Page 18 of The Cold Duke's Hired Bride

“I am already the talk of three counties. Your cousin has seen to it, and Lady Marwood has volunteered to assist him without a fee.” He let a beat go by. “One more tale of a duke and a pond will hardly overload so full an account.”

She pulled a reed apart along its seam. “It is no subject for a jest, I assure you.”

“I should do very little of what I do, by the reckoning of people who have never had to choose between their dignity and their next breath. You chose breathing tonight. I only carried it for you.”

“You rode out to the lawyer this morning. The codicil.” She had not forgotten it, even folded into a corner. “Tell me there was something.”

“There were a great many words, used carefully, to tell me what your cousin spent the past year arranging. The filed copy cannot be found, the original cannot be produced, and a man who swears upon everything he holds that no such codicil was ever drawn cannot be made to surrender what he insists has never existed. And the law, asked to choose between a grieving widow and a respectable executor who settles his accounts on the day they fall due, will choose the executor every time it is asked.”

“So. A wall?”

“A wall. I told you the honest road might prove to be one.” He turned a reed between his fingers. “I did not enjoy being right, for once in my life, which is its own small novelty.”

“I am almost touched, my lord. You so rarely object to being right that I shall have to mark the date in the household book and keep it as a feast.”

The reeds moved between them and were the only thing that did. He gave the dark a moment, then gave it something, because the dark made it possible at last.

“I came here as a boy. When the house grew unbearable.” His eyes stayed on the water. “My brother had a gift for filling a room with noise, and a whole house with it, and there was no quiet inside the walls he did not in the end find and spoil. So I found mine out here, where he never cared to come, there being no one out here for him to perform to. I counted the reeds. There are a great many reeds. It is a poor occupation, and it was the only thing that kept me in my right wits, which is more than most occupations can claim.”

“Was he cruel to you? Your brother.”

“Not cruel. Cruelty would have wanted him to notice me long enough to take aim.” He let the reed go onto the water. “He was loud. A loud man fills all the space a house has, and a quiet boy learns to live in the cracks of the place or not to live in it at all. My father admired him. They are not always different things, admiring and letting. Alaric was the whole of what a duke’s heir is drawn up to be, and I was the spare they kept folded in a drawer against the chance the first was lost.”

“And a folded thing learns not to crease itself with wanting.”

He looked at her across the reeds, because she had finished the sentence he had not meant to finish aloud. “Yes. The wanting shows, when a man is finally taken out and shaken open, in every line it left behind. You have remarked on most of mine, with your customary thoroughness.”

“I have remarked on them. I never said that I objected to them.”

He almost smiled into the dark. “That is either very reckless of you or very kind, and I find I cannot tell which.”

“Nor can I, this evening. You will have to allow me a sentence or two I have not fully weighed. I have had a trying day, and my judgment has gone to bed without me.”

She was quiet a moment, watching the reeds. “Where was your mother in all of it? The drawer, and the noise, and the boy counting reeds out here alone.”

“Departed before I was old enough to disappoint her, which my father always implied was the kinder arrangement for her.” He kept his eyes on the water. “She is a portrait on the stairs and a scent I cannot place when a certain flower is cut, and that is all I have of my mother. My father did the rest of the raising, such as it was, chiefly by admiring my brother in front of me at a volume calculated to carry.”

“That is a cold way to bring up a boy.”

“It was a cold house. He knew it, at the end.” A reed turned over in his fingers and fell to the water. “He told me, near the last, not to wed the cold. It was the only fatherly thing he ever brought himself to say to me, and he said it as a warning rather than a wish, which will tell you the make of the place better than an hour of my describing it would.”

“And have you heeded it. The warning.”

“I had every intention of heeding it. I built my whole life around the heeding of it. Locked rooms, cold sums, a house kept at a guarded distance, so that nothing within its walls might ever inflict the cruel wounds that the other did.” He was a moment finding the rest. “I am told my intentions have lately come under new management.”

“I shall have a word with the management. It sounds a meddlesome sort of concern.”

“So I am told, and it is a thorough sort of concern. It reorganised my still-room inside a single afternoon, and has been quietly reorganising the rest of me ever since, without troubling to ask my leave for any part of it.”

She let that sit, then gave something back across the dark he had not earned and did not expect.

“I miss being Lady Renae. Not the precedence. I never cared a straw for going in to dinner ahead of duller women. I miss the wall the name put up between me and the Lady Marwoods of the world. As Lady Renae she was obliged to be cruel to me carefully, behind a fan, where it could be denied by morning. As Mrs. Trelawney she may do it to my face and call it a kindness, and nothing has changed but the name, and I find the name was load-bearing, and no one warned me until it was pulled out from under the roof.”

“There are ways a name is got back.”

“There are. They all of them require a man, my lord, and I have had the one, and the experience did not recommend the institution to me.” There was no heat in it, and the flatness was worse than heat. “I would sooner keep house under my own ring of keys than keep a husband under his. A leaking roof I may at least patch myself.”

“Your husband.” It was not quite a question.