Page 30 of The Cold Duke's Hired Bride

“That is a hard thing to say to a man preparing to meet his maker.” The duke’s eyes came to rest on him, and there was nocruelty in them, and the absence of it was its own grief; cruelty at least would have been familiar ground. “It is also true, and I have lost my taste for the other kind. I was a poor steward of you, Declan. I gave the warmth to the son who spent it and the watching to the son who saved, and I have lived long enough to learn which was the better investment, and not long enough to act upon the knowledge.”

“You need not act upon it. You need only stop spending what little breath remains to you on the sums. I have managed thirty years without the warmth. I should not know where to put it now if you handed it across the counterpane.”

The duke’s hand moved on the counterpane towards nothing. “You would learn the place for it. I have watched you learning, this last month, whether you would consent to name the lesson or not.”

“He was a great deal easier to cherish than I was. I have not once held it against him. It is no simple thing to resent a man for the crime of being the warmer fire.”

His fingers found the chipped box on the table and stilled there. “Resent me, then, who chose which fire to sit beside, and warmed my hands at the one that gave the better show. He was not a good man, your brother. I knew it, and forgave it, which is a father’s privilege and his largest single failure, and I kept the two in the same drawer. You were the better man, and I forgave you nothing, because it never once occurred to me to look. One does not examine the foundation of a house. One stands upon it, and admires the ornament, and is surprised by nothing until the day the ornament is carried out the door.”

“I have no particular need to be told I was the foundation. I have borne the weight of this place long enough to have arrived at the architecture without assistance.”

A long breath went in and out of him before he spent it. “Then be told the one part you will not have reached alone,being too occupied bearing the load to look up at what it held. A foundation may also be cherished. I did not learn it in time to make the smallest use of the knowing. I have learned it now, and a dying man’s late knowledge is worth only what the living consent to let it be worth, and I will not insult you by pretending that is much. It is more than I gave you in thirty years, and that tells you the poverty of the account, and nothing at all about the size of the late payment.”

The old man let his eyes fall shut. “Go down. There is much to be done, and you are the only one left to do it. I am told it is the hardest sentence I have ever passed upon you, and it is certainly the truest.”

Beatrice was waiting in the small parlour with a list, as Beatrice was always waiting somewhere with a list, and she put it into his hand before he had so much as sat.

“Eight names. Every one of them living, eligible, and able to be wedded inside two months by special licence, the whole of the span the creditors and your father between them will allow you. I have done the work you have been too proud and too lately bruised to do for yourself. You need only point at one.”

He read it. He read it as he read a column he meant to dispute, and he set it down upon the arm of the chair without pointing at anything on it.

“No.”

“No to which of them?”

Beatrice tilted her head a fraction. “It is not a difficult instrument. One points. The finger does the work the heart is too proud to.”

“No to the list entire. The names are sound. The hand is yours, and so the judgment behind them is sound also. I have no quarrel with one woman on it.” He returned it to her side of the table. “I simply will not point, and I am aware that is not an answer, and I intend to give it to you regardless.”

She left the list where he had put it. She regarded him a long moment with the particular patience of a woman who has decided the hour for subtlety is past.

“Shall I be vulgar, then, since subtlety has done neither of us the slightest good?”

He almost laughed, and caught it before it could escape him. “You have never been anything other than vulgar when it suited you, and it has reliably suited you. Be vulgar. I find I prefer it to the list.”

“You require a wife with sense, with nerve, and no romantic illusions about the comfort of a half-ruined dukedom. If this is my roundabout way of naming Mrs. Trelawney, you will say it wants polish, and I will tell you I abandoned polish the afternoon you began staring at staircases down which she had recently walked. You need a wife the law and the creditors accept tomorrow. She needs a husband with rank enough to wrench her fortune from that snake Lucien, and no solicitor and no lawsuit will manage it inside three years. You each hold precisely what the other cannot otherwise obtain.”

“You think my trouble is that the logic fails.” He stayed on his feet. “It does not fail. That is the whole of the difficulty. It is the soundest argument anyone has put to me in a year, and I have spent the year being handed sound arguments by men paid to make them. I distrust this one for a single reason. I want it to be true. The spare learns early not to trust a thing he wants this much, the wanting having always been the first step on the road to being disappointed of it.”

“That,” Beatrice said, “is the most honest thing you have ever said within my hearing. It is also the most foolish, and I am too old to sit out the years it will take you to outgrow the foolish half of it.” She rose, and gathered her list, and did not soften her voice as she went. “Think on it tonight. The clock that solicitor keeps mentioning is not a thing of his invention, and it does notstop running because you have closed your eyes against the face of it.”

***

He found her that night in the steward’s room with the accounts, a single candle and the household ledger and her sleeves turned back to the elbow, and he came in meaning to say a thing about Renton, and stayed instead because she did not send him away.

“You should be asleep,” she said, without raising her eyes from the column. “It is past the hour at which even the conscientious become merely vain about their diligence.”

“You are doing Renton’s worrying for him, and he is paid interest for the privilege. You do it by candlelight for nothing, which makes you a saint or a poor woman of business, and I have not yet decided which.”

Her quill did not pause on the column. “Neither. I do it because the figures will not be untruthful to me, more than I can say of most of the company I have kept in my life. There is a peace in a column that adds to what it ought to. I should have made a passable clerk, had the world troubled to make clerks of women. It does not, so I make do with being trusted to hold the keys and never the quill, the arrangement the world prefers, and the one I gave up arguing with a long while ago.”

“I find the house too quiet to sleep in tonight. It has lost a man it never once had beneath its roof, which is a strange thing to be kept awake by, and yet here I stand, thoroughly kept, by a man I never managed to like and a grief I had not the wit to expect.”

She was quiet a moment, her quill still moving. Then it stopped. “I entered the things from the north wing today. The clock, for mending. The horse.” Her voice did not alter, which was the surest sign the next of it cost her something. “And thesampler. The one worked by the child whose name the damp had taken. I sat a foolish long while over it before I could bring myself to set a value beside a child her own house had contrived to forget.”

“You are thinking of a different child than the one who stitched the sampler.”

“I am nearly always thinking of a different child, my lord. It is the one extravagance I permit myself, and I permit it only at this hour, when the candle is low and there is no one awake to catch me being unreasonable about it.” She set the pen down. “I wanted them. Badly, and long past the point where the wanting was either sensible or kind to me. It is a foolish grief, perhaps. To mourn a thing one never had.”