Page 40 of The Cold Duke's Hired Bride

***

The note lay on Renae’s own pillow, so it had come into the house by a hand still inside the house, and she did not need the seal to name the sender, because only one man of her acquaintance wrote his threats on paper fine enough to frame.

Cousin,it read.Wed him, and I will contest the whole of it in open court, where the public gallery is fond of a fallen gentlewoman and the newspapers fonder still. I will put your years of service to the question, every wage and every room and every hour you passed alone with your employer before the banns, and I will invite twelve honest tradesmen to decide what a housekeeper earns on her back that she could not earn on her knees. You will be a duchess wedded to scandal and to bankruptcy at once. Or you will come quietly to me, and not one word of it need ever be read aloud in front of anyone. You have until the church to choose. L.T.

She read it twice, standing, as she read everything that frightened her. Then she folded it along its own crease and set it on the table beside the bed, and her eyes stayed dry, because weeping was a wage she had stopped paying that family a long while ago. She sat in the lamplight in a house gone giddy with flowers and understood that her wedding morning would arrive with a writ held ready in its other hand.

Chapter Sixteen

“You may speak the words when you are ready, my lord,” the vicar said, “Though I will confess I have rarely seen a bridegroom attend to his bride quite so closely. Most of them attend to their boots.”

“Most of them have duller brides and better boots. I shall manage with the boots.” Declan did not take his attention from her face. “Read on, if you would. I should like to be wedded before the duke’s claret turns.”

The church was small and half empty by design, because Beatrice had judged a modest wedding less easily slandered by the county than a grand one, and she sat in the front pew like a general who had taken the field and meant to enjoy the survey of it. The duke had been too ill to attend. He had sent instead a single line in a hand that shook across the whole width of the page, and the vicar read it aloud before the vows, let the warmth into the house, and Beatrice pressed a handkerchief to her mouth and pretended it was the draught.

Declan said his vows looking at her, because he found he could do nothing else, and somewhere in the middle of them he watched her understand that he was doing it. Her eyes came up to his and held, wary at first, as a creature long accustomed to being overlooked turns wary of being seen, and then steadier. The last man to stand opposite her in a church had spent the ceremony attending to a point somewhere past her shoulder, where his own convenient future was kept. There was nothing behind her shoulder worth a second of the attention he could be spending on her instead.

“With this ring I thee wed,” he said, and meant it as a man means a figure he has checked three times and found correct.

They came out into a churchyard gone bright after rain, and Lucien stood at the far edge of it by the lych-gate, dressed for a wedding to which no one had invited him, watching with the ease of an idler who reckoned the law a slow horse and his own to ride. He kept his distance. There was no need for him to come forward. He had sent his writ on ahead, and a writ keeps its appointment whether or not its author troubles to attend.

“He came,” Renae said softly, very low.

“Then let us hand him a clear answer, since he has come all this way for one.” Declan took her hand, her bare hand, the glove already drawn off for the ring, and he held it openly, in the plain sight of every guest and idler and the one man at the gate, where it could be mistaken for nothing but exactly what it was. “Do you wish me to release you?” he murmured, and they both understood he did not mean only the hand.

“No.”

Their joined hands stayed exactly where they were, not lowered by so much as an inch. “Then I shall not. He may watch as long as he likes. It is, I expect, the only occupation the law will leave him by Michaelmas.”

“He will do it, you know. The court. He does not bluff. He has never in his life threatened a thing he was not entirely prepared to carry through, which is the single honest bone in the whole of him.”

His thumb moved once across her knuckles, unhurried, where the gate could see it. “Then we shall meet him in the court, and we shall meet him as a great house meets a country cousin, with the better lawyers and the clearer conscience and a matrimony he can no longer pretend is a kept woman beneath a borrowed roof. Let him spend his money on it, and his patience, and the last of his welcome in this county. I have spent more than that on a great deal worse, and got less for it.”

***

The wedding breakfast filled the long room, and it went pleasantly until Lord Brearley, who had drunk his own consequence and a fair quantity of the duke’s claret, leaned along the table with the confidential loudness of the well fed.

“One does not like to say it, Greene, but a housekeeper. A man in your position. There was a time the family would have felt the want of a better connection than the woman who counted its candles.”

“There was such a time, yes. In it the family felt the want of a great many things, chiefly a roof that did not leak and a steward who did not steal, and the family did precisely nothing about either.” Declan set down his glass without heat. The table found that a good deal more alarming than heat would have been. “My wife restored Carrington to working order before she consented to take my name, at a time when half the company here assembled had quite despaired of our survival. On the present accounting I consider myself the improved party in this match, and the better bargainer.”

“Come now, that is modesty dressed as accountancy.”

“It is plain figures dressed as nothing at all, and I prefer it bare. I would advise any man here who fancies he has done better in his own matrimony to have his books audited before he says so aloud to mine.” Declan let the silence sit. “Will no one? Then I take it the motion is carried.”

“Do try the duck, Lord Brearley,” Beatrice advised from along the table, without troubling to raise her voice. “It is very nearly the last thing in this room my nephew’s wife did not personally rescue from ruin, and you may eat it without choking on the irony.”

Brearley discovered a sudden interest in his plate, and the conversation removed itself, with some relief, to the subject of the weather.

***

That night he went up to the duchess’s chamber. It had been hers as housekeeper only in the sense that she had aired it for guests who never came. He found her sitting on the edge of the great bed in a plain nightgown, her hair down and her back very straight, and read the whole of it in a single breath. She had braced herself. She had arranged her body for an unpleasant procedure she meant to endure with dignity, and the bracing told him more of her first matrimony than any confession could.

He stopped at the foot of the bed and came no closer.

“Renae. Look at me.”

“I know what is expected, my lord.” She did meet his eyes, and the steadiness of it cost her, and he could see precisely what it cost. “You need not trouble to be gentle on my account. I should far rather we were honest and quick about it. I am not made of glass, and I have done this before, and the dread of it has always lived in the waiting and not at all in the thing.”