Page 7 of The Cold Duke's Hired Bride

He should have sent her off to find her room. He kept her one moment longer.

“You wear no black.”

“I wore it the year the law asks of a widow, and not one hour past it.” She met the question straight on, where most of them would have looked away. “Black is for grief, my lord, and I never mastered the trick of manufacturing what I do not feel. I keep what little I have for my father. He earned it. The Earl of Whitmore. The name will mean nothing to you now.”

It meant a garden party fifteen summers gone. It meant a girl with a muddied hem, and a loose ring of his brother’s friends laughing easy in the sun, and himself at fifteen steeringher without a word round the next puddle, because it was the one kindness within his reach, and saying nothing at all to the laughter was the kindness past it. The silence had shamed him for a week. Then he learned, as one does, to lay the matter down.

He said nothing now either. He inclined his head and let her go to find her room, and held the same silence he had held in the garden at fifteen.

Chapter Three

“You’ll not last the month.”

Mrs. Croft said it to the pot and not to Renae, a sort of courtesy, since saying it to the pot let them both go on pretending it had not been said.

“Then I shall take care to make the month a useful one.” Renae set her box on the one clean corner of a kitchen table that had not been scrubbed to the grain in a long while. “Where are the household books kept? I should like to begin with the worst of the house. The worst is generally where the saving has been hiding.”

The cook turned round, a big raw-knuckled woman with flour to the elbow and a grief worn into her like a stain that would not lift. “There’s books. And then there’s what’s true. They’ve not been on speaking terms above a twelvemonth, the two of them.”

“Then I shall want both, and the quarrel between them most of all. A false figure in a ledger is only the truth standing where it hoped no one would trouble to look.”

“You talk very fine for a woman come to count my flour.”

“I talk as I was raised to, which I can no more help than you can help the Devon in your vowels.” She unpinned her bonnet and set it on the box. “You will find the talk is the cheapest thing about me, Mrs. Croft, and the only part of me that came free.”

“And the dear part?”

“Everything else, and I have paid for it in full. You need not warm to me. You need only let me work, and judge me by the state of your larder in a month, and not by my vowels in the first hour of it.”

Mrs. Croft weighed that, and the weighing was grudging, but it was a weighing and not a dismissal. “A month, then.”

“A month. I have survived on far less generous terms.”

Wells walked her through the rest, apologetic for the house as the others had not troubled to be.

“How long since there was a proper housekeeper here, Mr. Wells?”

“Two winters, ma’am. Mrs. Bellamy gave up her keys when her knees gave up the stairs, and no one’s been set over the house since. Things have settled, in the want of her.”

“Things have rotted. It is a different verb, and we shall make no headway if we agree to call the one by the other’s name.” She stopped at the larder. “Who holds the key to this?”

“No one in particular. Which is to say all of them, and none.”

She opened it, and the larder told the rest at a glance. “There is French brandy here by the case.”

“Laid in for the old duke’s table, ma’am. In the good years.”

“And never paid for.” She tipped the merchant’s bill off its nail and read it. “No one even troubled to hide the shame of this. The flour is alive with weevil, the ham is green to the bone, and the cheese has grown itself a coat against the cold.”

“It does seem a waste, ma’am, put so.”

“Waste is not abundance.” She lifted the ruined ham down by its own string and carried it to the slop pail herself, so no one in the house could say the new housekeeper gave orders she would not dirty her hands to keep. “It is hunger wearing a richer gown, Mr. Wells, and I have known the both of them well enough to tell one from the other in the dark. Brandy on credit, and moth in the bread. This is not a house that ran short of money. It is a house that gave up the habit of looking at it.”

“And you mean to look.” The tall footman had come to lean in the doorway, arms folded, taking his time. “We’ll all be glad of that come quarter-day, I’m sure, when there’s grand new economies and the same old empty pay-box to keep them in.”

“What is your name?”

“Thomas, ma’am.” He put a small twist on the word, to be certain she caught the weight he had declined to lend it.