Page 11 of The Cold Duke's Hired Bride

“You are to know which is which by watching who helps you when there is nothing in it for the helping. It is the only test that has never once been untruthful to me, and I have had occasion to run it on a great many people.”

“You will want to settle something about the wages before the quarter-day,” she went on, before he could ask what occasion, “or Sowerby’s thumb will be the least of what troubles you.”

“You are bold, Mrs. Trelawney, for a woman in a precarious position.”

“Precarious positions require balance, my lord, not silence.” She set the figure down without a tremor. “A woman who whispers on a narrow ledge falls precisely as far as the one whospeaks, and looks a great deal more foolish on the way down. The wages stand eleven weeks in arrears. The staff have been patient well past the point at which patience is a fair thing to ask of the unpaid. You told me you meant to save this house. You will not save it with people who have stopped believing they will ever be paid, and belief, as I have had the impertinence to tell you once already, is the dear part. The rest is only counting, and the counting of this house is bleak.”

“You are very free with the word save, for a house you have kept three weeks.”

“I am very free with my labor for it, my lord, which gives me some small standing to be free with the word. I do not waste myself on corpses. You had that from me the first night, and you have given me no reason since to revise it.”

There is money that is not the estate’s, but my very own. What little of it the entail cannot reach, set by out of my commission and never spent. It will clear the worst of the arrears and leave next to nothing standing behind it.

“Then it is hardly my place to tell you to spend it.”

“No. It is not your place.” He drew the bank-book across the table between them. “And yet you would tell me to, if it were.”

“I would have told you to spend it a fortnight since, and spared you the watered brandy in the interval. I am telling you to spend it now, which is the next best hour to a fortnight ago, and a great deal better than the quarter-day.”

He wrote it regardless, a colder species of kindness and a kindness all the same. She noted the difference between the two and declined to remark on it, and he was more grateful for the silence than he had any tidy language to say.

“You might have told me there was money, my lord, and spared the house a fortnight of holding its breath.”

“I might have. The last of a thing does not leave my hand easily, and that figure was the last of a great many things. I hadgrown fond of the having of it, as a man grows fond of a door he need not yet open.”

She blotted the figure dry. “And now you have opened it.”

“Now you have opened it for me, which is not the same, and which I shall recall the next time you inform me a thing cannot be afforded. You have a way of being right that leaves a man no pride to retreat behind.”

“I shall endeavour to be wrong from time to time, my lord, for the sake of your dignity.”

He very nearly smiled, and did not. “Do not trouble. Dignity is maintained at a far lesser cost in order to replace than the brandy.”

The books kept them both late after that, more evenings than not. She had ordered the unused rooms shut to spare the coal and then exempted the steward’s room, where the work was done. It was the kind of small sense the house had been starving on for two winters together. They did not talk a great deal. When they did, the few years between them wore thinner than he had given them any leave to.

“You have not asked me why a duke keeps his own books at midnight, when he keeps a steward to do it and a housekeeper now to check the steward’s sums.”

“You have not asked me a great many things, which is among the chief of your virtues. I keep them because the figures are the one part of this house that has never yet been untruthful to me, and I have grown to need a thing in my day that cannot. Do not suffer your vanity to be excited by it.”

“You knew this house before me, I do believe.” She turned a page without lifting her eyes from it. “Or it knew you. You move through it like a man remembering, and not at all like a man learning it.”

“I was born in it. My brother was raised to it. I was raised alongside it, which is a different preposition, and a colder place to be brought up from.”

She was quiet a moment, and a memory settled into its place behind her eyes. “There was a boy at a garden party here, a great many summers ago, who steered a girl round a puddle the rest of them stood waiting for her to fall into. He never said a word. He only altered her course and let her keep her shoes and her dignity both, and she never did learn his name, since he was exactly the sort of boy a house of this kind teaches itself not to see.”

“I scarcely remember it.” It was a falsehood, and a poor one, and he held still while she made up her mind whether she would let him keep it.

“You disliked sugared almonds, as I recall.”

She set down her quill. “I beg your pardon, my lord?”

“My mother’s garden party. You hid them in your glove rather than eat them, and you were found out when they melted in the sun, and you made your curtsey to the bishop with the one hand sticky and the other tucked behind your back where he could not see the ruin you had made of your glove.”

“You said, not a moment ago, that you scarcely remembered me.”

“I said no such thing. I said it had been a long time. The two are not the same, whatever you have decided to hear in it.” He let it lie between them on the table with the ledgers. “You called me the sort of boy a house like this teaches itself not to see. It is a true thing, and it leaves a boy with a great quantity of unspent attention, which he is obliged to spend on something, since it will not keep. I spent a fair measure of mine on the girl with the ruined glove, who curtseyed to a bishop as though her hand were dry and let no one in the garden see what it cost her. I had notthought of her in years. The occasion has rather presented itself of late.”

For a moment she did not answer him at all, and he had the uncommon sensation of having said precisely as much as he meant, and not one syllable past it.