Page 35 of The Cold Duke's Hired Bride

“And what will you do, then, since you will neither run nor let the man fight?”

Her hands found the cup again. “What I have always done. I will count the linen, and bank the fires, and be so relentlessly the housekeeper that the rumour starves for want of a leading lady. A scandal wants a woman behaving like one with something to hide. I shall behave like a woman with nothing on her mind but candle-ends, which, for the larger part of any day, I am.”

“It will not be enough.” Beatrice set her cup down. “But it is the right thing to attempt, and the right thing and the sufficient thing keep such poor company that I have learned to applaud whichever of the two consents to appear.”

***

Lucien came in person on the Friday, and this time he did not trouble to wear the velvet over the iron.

“You look tired, cousin. The country does not agree with the fallen. It is too small. There is nowhere in a village to put a ruined woman where the village cannot see her at her business, and that is the chief argument anyone has ever made for towns.” He stayed on his feet, and took no leave to do it. “I have come to be useful to you, a novelty from me, you will grant. I can mend your name overnight. One announcement, one church, one quiet word in the correct three drawing rooms, and the woman the butcher’s girl asks about becomes Mrs. Trelawneyof a respectable house, and the tongues grow silent for want of subject matter.”

“How fortunate that the only cure should happen to be the man who diagnosed the disease.”

He drew off one glove, finger by finger, in no hurry at all. “Fortune had very little to do with it. You must see that no man of standing will touch you now. I am the one door left open to you, cousin, and I had the foresight to leave it standing open before I went round shutting the others.”

“You closed the others. You will forgive me if I do not thank the man who set the fire for arriving at the door with a bucket and a price list.”

His smile arrived without troubling the rest of his face. “I arrived with the only bucket on offer. Sentiment is a luxury reserved for women who can afford to watch the house burn.”

“You have not changed the price of the bucket, I notice.”

He laid the glove on the table and smoothed it flat. “Your father made the very same error, cousin. He kept pride where he had want of sense, and he perished because of it, in a manner of speaking, and left you to settle the account. I am offering you the chance not to depart this world of the identical complaint.”

“It is the forty thousand pounds attached to me that you are courting, Mr. Trelawney, and we both know the figure to the shilling, because you have been freezing it to the shilling for a year.” Her voice stayed low and even. “Do not dress it as concern for my health. I have watched you nurse the sick. The patients do not recover, and the will is always found to have been signed.”

“You wound me, cousin. I had truly hoped to find you sensible.”

Her voice held its level and sharpened to a point. “You wrote the falsehood yourself, or paid a hand to write it. A letter went missing from my sitting room three nights past, an honest man’s honest offer inside it, and a week later the lane hasdecided I am kept. That is no coincidence, Mr. Trelawney. That is bookkeeping. You took the one proof another door stood open to me, and spent it nailing every door closed but yours.”

“I have no notion what letter you mean. Though a woman who keeps her correspondence so carelessly can hardly complain of where it fetches up, nor of who reads it on the way.”

“I would rather be ruined by the truth, Mr. Trelawney, than rescued by the man who wrote the falsehood.” She stood very straight, as she had stood at nineteen signing her future away, and found she stood straighter now, having so much less left to lose. “At least the truth and I are old acquaintances. We have kept long company, the truth and I, and it has never once asked me to be grateful for a wound it dressed itself first.”

“Get out.” Declan had come in on the last of it, and there was nothing dry left in his voice at all. “You will leave my house, and you will not come back into it, and if another letter or another writ or another whisper goes down that lane, you will learn that a duke’s heir commands resources a country cousin has not had the imagination to fear.”

Lucien took his hat from the table without hurry, a man who had got what he came for and was in no doubt of having it. At the door he turned, because men like Lucien keep the worst of it for the door.

“You cannot keep her under your roof unless you enter into matrimony with her, Lord Declan. We both know it. And a man cannot go about espousing every stray creature he happens to pity, or the parish would never have done with the banns.” He settled the hat on his head. “Think on it. You will arrive where I am already standing, only later, and crosser, and having paid far more for the journey than I did.”

The door shut behind him. The line had been built to wound, and aimed with care, and it missed the wound entirely and struck the answer instead, as a thrown stone misses the windowand breaks the lock. Matrimony protected her. It blocked Lucien at the one move he had left undefended. One church morning would unlock the funds, satisfy the creditors, and end the talk together. The villain had said it aloud, in a sneer, the thing the three of them had circled for a month, and it sat in the cleared room with the door still trembling on its latch, undeniable, and hers to hear, and his.

That night, through the half-open door of the small parlour, she heard Declan’s voice, low and level and certain in a way she had not heard from him before. He was telling Beatrice to send for Fenwick in the morning, and not for the lawsuit. She stood in the dark corridor with the candle cupped against the draught. She understood that she was about to be offered a roof again, by the one man under whose roof she had let herself stop counting the rain. And she had no notion at all whether she possessed the courage to be married for a reason a second time, or the far greater courage it would take to discover whether, this once, the reason might not be the whole of the thing.

Chapter Fourteen

“I have asked you to the library to put a proposal to you, and I am going to do it badly, so I would be obliged if you would let me reach the end of it before you decide precisely how badly.”

“That is the most honest opening you have ever given me, my lord.” Renae folded her hands at the edge of the long table, as she folded them for the accounts. “Proceed. I shall hold my verdict until the summing-up, as one does at a trial.”

“You are very calm. I had half hoped to find you nervous, so that I might have company in the condition.”

“I am the calmest I have been in a fortnight, my lord, because for once I can see the whole of the board, and a clear board is a restful thing even when the game laid out upon it is one you would never have chosen to play. You may proceed.”

He had written nothing down, for him the equivalent of walking into a duel unarmed, and since he had to begin somewhere, he began where it was safest, at the foot of the column.

“You should wed me. I will give you the reasons, because the reasons are sound, and you are a woman who respects a sound reason far more than a pretty one.” He set the first down between them like a coin laid on baize. “It protects your reputation. A housekeeper suspected of being kept becomes, overnight, a wife above suspicion, and the lane discovers it has nothing left to tattle about. The talk starves and perishes by the second Sunday, and no lawyer need lift a finger to destroy it.”

“That is one, and it is the reason a stranger would lead with, and it tells me you have arranged these in the order you would lay accounts before a board of governors. You may go on, my lord. The court is attending, and the court has the whole of the evening before it.”