because she had never let a single one out where it might be caught.”

“That is a grim story to bring a woman at her linen.”

“It is a warning got up as a story, which is the only kind anyone will take from me at my age.” She rose, slow and deliberate. “I shall not press you, child. I wanted you to know the cart has a watcher beneath it who likes you. Take care which ofyour figures you trust this afternoon. The ones that grieve you are generally the true ones.”

By four on the hour the figures had grieved her. The plate case in the butler’s pantry stood locked when she came to it and locked when she left, and four pieces the lighter in between, and she sent the boot-boy for Wells before she let herself think past the count.

“When was this case last opened, to your knowledge, Mr. Wells?”

“Couldn’t say to the day, ma’am. It’s brought out for the polishing, monthly, and otherwise it sits and sulks.”

She ran a fingertip over the empty baize where a salver had sat. “Who does the polishing?”

“Whichever footman’s set to it. Finch, mostly, this past while, him being the careful one with his hands.”

“And the key?”

Wells frowned into the open case. “On the footmen’s ring, ma’am, and on yours, and nowhere I know of besides.”

“Four pieces are gone, Mr. Wells. A pair of salvers and two candlesticks. And the lock has not been forced.”

Wells took that in slowly, and his face did the thing an honest man’s does when the figures walk him somewhere he would rather not go. “I’d not like to think it of any of the lads, ma’am.”

“No. Nor would I, which is exactly the difficulty with thinking, that one cannot choose where it sits down.” She closed the book. “Say nothing of this below stairs. A loose word now would do more harm than the loss, and I will not hang a man on a sum I have only begun to add.”

He left. She stood with the closed book and made herself read the sentence under it that she had not said aloud. The one person besides herself with a key and an unwatched hour was the single servant she had chosen, on no evidence but a kindnessat a linen press, to trust without reserve. She could not make herself believe it. The refusal was the precise thing his kindness had bought.

The first open defiance came from Thomas before the week was out, over a matter too small to be the true one. The smallness of it told her the true one was herself.

“The plate is to be counted weekly now,” she told the hall, “and kept against a single key, and the key is to be mine.”

“We’ve counted it monthly twenty years.” Thomas held up his stretch of wall and did not leave it. “I’ll not be handled a thief on a lady’s whim.”

“It is not a whim. It is four missing pieces and an unforced lock, and the two will not introduce themselves without my help.”

“Then say it plain. Say you think one of us a thief, and let the man answer you to your face.”

“I think a case was opened with a key and not a crowbar.” She kept her voice exactly where it had been. “I have thought any number of things this week I have not said, Thomas, and there lies the whole difference between us this morning.”

“You’d not have lasted a week in a proper house, giving yourself such airs over the spoons.”

She set the inventory book down on the table, unhurried, and let the small flat sound of it be the loudest thing in the room.

“You may dislike my instructions, Thomas. You are not at liberty to disregard them. Choose which of those two difficulties you would prefer to keep, because you may not keep the both of them.”

He held her eyes a moment past wisdom, then dropped them to the floor. She took the floor for the surrender it was and did not make him say the word. A man made to speak his own defeat only comes back for it later, in a sharper hour.

***

“I have a footman who would greatly prefer a different housekeeper,” she told Declan that evening, the books open between them. “And I have four pieces of silver gone out of a locked case, and I should like to know how much rope I am allowed before I learn its measure the hard way.”

His eyes stayed on the column. “You think the two are the same man?”