Page 33 of The Cold Duke's Hired Bride

His hand stayed on the doorframe. “That is not an answer.”

“It is the only kind of answer my position affords me. The others are above my station, like the good china, brought out only for guests who can be trusted not to break them.”

His hand closed on the edge of the door. “And will you take Thornbrook?”

“Why do you ask, my lord?” She gave him nothing to read but the steady housekeeper’s face. “It can be no concern of the house whom its housekeeper weds, provided she gives proper notice and trains a successor up in the still-room before she goes.”

“It is a concern of mine.”

“Yes. I had observed that it is. I have observed very little else this last quarter of an hour.” She lifted the tray she had no need of, for the tray was a thing to hold and holding it steadied her. “But a thing being your concern, my lord, and a thing being any of your business, are not the same article, and the distance between the two is the precise distance the word employer was built to hold. I find I have need of every inch of it tonight.”

“That is not fair.”

Her cloth went on along the edge of the tray. “No. It is not. Fairness is another of the things kept above my station, with the china and the temper.”

“If I were not your employer.”

“But you are, my lord. That is the entire sentence, and there is no clause that comes after the if to mend it. You are my employer. I am your housekeeper. Mr. Thornbrook is a free man, who may say what he wishes to a free woman, and that, in the end, is the whole reason his offer sits upon my table tonight and yours does not, whatever your face is presently attempting to put there in its place.” She carried the tray towards the door he had no reason to occupy. “Good evening. The fires want banking, and I am far more use to this house banking them than I am standing in cold parlours, being asked questions to which neither of us is permitted the honest answer.”

She kept her back to him as she went, having read more than enough of his countenance already to last her the climb. A woman who has just set the right distance between herself and the one thing she wants does not survive turning round to measure whether the distance has held.

That night she went to her sitting room for Elias’s note, the formal one he had left her to weigh at her leisure, the offer set down in his careful clerk’s hand so that the steady face across the table could not tip the scale. She had left it on the writing slope beneath the candle. It was not on the writing slope beneath the candle.

She had passed Finch in the corridor not an hour before, coming away from this end of the house with a coal scuttle and a ready reason, and the fire in her sitting room had not been laid. She had marked the unlaid fire and made herself think nothing of it. To think something of it was to set a name at the head of a column she had kept open and blank for two months, and she had grown so very tired of all the things she made herself decline to know.

There was no declining it now. She stood in the cold room with the empty slope before her and understood it whole, as one understands a sum that has at last consented to add. Shehad kept the column blank for two months out of a kindness to the man who had been quietly robbing the house that fed him, and the kindness had cost her the one letter she could least afford to lose. The letter was gone. There was no question left whose careful hands had carried it off, only the slower horror of where it was bound. Somewhere out in the dark a paper with Elias Thornbrook’s honest offer written across it was travelling towards the one man in England who would know exactly what to make of the news that Lady Renae had been handed another door, and exactly how to set about nailing it shut.

Chapter Thirteen

“They are saying it in the village now, ma’am. Not only the gentry. The butcher’s girl asked me outright, plain as washing, whether it was true you had the run of his lordship’s, whether you and his lordship were.” Annie went scarlet and could not get the rest of the sentence over the sill.

“I understand the shape of the question, Annie. You need not supply the verb. The verb is the part they enjoy.”

“I told her it was wicked talk and she ought to be ashamed of her mouth. She said her mother had it from the Pelhams’ cook, and the cook had it from a man who had it direct, and there is no arguing with a thing that has a witness sitting at the bottom of it, ma’am. There just isn’t.”

“No. There is not.” Renae set down the linen she had been folding, because her hands had stopped being any use to it. “A rumour with a source has a spine, Annie, and you cannot reason a thing out of standing once it has learned how to stand. You did well to bring it to me. I would always rather know the weather than be caught out in it dressed for July.”

“The kitchen doesn’t believe a word, ma’am. Mrs. Croft said anyone who’d seen you count a candle-end would know you’d not the time nor the inclination for sin, and that she’d say so to the butcher’s girl’s mother with a ladle if it came to it.”

“Pray tell Mrs. Croft that I am deeply sensible of her kindness, and that she is to leave the ladle on its hook. A defended woman is a woman worth defending, and that is precisely the impression we cannot afford to give. But you may tell her I shall want the good copper kept bright regardless, scandal or none, because a house that lets its copper dull has confessed to despair, and I am not despairing. I am besieged, a wholly different posture, and far kinder to the complexion.” Shefound the girl a task, because a frightened girl wants a task more than she wants comfort, and sent her down. Then she went up.

She went up to the old nursery, three floors above the talk, because it was the one corner of the house no living voice could reach. She had a sudden and entire need of a corner as such.

The nursery had been closed longer than the north wing. The dust sheets had gone grey as moths, and beneath them stood the small furniture of a childhood nobody had been happy in. A low bed, and a rocking horse with a real mane felted to nothing. The shelf of improving books had its spines sunned blank. She lifted a sheet and began, from old habit, to count, because counting was the one prayer whose words she still had by heart.

He came up without her hearing. She had folded the sheet back from a child’s writing desk, small enough for a boy of seven and scarred along one edge with initials cut by a knife in an inexperienced hand, when his voice came from the door.

“You have found the only room in the house worth less than the north wing. I had wondered whether you would ever find the leisure for it.”

“I came up for the quiet, my lord, and the quiet appears to be tenanted.” Her eyes stayed on the desk. “Whose initials are these? They were carved by someone very angry and very small.”

“Mine. I was both of those, that year, and had no other way to say so.” He came in, and the coming cost him something she could hear in the evenness of it. “It is the one room nobody ever came looking for me in. Alaric filled the rest of the house with noise, as warm boys do, and it went everywhere except up three flights to a nursery no one had used since the nurse was pensioned off. So I used it. A boy will take the room nobody else wants, if it is the only room reliably his.”

“And no one came?”

“No one came. That was its whole value to me. I have spent the better part of my life since arranging to be in rooms nobodywould think to look in, and I learned the trick of it here, at that desk, with that knife.” He set a hand to the rocking horse and the worn mane stirred. “It was never a magical room. People speak of nurseries as though they were.”

“No house is magical to the child who is lonely inside it. The wallpaper makes very little difference.” She ran a thumb along the carved initials. What the room was doing to her she kept from his sight, though it was doing a fair amount. She had papered a nursery once herself, in another house, and folded its linen the length of a marriage against a child who never came, and a nursery was a nursery in the end, whoever’s particular loneliness had been stored away in it. “I came up here to be away from a thing, and I have walked straight into the middle of it. Rooms are unkind that way. They keep what you bring them.”