Page 5 of The Cold Duke's Hired Bride

“You kept the plate at Hartfield, the letter says. How many covers in the great service?”

“The full service, my lord.” She gave the words the weight of a rehearsed line. “Every piece of it. A very great many indeed.”

“A number would reassure me considerably more than an adjective.”

“Forty, perhaps.” She tried it like a key in a strange lock. “Or near to forty. One loses the count, my lord, with so very much to mind.”

“The Hartfield service is twelve covers, and has been since the catastrophic fire of ninety-one carried off the rest of it. You have kept a grander house than the one that exists.” He got to his feet and reached for the bell-pull. “Wells will see you down. Mind the stair.”

By the time the clock struck the half he had seen six women and engaged not one of them, and the house continued its quiet descent into decay around the failure, just as it had been steadily languishing for the better part of a year.

Wells put his head round the door. “His Grace is asking for you, my lord. He has had a fair morning of it. Lucid, and cross with the luck of it.”

The duke’s room was the only warm one left in the wing, and the warmth cost coal they did not have and would have cost his father his life to refuse. He lay propped on the bolsters, smaller by the week, his hands gone to paper over the counterpane.

“Six,” his father said, before Declan had the door shut behind him. “Wells tells me you have turned away six.”

“Wells talks overmuch for a man I pay to be silent.”

“You pay him late. He takes the difference out in conversation.” The duke’s mouth moved, the ghost of the dry humor Declan had got from him and from nowhere else in the world. “Sit. I have not the breath to crane up at you.”

Declan sat.

“The funds are entailed, Declan.”

“You have told me.”

“I will go on telling you until it lodges somewhere it consents to stay. Released to the heir upon his matrimony, and not one day before.” A breath dragged in and let itself go. “Your grandfather wrote it so, to drive your father to the altar, and your father to me, and now it drives you. I have set three men of law on it and paid them in land we could not spare to be told no inlonger words each time. The estate will not see the winter out without it. You must wed.”

“For the entail.”

“For Carrington.” His father’s hand found Declan’s wrist on the counterpane and closed on it with what strength was left. “The law is only the door. I mean the house, and the people still in it, and the name your grandfather half ruined and I have wholly failed to mend. You must wed, and soon, and well enough that the men we owe will believe in the thing.”

“I was not born for this.”

It came out flat, as the true things always did with him, and hung in the warm close air between them.

“No. You were born the second.” His father held his eyes through the saying of it. “Your brother was born for it, and your brother took the plate and the horses and the better part of my judgment abroad with him when he went, and left you the reckoning. It is a poor inheritance, and it sorrows me that I must hand it you. But you are all that is left to me now, and I have found that what is left is far more than I had the sense to deserve.”

Declan turned his dark brown eyes to the cold edge of the hearth so as not to meet the expression standing plain in his father’s face. “Then I shall be enough.”

“I never once doubted it. It is the single extravagance I have permitted myself in a frugal year.” The old man let the silence sit, and then his thumb moved once across Declan’s wrist. “You were a warm child. Are you aware of that? Before your brother taught you out of it a winter at a time, because warmth was laughed at in this house and arithmetic never was. I watched him do it, and I told myself it would harden you to some good purpose, and I had not the strength to stop him. It did harden you. I am no longer certain hard was the kindness I pretended.”

“You are maudlin this morning.”

“I am failing miserably this morning, and most mornings of late, and a man is owed a little maudlin on the way to the door. Humor me.” His father’s eyes held, clear in the wreck of the rest of him. “Do not enter into matrimony with a woman who wants the coronet and fears the debt. She will spend the first and resent the second, and you will be alone in a full house, the coldest manner of being alone there is. I have lived in that house. I built it. Wed sense, if a warmer choice is not on the table. But never, upon your very life, wed the cold.”

“You have handed me a list of women and a contradiction in the one breath. Wed sense, you say, and also not the cold.”

“I am a fading creature, and you must allow a dying man the liberty of his own confusion.” Something almost like a smile touched upon his lips. “Find me a woman you would not mind growing old beside, Declan, on the chance growing old is still in the offing. Just the once, I should like to have been wrong about the price of this house.”

Wells caught him on the stair as he came back down. “There is one more, my lord, off the afternoon coach. I had near sent her away again, only.” The steward stopped, a thing he never did. “You had best see this one yourself.”

She was already on her feet when he came into the room, and she kept them until he had taken his own chair. Not one of the six before her had thought to do as much, or, nearer the truth, had been bred to do it without the thinking. The gown was plain wool, decent and turned at the cuffs, and the woman inside it held herself as though the wool were silk and the cold dead room a place she had consented, graciously, to grace. A widow’s plainness on a lady’s spine.

“You have read the advertisement.” He set Wells’s scrawled note beside the inkwell. “Mrs. Trelawney.”

“I have, my lord.”