Page 33 of Reclaimed By Her Scottish Duke

“Loud. Crowded. Expensive past all reason.” Magnus let a beat pass. “But I’ll say the timber in yer park is the finest I’ve seen since I crossed the Tweed. I noticed it comin’ up the drive. Ye must have four hundred years of oak out there. However does a man keep a stand like that this close to a city forever hungry for firewood?”

It was, he thought, a shameless piece of work, and he watched it land exactly as Rosaline had promised it would.

Ulverton’s chin lifted. The fist of his face opened by a knuckle.

“Five hundred years,” he corrected, leaning back in his seat. “My great-grandfather planted the eastern avenue. People imagine timber tends itself. It does not. It needs management, Your Grace. Continuity. A steady hand across generations, each one holding the thing in trust for the next and resisting the temptation to cash it in for ready money.” He looked into the fire. “That is the whole of it, in the end. Everything worth having is held in trust. Land. Name. Order itself. You cannot spend it and keep it both.”

“Nay,” Magnus agreed quietly. “Ye cannae.”

And he meant it, more than the old man could know.

Something of that must have carried because Ulverton’s pale eyes flicked up from the fire and settled on him with the first flicker of genuine attention.

He was silent a moment, and Magnus made himself wait through it without filling the quiet, which was its own small torture. He had spent years being a man who said the true thing at once. Sitting on his tongue felt like sitting on his hands.

“You have land in the north.”

“I do. Poorer land than this and a deal more of it. Hill country. Sheep, and tenants who’ve farmed the same glens since before me family had the name.” Magnus turned his hat once in his hands and set it down. “I ken what ye mean about holdin’ a thing in trust, Me Lord. I’ve buried the men who held mine before me, and I’ll answer to the men who come after for what I do with it. It concentrates the mind.”

“It does.” Ulverton studied him. “And what do you make of the mood of the country, Your Grace, seen from those glens of yours? There are men in this town who would have me believe the whole edifice is perfectly sound.”

Here was the test, the real one, dressed as idle talk. Say the reckless thing and be marked a radical; say the flattering thing and be marked a fool who would say anything. Magnus picked his way between.

“I’d say the edifice is sound and the ground beneath it is movin’, and a wise man watches both.” He kept his voice even. “There’s hunger in the manufacturing towns that isnae goin’ away by bein’ ignored, and there are men who’d use that hunger for their own ends, who care nothin’ for the poor devils they’d set marchin’. I’ve no love for the mob, Me Lord. I’ve less for the clever men who’d light the fuse and stand well back. Order’s worth keepin’. But order that only ever asks and never gives is a wall built without mortar. It stands grand until the day it doesnae.”

The room went quiet. The fire crackled.

“That,” Ulverton said at last, “is a more considered answer than I have received from men who have sat in the Lords for thirty years.” He regarded Magnus with open reassessment now, the disappointment he had been armed with laid quietly aside. “You are not what I was told to expect.”

“I’m told that a great deal of late, Me Lord. I’m learnin’ to take it as a compliment.”

The ghost of the Earl’s smile came a little nearer to the surface this time.

They talked for the better part of an hour, and Magnus did the thing that cost him most in all the world—to listen without leaping. He let Ulverton range across the price of grain, the folly of the young, the war and its endless bill, and he asked his questions in the shape Rosaline had taught him, questions that let the old man answer at length and think himself brilliant for it. Only now and then did Magnus lay down an observation of his own, and each time he did, he watched the Earl’s regard for him climb another rung.

He did not once mention his father. He was not that foolish. But near the end, he steered close to the years that mattered, to the intelligence men and the sealed committees of the war. He watched Ulverton’s face for anything that moved and filed away every name the old man dropped in passing.

When the clock struck, Ulverton rang for his man.

“You will come to me next Thursday,” he said as Magnus rose and bowed his head again. “There are two or three men you ought to meet, and who ought, I’m beginning to think, to get to know you. Danvers among them. He is a difficult man, and he will test you.” A pause, and his pale eyes sharpened. “But I suspect you are less easily discouraged than you allow yourself to appear.”

“Me Lord.” Magnus bowed a third time, lower than before. “Ye’re doing me a favor I’ll nae forget.”

“See that you keep it.” Ulverton lowered his hands to his lap and closed his eyes, an old man conserving his warmth. “Good day, Your Grace.”

Magnus stepped out of the great cold house and down the steps into the ordinary noise of the street, and did not let the knot in his chest loosen until the door had shut behind him and there was no one to see it.

Danvers. Thursday. A door he had been slamming his head against for a year, and it had swung open on a bow and a lie about oak trees.

Leo was leaning against the carriage. He read Magnus’s face in an instant, and his expression eased.

“Well,” he drawled. “You did not hit him.”

“I complimented his timber for an hour and let him teach me about grain.” Magnus climbed up. “I’d sooner have hit him. It would have been more honest and taken less out of me.”

“And yet.” Leo swung up after him and rapped the roof. “That is the entire education. Honesty is a luxury for men no one is watching. You are watched, so you learn to lie beautifully, in the correct forms, until the men who matter forget to be afraid of you, and then you find what you came for while they are busy admiring your manners.” He grinned. “Someone has taught you very well, I must say. Better than I managed. I don’t suppose you’d care to tell me who?”

“Nay,” Magnus said. “I wouldnae.”