Page 20 of The Cold Duke's Hired Bride

His gaze stayed on the dark water. “Myself, at three in the morning, when the house is quiet enough that the figures say what they mean. I have not cared for what they have been saying of late. I suspect you of tampering with the books.”

They sat until the cold made it foolish. He brought her up by the hand and they went back towards the one lit window. There was no carrying her this time. Instead he offered his arm, as he might to a woman he is taking in to dinner, and she put her hand through it and let it stay. The distance between the carrying and the offering was the whole shape of the thing happening to them, and it found the lowest room in him and settled there.

Halfway across the field she spoke without turning her head. “You will not repeat it. What I said of the child.”

“No.”

“It is the single thing I have asked you for. I should like it on the record that I asked for nothing else, in case the asking proves a habit and someone makes a character of me out of it.”

He matched his stride to hers. “It is on the record. You have asked me for one thing in a month, and it was silence, which costs me nothing and is the easiest gift I have ever been in a position to give.”

At the side door she stopped, her hand still through his arm, and drew it back slowly.

“You must never do that again,” she said.

“Carry you?”

“Make me laugh when I have gone to considerable trouble to be miserable.” The ghost of the laugh was still at the corner of her mouth. “It is unsporting, my lord, and I was managing my misery beautifully until you came and interfered with the running of it.”

“I shall consider myself reprimanded, and do it again the instant you require it.”

A breath of the laugh escaped her in spite of everything. “You will do no such thing. I forbid it absolutely.”

“Then I shall wait until you forbid it rather less absolutely, which by my reckoning of you should take until about Thursday.”

She went in. He stayed where he was. The door closed between them, and the cold came up off the fields at his back.

He had spent his life building rooms that locked from the inside, precisely so that this could never reach him. It had reached him anyway, quietly, over a ledger and a tray with no name and a walk home on a borrowed arm, and he understood, alone in the dark, that he was in very deep danger.

Chapter Eight

“From his lordship, ma’am. He gave it me himself, in the passage, and said I wasn’t to let you stir before you’d read it, and I wasn’t to explain it neither, on account of it explaining itself.”

Renae took the folded paper from Annie’s careful fingers, mortified before the seal was even broken, certain it would prove one of two things. An apology that made the night larger than it had been, or a coolness that pretended the night had not happened at all.

“Did he say anything else, Annie? When he gave it you.”

“Only that I wasn’t to drop it, ma’am, and that if I read it myself I’d not understand a word of it, which I took for him being kind, on account of I did read the corner, and he was right. I didn’t understand a word.”

It was neither of the two things she had braced for. What he had written, in his plain unhurried hand, was this.

“Mrs. Trelawney is not to be disturbed before ten. Any household emergency incapable of surviving two hours unattended was poorly constructed and may be left to collapse as a lesson to us all.”

She read it twice. The second time, the thing in her chest that had braced itself for awkwardness set quietly down. He had found the one register in which he might be kind to her after she had begged him not to be. He had disguised the kindness as an administrative order and signed it like a man docking a footman’s wages.

“Is there an answer, ma’am?”

“There is. Tell his lordship the household collapsed promptly at half past eight, and that I have decided, upon his written instruction, to leave it lying where it fell until ten on the hour, as a moral lesson to the survivors.”

A sudden alarm overtook Annie’s countenance, the startled apprehension of a girl thrust a lighted flame, left ignorant that it is merely a harmless taper.

“This is merely a jest, Annie. You may carry it to him entire, word for word. He will know precisely what to do with it, which is a great deal more than I can say of most things under this roof.”

“Yes, ma’am.” She paused at the door. “I’m glad of it, ma’am. The note. The girls thought it’d be a hard morning, after, on account of mornings being hard, mostly. I shall take your jest down to him.”

Renae let the girl go and sat a moment with the absurd warm fact of being undisturbed. Nine years of matrimony had trained her to wake before she was wanted, and it had taken a stranger’s dry kindness, written out like a reprimand, to teach her that she might wake when she chose.

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