Page 23 of The Cold Duke's Hired Bride

“The Ossorys have remembered, quite suddenly, that they are full for the season.” Beatrice tapped the page with one finger. “The Pleydells find their numbers will not, after all, stretch to take in Declan. Three more houses will make the same discoveryby Friday, and you may set your clock by the order they arrive in.”

“Over Alaric.”

“That is the reason written upon the paper. Alaric’s scandal is two full years cold, and it has never once kept a hostess from seating Declan at her best table, because a duke’s heir is a duke’s heir and an old scandal is no more than a flavour to a dull dinner.” Beatrice’s voice stayed very level, the pitch Renae had learned to read as true anger. “What has altered is not Alaric. What has altered is that Mrs. Allardyce called here on Tuesday, and stayed her full hour, and was heard to remark to her own coachman as she climbed into the carriage how very comfortable dear Lord Declan looked these days with his housekeeper. Mrs. Allardyce’s carriage is the swiftest post in three counties and the least honest of the lot.”

Renae set down the cup she had been holding without once drinking from it.

“So it is me,” she said.

“It is the look of the thing, which to the people who compose these letters is the entire thing and the only portion they trouble to read at all. They do not care one straw what you are to one another in fact. They care what it can be made to seem in the retelling, and you have handed them something that seems, by the one unforgivable crime of making a dying house comfortable and a cold man laugh inside it.”

Renae heard her own voice come out flat and practical. “Then I shall be less comfortable to be near. It is a thing that can be managed. I have managed a great deal harder than my own face.”

“You will do no such foolish thing, and if you attempt it he will notice inside a day, because he notices everything that concerns you, and there lies the whole of our present difficulty.” Beatrice folded the letter along its crease and pressed it flat withher palm. “Hear me, for I am old and I am right, which is a rare and valuable pairing in any one woman. Should you grow cold to save him, he will follow the cold to its source like a hound after blood, and arrive at the truth far faster than the gossips will, and you will have ruined the whole thing in the saving of it.”

“Then what would you have me do?”

“For the present, nothing whatever, which is the hardest labour there is and the one you are least practised in.” She laid her hand flat upon the folded letter.

“And what will you say to him? When you give it to him.”

“The truth, which is the only thing he has ever respected and the last thing anyone in his life has troubled to hand him. That the invitations are withdrawn, that the reason on the paper is a falsehood, and that the falsehood will cost him nothing he ever valued in the first place.” Beatrice’s mouth thinned to a line. “I shall not tell him the part that touches you. He will arrive at that part himself, and a man who arrives at a thing on his own feet owns it, whereas a man who has it pressed into his hand spends the rest of his life suspecting he was robbed of it.”

“You are managing him.”

“I am managing the manner of his finding out, which is an entirely different trade. There is all the difference in the world, child, between steering a man towards a door and shoving him bodily through it, and I have buried two husbands learning precisely where the one ends and the other begins.”

Renae turned the spoon over in her saucer. “And if I do nothing, and it grows worse regardless?”

“Then we shall do the next sensible thing, and the one after that, until the season wearies of us, as seasons always do.” Beatrice’s voice gentled by a degree. “Scandal is a fire that wants constant feeding. Starve it of fresh comfortable looks across a sickroom and it will eat itself hollow inside a month.”

Beatrice rose, with the slow deliberation of a woman whose joints held strong opinions on the matter. “I do not tell you all this to wound you. I tell you because you are the one person under this roof clear-headed enough to do something sensible with the knowing of it. My nephew will do something magnificently foolish with it inside the hour he reads it, which is exactly why I mean to be the one who hands it to him, and exactly why you will allow me.”

Renae looked at the small heap of withdrawn invitations and understood, with the particular cold of a thing she had refused for a fortnight to see, that the warmth she had been so quietly proud of building was the very rope they would use to hang him.

They were the two pieces of evidence that counted, and she had gathered them both herself, and carried them across with her own two hands, and set them down in front of the very people who would use them against him.

Chapter Nine

“This is the wing, then. The one the house pretends it has not got.”

“It is. Wells gave me the key this morning as though he were handing over a thing that might bite, and then he found a sudden press of urgent business at the far end of the house.” Renae fitted the key, and the lock gave with a complaint. “I cannot spare a maid for it, my lord. They are every one of them counting linen I have not yet the heart to tell them is past counting. So it is the two of us, or it is another winter shut.”

“Then it is the two of us.” He took the door before it could swing back on her. “I should warn you that I have reopened nothing in my life. You will have to tell me which end of a dust sheet is the dangerous one.”

“Both ends, my lord. That is the first lesson, and the only one most people require. A sheet has spent three years collecting everything the room wished to be rid of, and it gives the lot up at once, to whoever is nearest and best dressed.”

He glanced down at the worn cuff of his coat. “Then I am glad I wore the old coat.”

“You wore the old coat to a wing you have not entered in years, having known since breakfast that I meant to open it. I draw my conclusions about a man’s hopes from his choice of coat, my lord. It is the most honest thing most gentlemen tell me in a day.”

The room beyond held the particular cold of a place that had given up expecting anyone. Furniture stood under sheets in the shapes of furniture, somehow worse than bareness would have been, a roomful of patient grey ghosts waiting to be told the family was not coming back. He could not have said how long ithad been since he last stood in it without sitting down to count, and the not being able to say was its own kind of answer.

“Your family abandoned a fair part of itself in here.” She lifted a corner and folded it back. “There is a writing desk under this one worth more than a quarter’s wages, sitting in the dark, doing no one alive any good.”

“My family was rich enough to be careless and proud enough to name the carelessness taste. We did not abandon things. We merely ceased to regard them, which my father will maintain is an entirely different matter, though it is no such thing.”

She placed the catalogue book and the lead pencil into his hands. “Then you shall write and I shall lift, and between us we will make the house confess what it owns. Read me back the last thing I said, so I am sure you are attending.”