Page 25 of The Cold Duke's Hired Bride

“That is either the most flattering or the most alarming thing anyone has said to me in a decade.”

“It is both,” she said, and went back to the lifting. “The two are rarely far apart, in my experience, and never at all where you are concerned.”

She paused with her hand flat on the next sheet. “You have gone quiet, my lord.”

“I am attending. You instructed me to attend.”

“You are attending to something that is not the catalogue. I can hear exactly where the lead pencil stops.” Her back stayed to him. “If it is the chair beneath the window, it is sound, only wormed in the one leg, and well worth the saving.”

“It was not the chair.”

“Then it was idleness, and idleness is dear at present, with only the two of us and the light already going. Lift.”

He lifted the next of them, and the family came out of the dark a piece at a time, each thing she named and he wrote, until there was a tall shape against the far wall, sheeted to the floor, the wrong shape entirely for furniture.

“That one is yours, my lord. I keep a rule about faces. I do not unwrap a person I have not been introduced to.”

He drew the sheet down himself. The dust came with it in a soft fall and he let it come. There was a portrait on the stairs that he passed every day and had long since stopped seeing, and this was not that one. This was older, and larger, and she was young in it, younger than he had ever managed to imagine her, painted before the house had finished its work on her, and the painter had caught something about the mouth that the stairs portrait had either lost or never held.

His hand went to the frame to steady it. Hers was already there, at the same corner, and neither of them drew back. The moment ran a breath past the point where it could still be called an accident.

“She would have liked you,” he said, and surprised himself in the saying of it.

“You cannot know that. We never met.”

“She liked people who said true things to my brother’s face. There were never enough of them. You would have been an oasis.”

She turned the question back at him without releasing the frame. “And did you say true things to his face, my lord?”

“No. I was the second son.” He let his attention rest on the painted young woman who had not lived to see what the house would make of either of her boys. “I said true things to ponds, where they could do no damage.”

“That is a great waste of true things.”

“It is the second son’s economy. You learn early which of your true things the house can afford, and you say only those, and the rest you carry down to the water.” He paused over it. “I have perhaps four memories of her, and I am no longer certain two of them are not borrowed from the portrait on the stairs. A scent. A green sleeve. Her hand at the back of my neck the once, in church, when I would not sit still. That is the whole estate she left me, and I have spent it carefully, and I am nearly through it.”

“That is not nothing.”

“It is very nearly nothing. Four coins and a face I must take on the word of a painter who was paid to flatter the sitter.”

Her hand was still at the frame’s corner, near his. “Four coins more than a great many people are ever left, and you have not lost the one of them in thirty years, which tells me precisely what they were worth to the boy who kept them.”

His attention came off the portrait and onto her. “You are very certain, for a woman who never met either of us.”

“I am certain of the boy. The man I am still counting.” She looked from the portrait to him and back. “But the boy who wound a clock no one asked him to wind, and kept his brother’s horse, and carried his true things down to the water so they would trouble nobody, that boy I have entire. He is not a difficult sum, my lord. He is only one that no one before me has troubled to do, because the doing of it asked for someone to sit in the cold with the books and genuinely want the answer, and this house has been very short of both for a very long time.”

She laughed then, not a large laugh, and she tried to keep the most of it behind her hand. He watched her do it, the dust still pale in her honey blonde tresses and the laugh she did not quite trust herself to spend, and he understood he was in trouble past any sum he could foot.

“You may enter her in the catalogue,” he said, once his voice was reliably his own. “Under things the family abandoned and ought not to have.”

“I shall do no such thing. She is uncovered now, and uncovering is the very opposite of abandoning, and I shall send Annie up to dust her and the chair beneath the window, and the room may give over pretending to be empty.” Renae folded her sheet across her arm. “Houses do better when someone consents to look at them. I have said it to you before, and I begin to bore even myself with the saying of it.”

“You do not bore me.” He let it out before he had cleared it for release. “That is also a true thing, and I find I have lately run quite out of ponds, and a man without ponds is obliged to say his true things to whoever is standing nearest, which I am beginning to suspect was the whole design of the arrangement.”

He had carried the letter in his coat since breakfast, meaning to read it alone as he read everything that mattered. He took it out instead in the half-cleared room with the dust still hanging in the light, and he read it aloud to her, because she had become, without his ever having decided it, the person he thought aloud in front of.

“Renton will extend the loan against the spring rents.” He went down the page. “On conditions. He should wish, and I give you the man’s own phrasing, proof of a settled heir before he commits another shilling to a house whose future he confesses he cannot read.”

“He requires proof you are settled.”