Page 3 of The Cold Duke's Hired Bride

“I am quite sure you mean to honour it to the letter. You were always a close reader of letters.”

He set his hat on the side table with the care of a winning hand laid down. “The funeral is arranged for Saturday sennight. I have seen the rector and the undertaker both, so you need not lift a finger over any of it.”

“My husband is two days deceased, and already you have found the rector, the undertaker, and a way to tell me I am not wanted at his burying.”

“I am sparing you, cousin.”

“You are arranging me.” She heard the shape of it without her face moving. “You have arranged the rector, the undertaker, and now the widow, and we are all of us very neatly filed.”

He gathered his hat again and led the way to the study himself, as though the keys at his belt had not already told her he knew it, to the small room off the library where Sir Malcolm had kept his evenings and his one good lamp.

“He kept everything close.” Lucien fitted a key to the desk and turned it. “A careful man. I always did admire the habit in him.”

“You have admired a great many of his habits this week that you never named while he lived to hear them.”

He let that pass too, and drew the papers out in their order, settlements and leases and the long sealed envelopes of the trust, and lifted down from the high shelf the steel box that no hand but Sir Malcolm’s had touched in years.

“There is a key wanting here.” He went through the whole ring twice, and not one of them would turn. “Did he carry it on his person?”

“I never saw it. He never let me near the thing, and I learned not to ask. A wife in this house came to understand quite early which doors were hers.”

“No matter. It will keep, and locks always do.” He pushed the box to the back of the shelf, his interest already gone from it to the warm bundle in his arm. Renae marked the box’s small flat refusal the once, and then her grief came up over the thought and carried it off downstream, and a year would pass before she would attend to it.

“Your portion is all provided for in the settlement, you understand. In time.” While he spoke he had begun to set the household to his own measure. “These things move slowly through a trust. There is a deal of paper between a widow and her money, and you need not trouble your head over the particulars. I shall manage the particulars.”

“How convenient that the particulars and the money should rest in the same pair of hands.”

“You make it sound a scheme, cousin. It is law.” He squared the bundle against his chest. “Malcolm’s grandfather tied all the property into a trust two generations deep, and named an executor to keep it, and the executor, by every misfortune, turns out to be me. The settlement was none of my drawing. I have only the keeping of it.”

“And the keeping of it keeps me. How tidily the misfortune has arranged itself around your comfort.”

He set a second bundle atop the first, unhurried. “I have written already to the family’s man of business. He will hold the lot of it in trust and render you an allowance, quarterly, so that you need never trouble a tradesman or a column of figures again. I have set it at sixty pounds the year.”

“How thoughtful. A cage with the bars filed smooth is the most dangerous kind, since one is forever tempted to mistake it for a parlour.”

“Sixty pounds is more than many a widow sees.”

“Many a widow did not bring her husband the name he entered into matrimony for.” her hazel eyes stayed on his. “I am not asking you for charity, Lucien. I am asking for what is mine, which I am given to understand runs to a good deal more than sixty pounds, and which has grown remarkably shy of me since the only man who could lay a hand on it has passed away.”

“You are bitter. Grief does that. It passes.”

“I am not bitter. Bitterness expects better and is disappointed, and I expected precisely this.” Her voice stayed exactly where it had been. “I wedded a man who kept his affection in a locked box, Lucien. Now I am to be kept by his cousin in another. The only thing new about my situation is the lock.”

A footman appeared at the study door, summoned by no bell that Renae had rung.

“Ah. Pruitt, is it?” Lucien did not glance up from the papers. “Have the blue room made up. I shall stay until the funeral is behind us, and a while past it, to set the lady’s affairs to rights.”

“Pruitt will do nothing until I have said so.” She turned to the footman, and her voice gentled by a degree that was never meant for Lucien. “Make up the blue room, Pruitt. Mr.Trelawney is quite right that he should stay. I’ll not have it said the family left me to bury my husband alone.”

The footman went, having been given his order twice and having kept only the second.

“You correct me before the servants.”

“I instruct my servants before whoever happens to be standing in my study.” She set straight a chair that did not need it. “It is my house yet, for as long as the law will allow it to be anything of mine at all, and I find I do not care to spend the little while pretending otherwise.”

“You will feel differently in a month, when the house has gone quiet and the bills come in and there is no one to carry them to but me.”

“I have learned the worth of family already. My father taught it me when he passed on and left me a title and a debt in the same envelope. You will forgive me if the second telling holds no novelty.”