Page 12 of The Cold Duke's Hired Bride

“That is a great deal to have kept, my lord, of a girl whose name you did not trouble to learn.”

“I learned it the day after, from my mother, and found I had no earthly use for it, and kept it anyway, which is a failing you will have remarked in me by now. I keep what no one else can be troubled to value.” He turned the ledger a quarter-turn on the table, for somewhere to put his hands. “The house is full of such things. So, you will have gathered, am I.”

“Then we are a pair of misers, you and I, hoarding the things the world threw out.” She took her quill up again, but she did not yet write with it. “I kept the memory of a boy who said nothing and changed my course. His face was gone from me this morning, and I find I could draw it tonight. I am not certain that is a comfort. A great many of the things I have kept have turned, in the keeping, to a weight one cannot set down in company.”

“You may set this one down in mine. I have a long practice at holding what other people would rather not be seen carrying.”

She set her eyes on him then, as she had not let herself since the interview. “What did you keep, my lord that no one valued? Besides the name of a girl in a ruined glove.”

“My brother’s coat. He took the good ones abroad with him and left the one with the torn lining, and I have worn it three years, since it fits, and since no one in this house would trouble to wonder why a duke goes about in his vanished brother’s cast-off with a lining that lets the wind straight through.”

“That is either very sentimental or very poor, my lord, and I cannot tell which.”

He turned the cuff up, where the worn lining showed. “Nor can I, most mornings, which is perhaps why the coat is still on my back. Poverty and sentiment wear very alike from the inside. You will know that yourself, keeping the memory of a boy because you could not afford a finer thing to keep.”

“That was unkind.”

“It was true. I am not always able to tell the two apart, and I am told it is a failing. I am beginning to suspect it is the only honest thing left about me, and I would sooner keep it than trade it for a manner.”

She gathered her quill up again. “Keep it. I have had a great deal of manner aimed at me by men who meant me harm. I find I prefer the plain unkindness of a man who does not. It is a low standard, my lord. You clear it by a head.”

***

The second letter came up with the Thursday post, and he was in the steward’s room when she broke its seal. He had not contrived to be there and could not afterward bring himself to regret it.

She kept the contents of it to herself, and he let her, for the asking would have made her choose between a fabrication and a humiliation, and he had done sums enough that year to know which of the two she would take, and exactly what the taking would cost her in the paying.

The letter, had he been the kind of man who read another’s post, ran in Lucien Trelawney’s careful hand.

“My dear cousin, I had hoped you would come to sense of your own accord before I was obliged to be plain with you. A widow of your name keeping house beneath the roof of an unattached duke is a thing that will be remarked, and remarked unkindly, and your late husband’s jointure is not so firmly settled that it cannot be looked into by a man who has the causeto look. I have the cause, and I have the patience, and I would far rather be made to spend neither of them. Come home. The trust is yours the very day you are sensibly wedded, and I have never yet asked you for a single thing your own father would not himself have wished for you.”

She finished the crooked column, and then she ruled it again straight, and her hands had steadied by the time she placed her quill down. The steadying had cost her a price he could read off the silence it was bought with.

An hour later a tray went up to her sitting room. Tea, and the good china that had escaped the pawnbroker only by being chipped, and bread and butter cut thin as the kitchen cut it for the family and never for the hall. There was no note upon the tray. There was no name to it. He had given the order to Mrs. Croft himself, in three words, and was gone down the passage before the cook could arrange her face into any opinion on the matter.

He stood in the dark of the corridor a good while longer than the simple seeing-to of a thing would account for. A well-run house looked after a valuable servant, he told himself. A tired woman did better work for a cup of tea, he told himself. He had protected an investment and nothing further, he told himself, and he stood in the cold passage with the third falsehood going stale in his mouth beside the other two, and believed not a word of any of them.

Chapter Five

“Mr. Trelawney is in the hall, my lord. He’s come for Lady Renae, and he says it like a man who expects the house to apologise for the asking.”

Declan capped the ink and set the quill in its tray. “Then he may say it to me, and the house may keep its apologies for an occasion that warrants them.”

Lucien Trelawney came in as moneyed men enter rooms they have decided to own, unhurried and already faintly amused, and he set his hat and gloves on the steward’s table without waiting to learn whether he might. He was a handsome man run a little to softness, with a smile he wore as other men wore good boots, for the wear it would take.

“My lord. How very good of you to receive me, when I had asked only for my cousin.”

“You asked for Lady Renae.”

“I asked for Mrs. Trelawney. The post she has stooped to does retire the courtesy title somewhat, would you not say.” Lucien drew off one glove, finger by finger, and left the second on. “Though it is gracious of you to keep the thing polished on her behalf. Where is she? I shan’t trouble her above the hour. Family business, tedious, and ours.”

Declan did not offer him the chair, and watched him take note of the omission and forgive it, and the forgiving sat worse on the room than offence would have.

Lucien turned a slow look about the room instead, the dead grate, the stacked ledgers, the turned cuffs of the coat on the man behind the desk, and let the look finish its sentence before he troubled to speak it aloud.

“You will pardon the observation, but this is a vast quantity of house from which to be guarding a housekeeper’s good name.One hears things, my lord, even three counties off. One hears the rents are spoken for, and the plate has gone to town, and the duke your father is not long for the keeping of any of it. I mention it only as a cousin with the family’s welfare at heart. A gentleman in want of forty thousand pounds is not, on the face of it, the soundest harbour for the woman in whose name forty thousand pounds sits frozen in a trust. People will draw the line between the two figures. They are so fond of a straight line.”

“People talk a remarkable quantity in your telling of them, Mr. Trelawney.” Declan did not rise. “I begin to suspect you do the most of the talking yourself and lend it out to them afterward, so as to be seen carrying none of it.”