Page 51 of A Bride for the Ruthless Duke

“And how did stones become the whole of his holding?”

“That I couldn’t say, Your Grace, and it isn’t my place to wonder.” Mrs. Selby’s mouth thinned in a way that said she had wondered a great deal and learned the cost of saying so. “Agents came. Papers were signed. The good land went and the family stayed, and nobody in the house was the wiser, which is how a great many things go in a house with no mistress to ask the awkward question.”

“Then it is fortunate the house has acquired one.”

“We shall see, my lady.” But she packed a second jar of the cordial into the basket without being asked, which coming from Mrs. Selby, was received as a peculiar blessing.

The first cottage was the Renwicks’, and Mrs. Renwick came to her own door wiping her hands on her apron with three children ranged behind her skirts in descending order of boldness.

“You’ll forgive the state of us, Your Grace. We weren’t looking for the house to call. The house has never once called, not in my time.”

“Then it is past time it began.” Ellen lifted the cloth on the basket. “Cordial for the children’s chests, and honey, and I have come to ask whether the cottage wants anything that has not been seen to.”

“Wants, my lady?” The woman laughed, surprised into it. “We want for nothing a duchess could carry in a basket. The chimney smokes when the wind’s in the east, but every chimney in the parish does, and we’d not trouble the house with the wind.”

“You may trouble me with the wind. I have nothing better to do with it.” Ellen crouched to the boldest child, who had crept out to inspect her hem. “What is your name?”

“Tom.”

“Tom, when the chimney smokes, who sweeps it?”

“Nobody, miss. Da does it with a holly bush on a rope.”

“Then we shall find your da a better arrangement than a holly bush.” She straightened. Mrs. Renwick was looking at her with the wary, half-hopeful revising Ellen had begun to see on faces all over the estate. “I shall send the sweep out from Wrenford before the cold sets hard. Two spoons of the cordial at bedtime, Mrs. Renwick, not the whole jar, or you will have these three bouncing off the walls till Lady Day.”

“May every happiness attend you, Your Grace.” It came out of the woman before she could dress it for company, and she flushed at her own boldness, and Ellen pretended not to have heard it so the woman need not have been ashamed.

The second cottage was the one Mrs. Selby had warned her of, and the roof told its tale before anyone came to the door. Half the thatch on the north pitch had gone black and fallen in, and a tarred sheet lashed over the worst of it had begun itself to perish.

A big slow careful man came round the side of the house with a billhook in his hand and stopped at the sight of her in his yard.

“Mr. Burton?”

“Aye, Your Grace.” He set the billhook against the wall, deliberately, his wife’s caution doubled in him. “Mary said you’d been by the gate. She didn’t say you’d come up the lane.”

“I said I should, when I had time for the longer tale. I have made the time.” Ellen looked up at the roof. “How long has it been like that?”

“Year and more. I patched it with the sheet last winter and the sheet’s near gone.” He said it without heat, a man long past the belief that heat would help. “There’s no money for thatch on a holding come down to what mine has.”

“And what has it come down to?”

He was quiet, the way his wife had been quiet at the gate, weighing whether a duchess was a thing you told the truth to. “It ran to the river once, my lady. Forty acres of good bottom, my father’s, and his before him. The bottom went four years back. An agent came, said His Grace had no objection, named a price that was fair enough I couldn’t fight it, and now the good land’s somebody’s I never set eyes on, and the high ground’s mine, which is stone and gorse and a roof I cannot mend.”

“His Grace had no objection.” Ellen kept her voice level. “Did the agent say so in those words, or did you assume that the duke must have known?”

Burton looked at her, and something moved behind the broad slow face, the dawning of a question he had not let himself ask in four years. “He said so, my lady. Or so near it I would not have been so rash as to accuse him of falsehood to his face. But now you put it to me plain, I never had it from any mouth but the agent’s that His Grace knew a thing about it.”

“No,” Ellen said, more to the lost hedges down toward the water than to him. “I begin to think a great many people have not.”

She gathered the basket. “Mr. Burton. I am going to speak to the land agent about your roof. Not the duke but the agent himself. The thatch will be on before the hard frost, and you will not pay for it, and if any man tells you the duke objects, you will send that man to me.”

“You will find little favor for it, Your Grace, in inquiring who purchased my bottom land, and under whose name the deed was struck.”

“I have enjoyed remarkably little favor these past twelve months, Mr. Burton. I have long since learned to content myself without it.”

***

She came back to the house as the light was failing, meaning to find Crewe the agent before he left for the night, and let herself in by the side door, and that was how she came to be in the passage outside the study while her own circumstances were decided through a half-open door.