Page 39 of The Cold Duke's Hired Bride

“You may put the list down, my lord. It will not run off, and you are crushing it past all hope of the figures.”

“I am perfectly aware that I am crushing it.” The list stayed crushed in his fist. “I arrived with any number of sensible things to say, and I find the gown has confiscated the lot, and I am toohonest a man this particular week to pretend otherwise, having put my hand to a clause on the subject.”

“Then I shall tell you a true thing in exchange, since we are spending dignity freely this afternoon.” She stepped down from the stool, because she would not say it from a height. “You cannot simply lift me from one staircase to another and expect me not to stumble on the unfamiliar steps.”

“Then tell me where to put my hand. I will hold whatever needs holding. I am only no good at guessing.”

“Beside me would do, for a beginning.” She held his look and did not let go of it. “Not in front of me, clearing the way and deciding which doors I am strong enough to be shown through. Not behind me, waiting to catch me when I fall and confirming, in the catching, that you had expected the fall all along. Beside. It is a position I have never once been offered, by my father or my husband or any man who claimed he was improving my circumstances. I should like to try it, and I am frightened of how much I should like it, which is the truest part, and the part I had not meant to hand you.”

He was quiet a moment, and the quiet had work going on inside it. “Beside you. I can learn beside you. It is the first instruction anyone has set me in a long while that I have wanted, with my whole self, to be good at.”

“Then we shall both of us be learning, my lord, which is at least an honest place to begin a matrimony from, and a good deal more honest than the place most of them begin.” She let the smile reach her eyes, which she rationed. “Now go and do something about your north tenancies, before the arrears discover they have been abandoned for the sake of a dressmaker and a length of midnight wool.”

“They will keep. I find this afternoon that a number of things will keep which I had believed, an hour ago, could not wait the day.”

***

The duke asked to see her on the Friday, and asked to see her alone, and she went up to the great shadowed bedchamber where the man who had ruled the house from a distance her whole tenure lay propped against a bank of pillows, smaller than his legend and a good deal sharper in the eye.

The duke lifted one hand a bare inch off the counterpane. “Come where I can see you. I have not the strength to chase a face about a room, and I have heard much about yours, and I mean to review the reports against the original.”

She crossed to the window so the grey light fell on her plainly. “Then I shall stand in the light, Your Grace, and you may review at your leisure. I am told my accounts have always been in good order, whatever else was not.”

“You are the housekeeper.” It was not a question, and there was no cruelty in it, only the directness of a man who had run clean out of time for the longer route. “My son means to wed his housekeeper. The county will be entertained a season and then find something else to tattle about and you will still be here, the part the county never troubles to consider. Tell me why a sensible woman ties herself to a cold house and a colder boy, and do not tell me it is the money. You could have had the money from your cousin at far less trouble, and got a warmer husband into the bargain.”

“My cousin would have given me a warmer husband only until the door was shut behind us, Your Grace. After that I should have been the coldest thing in the house, being the one thing in it he had already paid for and could stop courting.” She held his gaze. “Your son is cold in the manner of a banked fire, which is to say cold along the surface because he was taught the surface was the whole of what he was permitted. I have warmed my share of such fires in my time. A fire closely banked is not afire spent, Your Grace, whatever the cold surface may report to a casual hand laid flat against it. It requires only someone patient enough to credit the heat still in there, and stubborn enough to go on crediting it well past the point of sensible evidence. It is the chief skill the last ten years required of me, after holding still and wanting nothing aloud.”

“Wanting nothing aloud.” The duke turned the phrase over slowly. “My wife wanted much aloud, and I named it weakness, and I taught my sons to name it the same, and I have had a long quiet while in this bed to learn the price of the lesson. You will want things aloud in my son’s house, I expect.”

“I shall want them aloud, Your Grace, and written into a settlement besides, for I have learned that a thing wanted aloud and a thing wanted in ink are weighed very differently by the men who hold the purse.”

A sharpness woke behind the old eyes. “He has signed your clauses, then.”

“Every one of them, and gladly, which alarmed me far more than a refusal would have. A man who agrees too readily has often not yet weighed the size of the bill.”

“Or has understood it to the farthing and means to pay it on purpose, and has not learned how to say so aloud.” The old man let his head settle back. “He is mine, whatever else he is. We pay in coin, the men of this house, because no one ever taught us the other currency existed.”

“Then I shall have to teach it him, Your Grace, as one teaches a grown man a language, badly and late and with a deal of patience spent on both sides. I am not at all certain I can. I am certain I would rather try the teaching and fail at it than be furniture again and succeed handsomely at nothing whatever.”

The old man regarded her a long while, and the sharp eye let go of something it had been holding, as though a sum he had dreaded to total had come out, against every expectation,even. “Yes. You will do. You will do far better than the lists my sister kept posting up to him with their eligible girls and their unblemished names. Go and be measured for whatever it is they are measuring you for. Send my son up to me on your way down, and close the door behind him when he comes, and do not, whatever your good breeding tells you, go far from it.”

***

She sent Declan up, and she did not go far from the door, because a dying man’s instruction is a kind of permission, and she stood in the cold corridor with her hand flat against the panelling and heard the old voice gather itself for the last lesson it meant to teach.

“I gave you duty instead of warmth because warmth had gone out of this house,” the duke said, “and I will not pretend I failed to see what it made of you. Now you have found a woman worth the warmth, and I will tell you once. Do not make her pay the bill for the affection you were denied as a boy. That debt is not of her running. Do not present it to her.”

They had not been meant for her, and they were the truest thing anyone had yet said about the man she was to enter into matrimony with, and she carried them down the rest of the stairs without once opening her hand.

The last of it came on the eve, when the house was full of flowers it could not quite bring itself to believe in, and Annie had pressed the midnight blue twice over for fear of a crease that was not there.

“It hangs beautiful, ma’am,” Annie said happily. “You’ll be the handsomest bride the parish has had in many a year, and I’ve laid lavender in the press, so you’ll carry a bit of summer up the aisle with you.”

“Thank you, Annie. You have made far more of tomorrow than I have managed, and I am glad of it, because someone inthis house ought to believe in it with a whole heart, and I find tonight I have only enough belief left over for the dress.”

“You’re frightened.” Annie smoothed a sleeve that needed no smoothing. “Brides are, ma’am. My sister shook so on her morning we had to pin her twice and feed her brandy in her tea.”

“I am a little frightened, yes. Go to bed, Annie. Tomorrow will want you rested, and so, it appears, will I.”