Page 29 of The Cold Duke's Hired Bride

He said it quietly, and without the dryness, and it landed in the cleared room with no fork left to turn over and no guest left to perform for, and for a moment neither of them did anything with it at all. Then she gathered the last of the glasses, because a woman in her position is never more than one breath from a task, and a task at such a moment is a kind of rescue, and she carried them out before the silence could become something she would have to answer for by daylight.

Sleep would not come. She sat at the small window of the small cold room they had given her, the one with its view of nothing but the kitchen yard and the lane beyond it, and turned the evening over as Lady Carbery had turned her glass, to see what ran out.

It was past one when the movement in the yard caught her. A figure crossed it without a lantern, hugging the dark along the wall, and let himself through the gate to the lane, and was gone perhaps twenty minutes, and came back by the same careful road he had left. The set of those shoulders was one she had watched carry her own heavy presses up two flights without a word of complaint, and she had thought, more than once, that he was the single good thing below stairs she had not been obliged to fight for.

It was none other than Finch about some business of his own, in the middle of the night, by the one lane no honest errand troubled after dark.

A footman might keep a sweetheart in the village, she told herself. She told herself a good many reasonable things, in the reasonable voice she kept for frightened housemaids, and she believed perhaps half of them. The column she had opened on him had not balanced since the silver, and here was a second figure standing on the wrong side of it, in the wrong hour, andstill her hand would not write the name at the head of the page. She sat with the half she did not believe until the candle guttered low and the yard was only a yard again, and the lane was only a lane, and she was only a woman at a window, choosing, one more night, not to know.

Chapter Eleven

“I will not soften it, my lord, since softening is the one service you have never once paid me for.” Mr. Fenwick set three documents side by side on the library table, squaring their edges as though tidiness might improve their contents. “The estate is sound in land and ruined in cash. It cannot be sold, being entailed. The cash that would save it is entailed also, and your grandfather’s settlement releases it to the heir upon one event, and one event only.”

“My matrimony.”

“Your matrimony. Not your majority, long behind you now. The law in its tact declined to make your father’s demise the trigger, and your good intentions, of which I am reliably told you have lately acquired several, it declines to recognise at all.” Fenwick tapped the second paper. “Renton and the rest will carry the estate over the winter on the strength of a settled succession, and not one single day beyond it. They do not lend to the bachelor heir of a dying duke. They lend to a wedded man with sons coming, because a wedded man is a man they can find in the morning and a bachelor is a man who might be in Calais by Friday.”

“You have a low view of the institution of matrimony, Fenwick.”

“I have a solicitor’s view, lower than most men’s and a sight more accurate. Admiring the thing is not what you pay me for. I am paid to tell you that the law has built you exactly one door out of this house, and written a single word upon the lintel, and the word is wife.” He aligned the third paper with the others to the breadth of a hair. “I have laid it out three ways, because you have a settled habit of arguing with the first two presentations and conceding to the third. Concede, my lord. There is nothingin any of it to argue with. There is only a thing to be done, and a clock running while you decline to do it.”

“The clock is a recurring figure in my life of late,” Declan said wearily. “Everyone I meet has one, and every one of them is set to the same hour, and the hour is always now. I begin to take it personally.”

“Take it any way you like, so long as you also take a wife. I am not particular about your feelings on the subject. The creditors are even less particular, and your father has the least time of any of us to indulge them.”

“Indulge me one moment before you go. You are certain there is no other door. No bank in the City, no mortgage on unentailed acreage, no relation to be persuaded to lean upon.”

“There is no unentailed acreage. Your grandfather was a careful man and a cruel one, and he saw to that with his own hand.” Fenwick gathered his papers without hurry. “No bank in the City will advance a shilling against an entail it cannot touch. There is no relation left to lean upon, and no plate left to pawn that your late brother did not pawn ahead of you, with some style and no profit.”

Declan turned from the window. “You have been thorough.”

“Thoroughness is the other service you pay me for. It returns me the same word each time I send it out, and the word is still wife.”

“And does it signify whom I wed. The creditors. Do they require the lady bring a fortune?”

“They require you bring a wife, and that the match be respectable enough to suggest the line will continue and the man will not bolt for the coast. A fortune would please them. It is not asked of them.” Fenwick set his hat upon the papers. “What is asked is the appearance of a settled house, and appearances are the only collateral a half-ruined estate has left to pledge. Enter into matrimony where the county nods, and your grandfather’shand unlocks the money you require. The lady’s purse is immaterial to the lock. The lady’s standing is not, and I would not, were I you, give the county the smallest reason to question the second of those.”

“You have a particular case in mind, Fenwick, or you would not have warned me off questioning.”

“I have no cases in mind. I have a clock in mind, and a word on a lintel, and an old man upstairs who would like the news before he goes. Settle it soon, my lord, while he can still be told, and while the clock has an hour or two left in it that you can yet afford to spend.”

It was at that hour, with the three papers squared and the word still hanging on the lintel where Fenwick had nailed it, that Wells brought in the letter from abroad. It had travelled far, by the stains along its edge, and it had been opened once already and resealed by a hand that was not the writer’s, after the fashion in which news of that particular kind always arrived, passed from official to official until it reached the one person it had been written to break.

He read it standing. He read it twice, as he read everything that mattered, and the second reading did not improve upon the first.

Alaric was departed. He has passed away in a rented room in the country he had fled to, of a fever the letter named and the debts it did not, three weeks past and buried already among strangers who had cut his name wrong into the stone. The adored son, the warm one, the one this whole cold house had been built around and tilted towards, was a line of poor ink in a stranger’s hand. There would be no reconciliation now. No late return, no chastened brother at the door, no scene in which the two of them became anything other than what the house had long ago made them.

He went up to tell his father, because the thing could not be sent by a servant, and a dying man is owed the news that he is now the father of only one living son.

He told it plainly. There was no kind way to tell it, and the kind ways were falsehoods, and his father had spent a long life being told untruths to gently by careful men and was owed better at the close of it.

The duke received it as a worn shore receives one more wave. The ruined face gave a little, not loudly, and his hand moved on the counterpane towards nothing in particular, and for a long while he said the variety of nothing a man says when the last argument he had been saving has quietly lost its second party.

On the table by the bed sat a chipped enamel snuffbox, the blue gone grey at its corners. Alaric had won it off a stable boy at sixteen and then boasted of it for a decade as though it were a county he had conquered. Declan picked it up without having decided to. He turned it over, and turned it again, and waited for the ache beneath his ribs to declare itself one thing or the other, and it would not. Nothing in him answered cleanly to the word brother, nor to the word grief. He could not tell whether he mourned Alaric, or mourned only, at last and far too late, the boy who had been taught by Alaric that he was the spare, the second, the one folded in a drawer against the unlikely day the first was lost or broken. The day had arrived. Holding the chipped box, he was less a man who had been found than a thing drawn out of its drawer to learn the drawer had been the safest place in the house all along.

“Then it is only you now,” his father said.

“It was always going to be only me. I simply waited longer than you did to say so.”