Page 34 of The Cold Duke's Hired Bride

“What thing did you come away from?”

She set the folded sheet down on the small bed. “The talk, my lord. You will have heard it by now. The whole county has, and the village, and the butcher’s girl, who asked my maid this morning whether I was your mistress, in that word, with the cheerful frankness of the young.”

“I will have whoever started it.”

Her voice stayed as level as a ruled line. “You will have no one. That is my entire point, and I will make it again until it takes. The man who started it sits nine miles off behind a writ, and the one thing that travels faster than his lie is the sight of you trying to outrun it. Stand still, my lord. It is the single thing your rank has never asked of you, and the only thing that can serve me now.”

He went still in the particular way he had, and then he crossed the small distance between the desk and the window where she stood, and stood near enough that she could have learned the width of a hand and been against him. The whole air of the shut room changed its pressure. The true thing rosein him, and she caught it rising. She had learned to read it as a farmer reads weather, before it broke, while it was still only a heaviness in one corner of the sky. Then she watched him put it down again, and step back into the cool dry shelter of his manner, and ask her in the voice he kept for stewards whether the inventory would be finished by the quarter.

“You need not flee every kind word, my lord. They will not detain you long.”

“I do not flee.”

“No. You dismiss the room and expect your heart to follow you out of it on command.” She turned from the window at last. “I have noticed it does not always obey. It lingers where it has no reason to linger. It carries soup up staircases it might have sent a footman up. You are an extremely disciplined man in every particular but the one that signifies, and that one keeps wandering off without your leave and embarrassing the rest of you in public.”

“And if I let it wander. If I stopped recalling it to its tether?”

She held his look and did not soften it. “Then you would need to be ready for where it went, my lord, and for what it cost when it arrived. One does not put that question in a nursery at four in the afternoon, with the talk already loud in the lane below him. Ask it somewhere it can be answered without ruining the woman you ask it of. Or do not ask it at all, and we shall both go on blaming the wallpaper.”

“You are a dangerous woman to be honest in front of.”

“I am the safest woman in England to be honest in front of, my lord, which is precisely why it frightens you. There is no one for me to tell, and nothing for me to gain by the telling, and a man who has spent his life guarding his accounts has no notion what to do with a creditor who refuses to collect.”

The corner of his mouth eased, and was put away again. “You make a poor case for your own safety, Mrs. Trelawney.The dangerous women are precisely the ones who insist they are nothing of the kind.”

“Then you have nothing whatever to fear from me, my lord, for I have just insisted at length, and the genuinely dangerous never trouble themselves to. Now help me get this sheet back over the desk before the dust persuades itself we have asked it to stay, and we will both agree the last quarter hour was about the inventory and nothing besides.”

He helped her with the sheet. Neither of them spoke of the wallpaper again, and that was its own small mercy, in a room that had heard a good deal more truth than one grey afternoon was built to hold.

***

The talk did not stay talk. By the end of the week it had teeth. Women she had nodded to in the lane found the far hedgerow suddenly fascinating. The draper who had called her madam for a month called her missus now, with a hook in the smile, and weighed her ribbon short and dared her to remark on it. A ruined name cannot earn wages any more than it can attend a ball, and she reckoned the figures alone at night and did not care for the total they kept returning.

“I want Fenwick be charged with the business of it,” Declan said grimly, when she could no longer keep it out of the household accounts and he had read the meaning in the grocer’s padded bill. “And I want the man carrying it traced and made to wish he had carried water instead. There are laws against this kind of thing.”

“There are laws against any number of things that happen daily, my lord, and the law is the slowest and loudest way of announcing that a thing is worth denying.”

“So I am to remain idle?”

“You are to do the single hardest thing there is, which is to look as though nothing whatever is being done. A rumour cannot be threatened into silence. You can only confirm, to every soul watching you spend lawyers on it, that there is something here worth the spending. No man hires Fenwick to defend a woman who is nothing to him.” She kept her voice low. “Let it starve. It has no food but our recoiling, and I intend to serve it none. At looking unbothered I have a clear advantage over you. I have had the practice. You have had a title to spare you the need of it.”

“It is intolerable to watch.”

“Then do not watch, my lord. That is the kindest thing you could do for me, and the hardest for you, and so I do not expect you to manage it. Go and be a duke’s heir at any number of other things, loudly, where the county can watch you being one. The moment you take an umbrella out over my head, you have told the whole lane there is a head worth the covering.”

***

Beatrice had her own counsel, delivered over the morning chocolate with the bluntness of a woman long past minding what blunt cost. “Go away a while, child. To the sea, to a cousin, anywhere the talk cannot follow you with its eyes. Absence starves a scandal faster than silence does, and it would spare you the lane.”

“No.”

“It was not an order. It was a kindness, and you might at least let it sit on the table a moment before you sweep it off.”

“I know exactly what it was, and I am grateful, and the answer is still no.” Renae set down her cup. “If I go, I am guilty. To run is to confess, and the running will be said aloud in the lane before my coach has cleared the gate. And I will not abandon a household I have spent four months teaching to believe it will be fed. I taught Mrs. Croft to stop hoarding againsta famine that was never coming. I will not be the famine that proves her right to have feared one.”

“You are very hard to help, Renae.”

She folded a napkin that had no need of folding. “I have noticed that the people most in need of help are. It is not an accident. We learned it in the same school that taught us to need it.”