Page 9 of The Cold Duke's Hired Bride

“You have reorganised my entire still-room in an afternoon.”

She stayed where she was on the steps. “I have reorganised the idea of a still-room, my lord. The room itself will not be done before Thursday, and perhaps Friday, should the weevils prove to have opinions of their own.”

“And do you always work past dark on your first day in a house?”

“Only when the alternative is to sit alone with my own thoughts.” She came down a step, the ledger held against her chest. “They are poor company and worse conversation, and they keep returning to subjects I have asked them more than once to leave. The still-room at least answers a civil question when it is put one.”

“You have been under this roof nine hours. Give me your verdict on my household, since you appear to have formed one.”

“Your cook will fight me a fortnight and then be my staunchest ally, for she has carried a weight that was never hers and will go red and silent with relief to set it down, though she would perish before she let me catch her at it.” She counted them off without unkindness. “Your footman Thomas believes me a lady playing at labor and intends to be proved right. He is useful exactly until the wages come, at which hour he turns loyal or turns trouble, and I have not settled which I should find the more diverting.”

“And the boy. Finch.”

Her voice warmed by a degree for that one. “The only one who helped me before he counted what the helping might beworth. A house tells you the whole truth about itself by which of its people will do that, and how few of them there are.”

“You have read the lot of them in nine hours.”

“I have read worse rooms than this in far less time.” She turned the ledger once in her hands. “It was a means of survival, my lord, and a long while before it was a profession. A woman in a chilled house learns to take the measure of every soul in a room the moment she enters it, since the whole of her week may turn on the reading.”

“And mine.” He held his place at the foot of the steps. “You have taken my temperature.”

“I would not be so impertinent on the first day.”

“You have been impertinent since the still-room, and the first day is very nearly spent. Indulge me.”

“Cold, my lord,” she said plainly, since he had asked it plainly. “But the honest kind of cold. The sort that comes of a fire let go out, and not the sort that comes of a hearth that was never built at all. The first can be relit by anyone with the patience to lay it. I have made something of a study of the difference, and I am seldom wrong about which house I am standing in.”

“You are very certain, for a woman who has kept the house nine hours.”

“I am certain of very little. I am observant of a good deal, and people confuse the two to their cost.” She turned the ledger over in her hands. “I do not know that I can save your house, my lord. I know that it can be saved, a different certainty and a more useful one, and not the one I looked to find when I stepped down off the coach this morning.”

“And what gave it you. The certainty.”

“The brandy, oddly enough. A house that is truly finished does not lay in brandy upon credit. It has stopped pretending it owns a future worth the drinking to. Yours is still pretending, which means some part of it has not yet given up believing.Belief is the dear part, my lord. The rest is only sums, and sums I can do.”

Whatever moved over his countenance that time, he did not trouble to put it away as quickly as he had the others. “That ledger you are holding. My father kept it himself, the last year he could put a quill upon a page.”

“I can feel that it will not balance, only by the weight of the thing.”

“He knew it would not, and kept at it regardless.” His eyes stayed on the grey ledger and not on her. “To lay it down would have been to say the matter aloud.”

“That the house was falling into utter decay.”

“That he was.” For a moment he did not go on with it. “The two had grown difficult to tell apart, by the end of that year.”

“Then I shall balance the books for him, my lord, and spare the pair of us the saying of it.” She held his look, since he had handed her something true and the only decent reply was to take it carefully. “It is nearly the one thing my matrimony left me fit for, the keeping of accounts for a house that would rather not be told its total. I had not looked to be glad of the skill tonight. I find that I am.”

He was quiet a moment. “You asked Wells about the wages today.”

“I did. They are owed since Lady Day, and the staff know it, and no one has told them when the owing ends.”

He turned half towards the dark window, abstractedly passing his hand through his dark locks. “Because I do not know when it ends. There is no money until the spring rents, and the rents are spoken for twice over.”

“Then tell them so. The figure and the date, plainly, to their faces. A servant can bear no end of going without, far more than the gentry ever credit. What they cannot bear is the not-knowing, and being left to invent a worse tale in the dark thanthe true one. The silence is what loses you a household, my lord. Never the want.”

“You would have me stand in my own kitchen and confess to my cook that I cannot pay her.”

She gathered the ledgers against her. “I would have you do exactly that, and you will find she thinks the better of you for it and stays, far more than six months of your silence has bought you.”