Page 38 of The Cold Duke's Hired Bride

“You need not do that, Annie. You helped me turn a mattress on Monday.”

Annie bobbed again, lower, as if depth might settle the matter. “I know it, ma’am, but Mrs. Croft says you are to be a duchess and a body must practise, and I would rather practise on you, who is kind about it, than discover I have forgotten how in front of someone who is not.”

“Then practise, by all means, only do not practise so low. You are not greeting the Regent. You are greeting a woman who has seen you eat jam directly from the pot with your thumb.”

Annie’s chin came up. “That was once, ma’am, and the pot was nearly empty.”

***

Mrs. Croft called her ma’am as she always had, but the word had grown a careful edge, as though the cook were handling a dish she was no longer entirely certain she was permitted to have made.

“You will want a new cook, I expect, ma’am. A duchess has a French one. With opinions.”

“I want the cook I have, who learned to stop hoarding flour against a famine that never came, and whom I am not about to trade for a stranger with opinions and a temper and no notion at all of how this house likes its bread. You will stay, Mrs. Croft, unless you have grown tired of me, in which case you will say so plainly and I shall be wounded plainly in return.”

“I have not grown tired of you.” The cook turned briskly back to her board, which was how Renae understood she had beenthanked. “Someone has to see you eat. You forget, when there is a crisis on, and there is always a crisis on.”

***

Wells inclined his head a degree lower than the housekeeper had ever earned, and a degree less low than the future duchess would shortly command, and the half measure of it told her how lost the whole house had become.

“You need not bow to me, Wells. Your tea was in my own two hands three days ago.”

Wells did not lift his eyes from the salver. “I am aware of it, ma’am. The difficulty is that I do not know the correct quantity of bowing between a woman who poured my tea on Tuesday and a duchess by the month’s end, and so I have settled provisionally on a little, and beg you will correct the proportion when I have it wrong.”

“A little will do very well. I should hate for either of us to overspend on ceremony when there is so much real work going short of hands.”

Mrs. Pelham called on the Wednesday, the same Mrs. Pelham whose cook had carried the worst of the talk down the lane, and she arrived in her second-best bonnet with both hands extended and a memory freshly laundered.

“My dear Lady Renae, I said to Mr. Pelham only last month, I said, there is a woman of real quality fallen on hard circumstances, and circumstances are no measure of a person, none at all, and how glad I am to be proved right in front of the whole county.”

“How glad you must be, Mrs. Pelham. I recall the sentiment differently, but then a fortnight is a great while, and memory is such a comfortable chair once one has learned to sit in it.”

Mrs. Pelham’s smile faltered momentarily and steadied. “Well. Memory. One says so very many things in a season. I am sure I only ever wished you the best of everything.”

“I am sure you wished me whatever the season required, Mrs. Pelham, and I shall wish you the very same, which is, when all is reckoned, the entire currency of a county. Do take some of the seedcake. Mrs. Croft is wounded when it comes back to her untouched, and you would not wish to be the cause of a wounded cook in a house you mean to keep calling at.”

The gown came for the betrothal call, and the modiste pinned her into it in the long room off the gallery, and Renae stood on the low stool and regarded the woman in the tall glass with the wary attention she would have given a stranger asking after the plate. No housekeeper looked back at her. The grey wool was gone, and in its place stood a deep blue the modiste called midnight and Renae privately called expensive, and the woman wearing it had a throat and a collarbone and a way of holding her head the grey had spent four careful months teaching her to fold away.

The modiste spoke around a mouthful of pins. “Hold quite still, my lady, while I set the shoulder.”

She held perfectly still, not so much as a finger moving. “I am holding still. I have long practice at holding still. It has been the chief requirement of the last ten years, after learning to want nothing where anyone could see me do it.”

“You have the shoulders for it, my lady, which not every lady is given. Half my trade is persuading honest wool that a shoulder is present where there is none. Yours asks only that I tell the truth about it.”

“Then we are well matched, you and I, for honesty is the one extravagance I have always been able to afford. Set your pin. I shall not quail from it.”

Declan came in on estate business, mid-sentence, as he did everything he had decided in advance would be brief, and the sentence was about the north tenancies, and it did not survive the doorway. She watched it perish in his mouth. The practical man arrived with a figure on his tongue and a list crushed in his hand, and then forgot what either was for, and the forgetting crossed his guarded face like weather over a field promised it would stay dry.

“You were saying something, my lord, about the north tenancies.”

He had stopped just inside the door, one hand still on the frame. “Was I?”

“You were. You had reached the word arrears, and then you appeared to suffer a small apoplexy.”

His hand closed on the crushed list. “The north tenancies will keep. You look. That is to say the gown is. I find I have mislaid the end of that observation and do not expect to recover it.”

She laughed, and the laugh surprised her more than it surprised him, because she had not heard that particular sound leave her own throat unguarded in longer than she could readily account for. The wide gulf between them, the one built of land and name and the thousand a year she had never owned, narrowed in the space of that one undignified noise. It became, for the length of it, no gulf at all, but only the ordinary distance between a man at a door and a woman on a stool, which the simplest soul might perceive was a distance created only to be traversed.