Page 26 of The Cold Duke's Hired Bride

“I am extremely settled. I have not stirred from this county in months. This very afternoon I reopened a wing. A more settled man has never lifted a dust sheet in the history of the practice.”

Her hands went on with the work. “He means a wife, my lord.”

“Yes.” He folded the letter along its old crease. “I gathered, somewhere about the second reading, that the letter and I were not using the word in the same spirit.”

“What will you tell him?”

“The truth that the rents will cover him by spring and his nerves are entirely his own affair. Men like Renton do not lend against land. They lend against the comfortable feeling that some responsible person is awake at night on the far side of the books. I shall give him the feeling and keep the wife to myself, which is an arrangement that has served this family three generations and may as well serve it once more.”

She set her work down and faced him. “And are you? Awake at night.”

“Lately. Though not, as it happens, over Renton.” He let that stand a moment, then moved off it. “He will not be content with the truth. Creditors never are. They want a wife because a wife is a hostage the bank is able to see, a sign that a man means to stay and be ruinable in one fixed place.”

“I had such a fixed place once.” She straightened a sheet over the desk. “The bank was very pleased with it.”

“You have a bleak view of the institution, Mrs. Trelawney.”

“I have an accurate view of the institution as the world chiefly keeps it. Most bargains of that kind are struck by frightened people, and a frightened bargain is a poor one before the ink has dried.”

He set the lead pencil against the catalogue and did not write. “Yours was a bad one. They are not all bad ones, whatevera widow’s hard-won evidence may tell her, and I say so as a man who has lately spent no small labour gathering evidence to the contrary.”

“No. Only most, and only for that reason.” He had not meant to ask the next thing, and he heard himself ask it. “And which would yours be, if you struck one now?”

She was a moment in answering, and the moment was not an empty one. “I am in no position to strike one, my lord, frightened or otherwise. A housekeeper does not bargain. She is the thing bargained over, on the rare day she is anything in the matter at all. You are asking the wrong woman what sort of bargain she would make. Ask the people who have made them on her behalf since she was nineteen and her father’s debts fell due.” She set the sheet straight. “Write to Renton tonight, and tell him only the truth, since it is the cheaper article and he will trust it the less for that. The light has nearly gone, and I have a sampler to mourn and a clock to send out for mending.”

He put the letter back inside his coat, against his chest, where it sat with no more weight than a page of any other man’s accounts and a good deal more than that besides. The word was in the room now, settling over everything like the dust, without troubling to ask his leave. Wife.

He had been walking around the word for a month, as one skirts a known hole in a familiar floor, aware to the inch of where it lay and declining, on principle, to look down into it. He looked down into it now. Renae had gone back to the chair beneath the window and was easing its wormed leg with the flat of her hand, talking to Annie’s absent dust cloth about what the room would want come morning. She had not heard the word land, because to her it had been a creditor’s word and nothing further. He stood in the grey settling light and let himself want the thing he had spent the month refusing, for the whole length of oneunguarded breath. Then he folded that away as well, and put it where the letter was.

Chapter Ten

“The forks do not match. Two of them. I have decided no one will remark it, because the alternative is to send to the village at five on the hour for forks, and I would sooner serve the soup in my two hands.”

“No one will be looking at the forks.” Beatrice considered the long table from the doorway. “They will be looking at you, and at whether this house has the nerve to give a dinner at all. That is the entire reason I am making it give one. A house that entertains is a house that means to go on. A house that hides is a house with something to hide, and the county can smell that difference at a hundred yards in a fog.”

“I am aware of the reason, Lady Beatrice. I have been polishing the reason since six this morning, alongside the forks that do match.”

“Then you understand the evening rather better than half the people coming to it.” Beatrice moved a wine glass a quarter of an inch and left it improved. “Shall I tell you who comes, and why I chose each of them, since you are the one who must feed the consequences?”

“Please. I prefer to know the weather before I am standing out in it.”

“The rector, Mr. Dabney, because he is kind and foolish in equal and will say warm things at the top of his voice without being asked. That is worth two good courses on a difficult night. Sir John Pelham, because he is honest and his good word travels. His wife, because she is poison and her bad word travels twice as fast, and a dinner that converts only the friendly has converted nobody.” Beatrice ticked them off against her fan. “And old Lady Carbery, who is half deaf and wholly grand and knew everyone worth knowing forty years ago, and whoseapproval, if we can win it, settles the question for every hostess in three counties.”

“You have seated a friend, a witness, an enemy, and a judge.”

“I have seated the county in miniature, child. It is the only honest way to find out what the county will do. Now. The economy of your evening.” She turned from the table. “You will run it from the wings, flawlessly, and not one soul will know that the reason their fish arrives hot is the woman they intend to spend the soup course pitying. You will get no credit. The house takes the credit, and you are handed the privilege of watching it spend yours, and you are expected to find the spectacle nourishing.”

“I made my peace with that economy three years ago, over colder forks than these and worse company. Feeding is not what I require tonight. I require eleven covers and a kitchen that does not catch fire, and I have arranged for both.”

“Then we shall do very well, since I have never set a kitchen alight, whatever my late husbands reported to the contrary.” Beatrice paused at the door. “Who goes on the door?”

“Finch. He is the only one of them who can take a wet cloak from a countess without looking as though he has been handed a fish. He does not drop things, he does not gossip in the hall where the guests can hear, and he does not sulk when corrected. Together that puts him three full counts ahead of any footman I have managed.”

Beatrice’s brow rose. “High praise, from you, who hoards it.”

“Earned praise. It is the only sort I keep in the house. The other kind spoils in a week and makes the entire place foul for a fortnight together.”

Annie came up the passage with the warming pans, wide of eye at the number of places laid. “Eleven, ma’am? We’ve not laid eleven since I came to the house.”