Page 48 of The Cold Duke's Hired Bride

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It was her counsel, given later in the carriage home, when he laid before her the further ruin he could still bring down on her cousin, the debtor’s court and the disgrace entire.

“I do not want him ruined.” There was no heat in it, only the flat voice she kept for the things she had thought all the way to the bottom. “A ruined man stays at the centre of one’s life for years. Such a man writes letters, nurse’s grievances, becomes a project for one’s pity and a fixture in one’s conversation, and I have had quite enough fixtures to last me. I want him at the edge of my life, and then off it altogether, and a man with his power gone and his liberty kept has no reason ever to come back to me. Take his power, my lord. Leave him his liberty. Then he has nothing left worth the bringing back.”

“You are far more merciful than I am inclined to be on your behalf.”

“It is not mercy. Mercy would be for his sake, and I have none to spare him. It is housekeeping. I am clearing a room I intend to live in, and one does not leave a broken thing in the middle of the floor out of spite. One puts it out, and one shuts the door, and one does not think of it again. I have spent ten years being thought of by that family, and managed by them, and frozen and thawed at their convenience. I should like, very much, to stop being a room they feel entitled to walk into without knocking. Take the key from him, my lord. That is all I want. Take the key, and let him keep the empty hand.”

His wife sat across from him in the carriage dark, his solid ground, the woman who had walked into a bright roomful of people sharpening their knives for her and walked out with the county at her shoulder. Nothing stood between Declan and the plainest sentence in the language now but the one obstacle that had always stood there. Himself.

Chapter Twenty

“Sit where I can see you. Both of you.” The old duke had no voice left worth the name, only the shape of one. “I have spent the better part of my life unable to see the people in my own rooms, and I should like to break the habit before I go, if a man is permitted to break a habit on the last day he is given to do it in.”

“You are not going anywhere this morning,” Declan said firmly, from the chair he had not left in two days.

“I am going precisely where you tell me I am not, and at my own hour, which has always annoyed you.” The ruined eyes moved to Renae. “He told you the thing I charged him with. Has he told you yet, or has he done the cowardly sum and decided there is time.”

She could not practice deceit upon a man preparing to depart this world, having never acquired the art of disguise when meeting the direct gaze of another.

“Not yet.”

“Then he is a simpleton, and I have raised a simpleton, the one accomplishment of mine I had hoped to spare him.” A thread of the old asperity, and under it something gentler. “Do not let him do it the slow way, my dear. I did it the slow way. It takes thirty years, and it costs everything, and it buys a man a deathbed full of regret and a son who learned the trick by watching him. Stand in the door and do not let him past until he has said it.”

“I will stand in the door.” She took the thin hand. “You have my word, and I keep the words I give to men in their deathbed. I have so few of them left to give that I have grown careful with the spending.”

“Not Your Grace, mind. Not from you, and not yet.” The faintest pressure of his fingers. “I am the only duke in this houseanother hour yet, and I find I would rather be plain Greene to the two of you for the last of it, as I never once managed to be plain anything to anyone while it might have done some good. Sit closer. The light is going, and you are both a long way off.”

“I am here, and I have been here two days, and I am not going anywhere.”

“You are here in the chair. There is a difference between the chair and the man, and you have spent your whole life trusting the chair to do the man’s work. It cannot, and you are about to learn it in the worst possible order, after I am gone and before you have said the thing.” A breath that cost him. “She is right to make you say it in a doorway. A doorway is where I ought to have said it to your mother. I said it instead to the back of the carriage that took her coffin to the church, where it was a great deal safer and did precisely no one any good.”

“He will say it, Greene.” Renae had not let go of the thin hand. “I will see to it myself. You may go and tell her so, wherever she is waiting, that the boy turned out warmer than the house that raised him.”

“Did he?” Something that was nearly a smile. “Then the house failed at the one thing, and I am glad of it. Glad to be wrong, here at the end, about the only matter I ever truly wished to be wrong about.”

His hand was in his son’s when he went, near noon, with the light full in the window, and the title came down onto Declan’s shoulders in the same quiet hour, clean, Alaric newly in a stranger’s grave abroad and no one left to take it up but the spare who had never thought to carry it. She watched her husband become a duke between one breath and the next, and watched, with a cold she had no name for yet, the door begin to close behind his eyes.

It began as nothing. He was busy, which a new duke must be, and met the papers and the funeral and the thousand smallclaims a death makes on the living with a tireless competence that would have been admirable in a stranger. His courtesy did not once fail, and he asked after her comfort each morning and arranged it before she had finished answering. In a single grieving fortnight he had become the most attentive and entirely absent husband a woman could be cursed with, and the shape of it reached her as a smell from childhood does, before the name for it arrives.

“You were not at dinner again,” she said, in the doorway of the study where the lamp had burned past midnight all that week.

“There was much to settle. I had a tray sent up so you need not wait on me.”

“You have sent a tray up eleven nights running. I have come to know the maid who carries it better than I know my own husband. Her name is Sarah, and she has a sister wedded in Bath, and a fear of the back stairs after dark. These are things I have learned across eleven dinners eaten alone, in a marriage I entered for the express purpose of not eating alone.”

“A tray was not what I wanted. I wanted you across the table, being tired at me in person rather than considerately from another room.” She kept her voice level, because the alternative was not level in the least. “Declan. Set the quill down a moment and attend to me. Properly.”

“I am attending to you.” He was not. His attention stayed on the column of figures under his hand, as a drowning man’s stays on the one solid thing in reach. “I will be up shortly. Do not wait.”

“You said that on Tuesday.”

“And I came up.”

“You came up at two and were gone by six, and you have said do not wait so many times this fortnight that I have begun to think it is the only instruction you have left for me.” Shecame into the room. “I know this grief. I do not mean I merely sympathise with it, though I do. What I mean is that I have lived inside the exact house you are building around yourself, brick by considerate brick, and I know the inside of it, because I served nine years there, and it was you who taught me there was a door.”

“I am not your first husband, Renae.”