Page 22 of The Cold Duke's Hired Bride

“Clever men are paid by the word, Your Grace. I am paid by the quarter, which obliges me to be brief.”

“Brevity.” A breath dragged in and out of him. “My dearly departed wife had it. I had wedded her for her settlement and kept her for her brevity, and learned far too late that I had set the valuation the wrong way round. There is the whole of my life’s economy, madam, in a single sentence, and you may have it for nothing.”

“I am sorry, Your Grace.”

“Do not be. Sorrow is wasted on the reckonings of deceased men, and I have reckoning enough still to settle before I am one of them, so we shall not squander the daylight upon it.” His eyes came back to her face. “My son does not laugh. You will have remarked as much. He was a warm child, whatever you wouldcredit of it now, and the warmth was schooled out of him under this roof by people who ought to have weighed the cost of the lesson, and I was the chief of them.”

“Your Grace.”

“Let me finish. I have so little breath that I cannot afford to spend any of it being interrupted.” He drew in another long breath of air. “I heard him laugh last week. Through a wall, over a ledger, at something I could not comprehend and would not have asked to be told. I am departing this world, madam, and an expiring man must count his pennies close, and that laugh was the richest coin anyone has put into my hand in this house in a decade.”

“Your Grace flatters the ledger.”

“I flatter nothing. My time is clearly spent. It is the one economy that leaving this world makes easy.” His look held her, mild and merciless together. “I shall say no more upon it. I have said a great deal too much already, which is the single privilege of a man who will not be here long enough to be embarrassed by the saying of it.”

She held the bowl while he took the last of it, and his eyes went past her shoulder to the doorway, where Declan had come to stand without her having heard him arrive. The old man looked at his son a long moment. Then he looked at Renae, and then back to his son, and a knowledge settled into the ruin of his face that was not a smile and was a long way from a question. He had read all of it at a glance, as he had read everything else. He turned his eyes back to her, deliberately, and let her watch him decline to say it aloud, and let his son watch the declining. In a man with so little breath left to spend, the declining carried like speech.

Renae took up the empty bowl and made her curtsey and got herself out of the room before the silence could ask her anything she had no answer ready for.

He was in the corridor when she came out, leaning against the panelling as though he had been there an hour and would deny it under oath.

“He ate it,” she said warmly.

“I heard. I believe the entire landing heard. The soup was threatened with the linen cupboard, and the soup, being a sensible soup, surrendered.”

“It was a fair threat.” She had not smiled. “I meant every word of it.”

“I have no doubt of it whatever. You threatened me with a column of figures once, in this very house, and I have not passed an easy night since.” He turned the next of it over before he let it out. “You had my note.”

“I framed it. In my mind. It hangs beside the other, where you ordered the household to collapse upon a fixed schedule.”

“I did not order it to collapse. I ordered it left collapsed. There is a distinction in that, and a man in my position is obliged to cling to his distinctions, having so few other things left to cling to.” His eyes stayed off her face, and she understood that now in a way she had not a week before, that it was a courtesy and not a coldness, and that he was leaving her a wall to be private against. “You will tell me, if ten on the hour should prove insufficient.”

“I require nothing, my lord. Requiring nothing is the single study at which I have ever made myself the foremost living authority in England.”

“Yes. I had gathered as much.” He said it without the dryness, only the once, and then he put the dryness back on as one shrugs into a coat in a cold passage. “Go and eat something yourself. That is not an instruction, and it is not management, whatever your face is preparing to accuse me of being. It is an observation that you have carried soup to a duke this morning and have carried none to the housekeeper, and the housekeeperis the one member of this staff I have lately discovered I cannot replace.”

“That is a great deal of weight to hang upon a woman before her breakfast, my lord.”

“It is. I find I have a talent for it I had not suspected in myself.” A silence he did not trouble himself to fill. “I shall not say it again, if it discomfits you. I am setting it down the once, for the record, in case the house should ever require reminding which of us keeps it upright.”

“The house knows. It is only too proud to say so.”

“Then we are two proud houses, Mrs. Trelawney, and one of us has lately learned to speak.”

She studied him a moment. “You are in an odd humour this morning, my lord.”

“I am in an honest one. The two are easily confused in a house that has had so little practice with the second of them.”

“Then practise,” she said, before she had quite decided to.

“I intend to. I am told the housekeeper is very strict upon the point.”

He left her with that, and the leaving spared her the labour of an answer. It was the nearest he had come, in the cold sober light of an ordinary Tuesday, to the dark edge of the pond.

***

The London letter came two days after, and Beatrice read it through twice and laid it face up on the breakfast table. She laid things there only when she had decided they would be discussed whether or not anyone present wished it.