Page 2 of The Cold Duke's Hired Bride

Renae let out the breath she had been holding and went to Tess, who had stayed on her knees as though the floor were the safest place in the house.

“Leave the rest of it. Go down to Cook and ask for the warm bread, the first loaf out of the oven, and you are to sit while you eat it. Tell her I said so, if she fusses over it.”

“Yes, my lady.” Tess looked up, her lashes wet, her chin held hard against the wet. “Thank you, my lady. I’ll be quicker tomorrow, I promise it.”

“You will be exactly as quick as anyone can be who is watched while she works,” she said gently, “which is to say no quicker at all. Go on now, before it cools.”

The moment the door had closed, Renae worked the last sliver of china out of the seam of the boards with her own fingers, so that no one coming after would take a heel on it.

She had been Lady Renae Whitmore once, in a warmer house than this. The Earl of Whitmore had treasured his daughter and spent his money against a future he never doubted he would see, and when he passed away she learned that an earl could leave a girl her courtesy title and not one shilling to dress it in. A fine name and a thin purse were a known quantity in any London season, weighed and valued by every careful mother in the room, and she had gone at last to the only bidder who wanted the name badly enough to overlook the purse. She had entered into matrimony with Sir Malcolm for a roof no man could put her out from under on a quarter’s notice, and he had wedded her for the credit a wellborn wife lent his table. Each had got the bargain struck across her father’s final resting place, and neither a thing warmer than the paper of it.

She went up the back stairs an hour later with no errand she could have named aloud, and stopped at the door at the end of the upper passage that the whole household had learned not to speak of. The nursery had been furnished in the first year, when she still took the cold for a season and not the climate of the place. Inside stood a low bed under the slope of the ceiling, with a nurse’s chair set hopefully by the window where the light fell best. Against the far wall sat a press of small linen, folded and turned and folded again by her own hands across years enoughto wear it soft at the edges and nowhere else, since there had been no one to wear it.

She lifted the topmost square. The lawn fabric had gone soft from the handling and lay light against her palm, hemmed at every edge by her own candlelit stitches. It weighed nothing in her hand and had wrapped nothing. No child had been warmed in it, no crying stilled, no milk spilled to spoil it, and in this house, with this man, none ever would. She smoothed the cloth flat under her thumb as she had on a hundred quiet evenings, and the motion had long since stopped being hope and worn down into habit, colder than hope to find still living in her hands.

Whatever rose in her she put down by the same method she had used on most things she wanted, without a sound and from the outside, and secured the door upon it.

***

He passed away three days later, and he did it as he had done all else, somewhere she was not.

Mrs. Dunne brought the word up to the morning room on the Tuesday, where Renae sat over her mending, the housekeeper’s hands folded too tight at her waist.

“My lady. There is a man come up from Bath, from the house there. It concerns Sir Malcolm.”

“Tell me plainly, Mrs. Dunne. I would sooner have it whole than fed to me in pieces.”

“He was taken ill at his dinner, two nights since. A seizure of the heart, the man says, and very sudden with it. They did what there was to do.” The housekeeper held her voice steady to the end of it and then felt it thin. “He is gone, my lady. I’m grieved to be the one to carry it up to you.”

“Was he alone, at the end of it?”

“No, my lady. Mr. Lucien was with him. He had been at his side these past three days.”

Of course he had. She kept the thought behind her teeth.

“What would you have me do, my lady?” Mrs. Dunne asked it because someone had to, and that someone was never going to be him.

“The same as any other morning. Air the front rooms, for there will be callers by noon, and send to the draper for black crape before the news outruns our stock of it.” She drew her needle through the cloth, even-handed, and set it down. “Grief in this house will be managed like everything else in it. Competently, and on the day it is due.”

“Yes, my lady.” Her mouth worked once before she trusted it with more. “And I am sorry. Truly I am.”

“I know you are. You are the first this morning to say it and mean both halves of it, and I shall remember which of you did.”

***

By the account that came up the road ahead of the coffin, Sir Malcolm had spent his last clear hour on his keys and his papers and a low instruction to the cousin at his bedside, and not a syllable of it on the wife three counties away. It was the careful demise he had spent his life rehearsing, witnessed and documented to the final page by the one relation who could be trusted to turn even a deathbed to account.

Lucien arrived on the Thursday, ahead of the coffin, a black band already on his sleeve and Sir Malcolm’s ring of keys already hung at his own belt.

“Cousin Renae.” He caught both her hands before she had come down the last of the stairs. “My poor cousin. What a severe affliction. To be snatched away so suddenly. It is terrible indeed.”

“Lucien.” She let him keep her hands the length the occasion allowed, and then she drew them back. “You were with him.”

“To the very end. He knew me, and he was easy at the last. Keep that for a comfort, I beg you.” He pressed a clean handkerchief into the service of a dry eye. “He spoke of you. Among the last of it.”

“He spoke of his keys, I am given to understand.”

A transient show of grief flitted across his countenance, only to be immediately checked and hidden from view. “He was careful to the final hour, and it does him every credit. He charged me with all of it, cousin. The estate, and the seeing of you safe and provided for. I mean to honour that to the letter, whatever the cost should fall to me.”