Page 10 of The Cold Duke's Hired Bride

He inclined his head and left her to the ledgers. The leaving was its own small mercy. He had judged rightly that she had no wish to be watched climbing down off the steps.

Her room lay below the family floor, narrow and clean and cold, with a window no larger than a book. She let the day arrive all at once on the edge of the servant’s bed, the whispering maids, the folded arms, the half-mocking curtsey one of them had dropped her before remembering she was meant to do it in earnest. A year past she had still been Lady Renae in a house of thirty rooms. The humiliation came whether or not she gave it leave, and she let it come dry-eyed, for tears were a habit she had broken in a colder room than this.

The letter would be unkind before the seal broke. His kindness and his cruelty came out in the one hand, and this one ended as he always ended, with a kindness made in the shape of a fist.

“You cannot hide behind a ring of keys forever, cousin. The trust will not open itself, and only I hold the means to ease your present circumstances. Come home before you embarrass us both.”

He had found her in three days. She had run three counties to put herself out of his reach, and it had cost him three days and the price of a stamp to lay a hand on her sleeve regardless. She set the letter beneath the candlestick and turned the wick down low, and the ring of keys at her own waist, the housekeeper’skeys a tired steward had pressed on her that morning, hung heavier against her hip than they had at noon.

Chapter Four

“She’s turned off the brandy merchant, my lord, and he, who owed the better part of forty pound.”

Declan did not look up at once from the rent-roll. An hour of being stared at had not improved it. “On what grounds, Mr. Wells. Temper, or arithmetic?”

“Arithmetic, she says. We’re to order no more on credit from a man we cannot pay the standing bill to, and she says he’s been watering the casks besides, which is why the last lot turned so quick on us.”

“And is he watering them?”

Wells spread his hands. “I couldn’t rightly say, my lord.”

“Then we shall find out, since Mrs. Trelawney appears to have found out without troubling either of us for the leave to do it.”

And thus, he became acquainted with the circumstance. The casks in the cellar ran a third weak against the bottle his father had laid down in a better year, and the merchant, pressed on the point, discovered an urgent appointment in a distant county. By the Friday he had given up expecting to be asked first.

Thomas came to him on the Monday. Declan had not looked for it. Thomas guarded his grievances as other men guard money.

“I’ll say it plain, my lord, and the new housekeeper having made plain the fashion. There’s a deal of bad feeling below stairs over the candle-ends.”

“Bad feeling is the house’s chief crop this year.” He set the rent-roll aside. “What of the candle-ends?”

“She counts them. Weighs the stubs against the issue, like a man counting his change off a stranger he’s decided not to trust.It’s an insult to honest service, my lord. That’s the shape of the feeling.”

“And is the service honest?”

Thomas took his time over the answer, and the time itself was the answer. “I couldn’t answer for every man under the roof.”

“No more could I, Thomas, until a fortnight ago, when there was no one counting and every man could answer for himself in the dark.”

He went and found her in the still-room with the candle-book open, and put it to her directly, because directness was the one currency they had so far agreed to trade in.

“Thomas informs me the hall is in revolt over the candle-ends.”

“The hall is in revolt over being counted, my lord, which is a different grievance and a more honest one.” Her tally went on without a hitch. “Sixty pounds of wax went out of this house last year as issued candles and came back as nothing whatever. Wax does not evaporate. It walks, in a pocket, and I have formed a fair notion of whose pocket, though I shall not say the name to you yet.”

“You have a thief and you will not name him.”

“I will name him when I can prove him and not one hour before. I would sooner lose sixty pound of tallow than lose my own justice over it, my lord. A housekeeper who accuses on a suspicion is a worse creature than the thief she chases, for the thief robs only the larder, and she robs the trust of every honest servant who watches her do it. That mends slower than a stolen candle, and costs the house a great deal more.”

He had braced himself for a week of correcting her. He got a fortnight of standing behind her while she was proved right, the more uncomfortable posture of the two. He knewwhat to do with another’s error and stood empty-handed before competence.

“Your footman Finch has done you a service worth more than the candles,” she told him on the Wednesday, across the week’s books in the steward’s room. “He informed me, quietly, in an empty passage, that Sowerby the corn-chandler keeps a thumb on his scale for this house in particular, on the sound reasoning that this house has not been in a position to argue the weight of anything in a year. We have been paying for eleven stone in every ten.”

“Finch told you that of his own accord.”

“He waited until the passage was empty before he told me, which means he understood the worth of what he was handing over and handed it across regardless.” She ruled a line beneath the column. “You keep one footman who pockets your candle-ends and one who guards your corn, my lord. The whole distance between those two men is nearly everything that is wrong with this house and everything that might yet be right with it, set out for you in a pair of liveries.”

“And I am to know which is which by your reckoning.”