Page 19 of The Cold Duke's Hired Bride

“Sir Malcolm.” She kept her eyes on the moon and off him. “He was not cruel either, before you find a place for him on the list. He was cold, which is a different country and a colder one. Cruelty at least obliges a man to think of you long enough to take aim, and Malcolm never thought of me at all. I came with a good name and a thin settlement. He was disappointed in the settlement, and took the disappointment out in not seeing me, which he managed with a really remarkable consistency for the whole length of the matrimony.”

“That is the worst thing you have told me tonight.”

“It is the truest, and the two keep company, as we have established.” The corner of her mouth moved, the first sign of weather clearing. “I would have taken blows over it, by the end. A blow is at least an admission that the other person is in the room with you.”

“How did you enter into matrimony with him?”

“My father passed and left me a title that was no use to a daughter and debts that were a great deal of use to his creditors. I was young, and unprotected, and Malcolm offered a roof.” She turned the matter over with no heat left in it. “A roof, to a girl who has only just learned what it is to be without one, greatly resembles affection. I learned the difference. It is one of the more expensive educations there is, and the only one no one warns a girl she is enrolling in until the fees fall due.”

“You need not make that face, my lord. I have had it from kinder ones and it never improved the facts.” Her chin held its line. “I made the only bargain on the table, and I kept my half of it, and the chief thing I have to show for the keeping is that I now know to the penny what a roof costs, and I have never since mistaken one for a home.”

“And you came here, in the end, to keep another man’s roof for a wage instead.”

“A wage is honest, my lord. It does not pretend to be cherished, and it does not expect to be thanked as though it were.”

She let a slow breath go, and when she spoke again the weather had lifted in her voice. “You are easier to talk to in the dark, my lord. You should conduct all the estate’s business by moonlight. The tenants would weep with gratitude and the candle bill would mend itself overnight.”

She almost smiled at the water. “You are learning to manage your own house. I take a professional pride in it.”

“You are learning to laugh at the bottom of a pond at midnight, having sworn off it within the hour. I take a less professional pride in that, and shall not examine the pride too closely in case it proves to be something I have not budgeted for.”

The lightness held a breath, and then it went out of her face as a candle does when a door opens somewhere out of sight.

“I was never cruel to my servants, whatever Thomas wishes to believe.”

“I know that.”

She turned her head from the water to him. “How can you possibly know it? You have had the keeping of me a month.”

“Because cruelty leaves a residue on a person, as smoke leaves it on a wall, and you do not carry the smell of it.” He had stood in cold houses enough to trust his nose past argument. “My father’s, for one, before it thawed too late to do any of us the smallest good. You have a great many faults, Renae. I am compiling the list with care, and it runs to a respectable length. Cruelty is not on it, and I have stopped going back to check.”

The reeds moved. The moon kept its doubled place. She said the next thing to the water, away from his face, and he understood that to be the only road she had for the saying of it.

“All I ever wanted was to be a mother.” It came out with no self-pity anywhere in it, and the plainness of it was what made it past bearing. “That is the whole of the want. Not a title, not a settlement, not a great house with my name above the door. A child. I had a nursery papered and standing ready in a house where I was never once warm, and I kept the linen folded in it the length of the matrimony, and there was no one, ever, to wrap in any of it. And now I am nine-and-twenty, and a housekeeper, and the only nurseries I shall stand in for the rest of my life are other women’s.”

He offered her none of the usual coins, not that she was young yet, nor that there was time, nor a gracious fate which arranged such things to a kindly plan. He had reached for a sum to settle every other trouble she set before him, and understood now, in the cold reeds, that there was none on earth that answered this one, and that reaching for one would be a cruelty wearing the coat of help.

“Then I am sorry,” he said, “that the world saw fit to punish you for wanting something so gentle.”

She was quiet a long moment. When she spoke again it was to him, and not to the pond.

“You did not try to mend it.”

“No.”

“Everyone tries to mend it. They tell me I am young, or that Providence is wise, or that a woman finds other uses for her affection, as though a child were a draught one took a substitute for when the apothecary was out of the proper one.” Her voice was steady, and that was its own wound. “You did not reach for one of them.”

“There is no sum for it. I looked, being good at the looking, and found none at all.”

“Of that I am aware.” She drew her shawl closer. “It appears to be also the thing I have come, against the whole of my better judgment, to lean upon. I would be obliged if you did not make a study of that, my lord. I have given you quite enough to remark on for one night.”

“Then I shall remark on none of it, and add it instead to the considerable list of things about you I have noticed and said nothing of.”

She looked up from the water. “There is such a list.”

“There is a ledger. You would approve of the keeping of it. It is the most careful set of accounts in the house, and the only one I have never once shown the auditor.”

“And who is the auditor, in this figure of yours.”