Page 53 of A Bride for the Ruthless Duke

It did not undo everything, and she was not ready for it to. But she set it beside the mare bought without a reason given, and the ridge where he had told her the one true thing about himself, and the garden he had noticed and never named, and the wall she had only tonight discovered, and the man she had built out of all her fear of him shifted under the new weight, a small definite movement, the way a house settles in the night, and she felt it go.

She turned onto her side. Out of old habit her mind reached for Vance, the way a tongue goes to a missing tooth, and found him there still, the red coat and the practiced smile and the hand laid warm on her knee. The thought had gone thin. Worn somehow, like a letter folded and refolded past reading, and she lay in the dark and did not understand why, and fell asleep before she could, which was its own kind of answer.

CHAPTER TEN

“Keep your purse close on a market day, Your Grace. Wrenford’s an honest town, but honest will empty a purse faster than thieving ever managed.”

Mrs. Selby said it with the grim satisfaction of a woman who had been emptying her own purse in this market for thirty years, and Ellen, walking beside her up the cobbled hill with the footman a pace behind, found that she was very nearly happy, which surprised her, since she had not had the sensation in long enough to be uncertain she recognised it.

It was the first time she had been off the estate in nearly on two months. The morning was bright and cold and full of the ordinary racket of a country town, the stalls and the geese and a man crying eels, and nobody on the hill knew or cared that the woman in the good pelisse had been bought with her brother’s debts.

“They will stare,” Mrs. Selby had warned her in the carriage. “Mind you don’t take it for the London sort. London stares to find your fault. Wrenford stares to settle whether you’ve two eyes and a nose like the rest of us, and once it has settled the question it will sell you a fish and think no more about you.”

And so it proved. A woman at the butter stall stared, decided, bobbed, and sold her nothing, since Ellen wanted no butter, and was perfectly friendly about it. A child stared until its mother cuffed it. The man crying eels offered His Grace’s lady a special price and then, on reflection, the ordinary one, which Mrs. Selby pronounced the highest compliment Wrenford had in its gift.

“You see,” she said, steering Ellen on by the elbow. “You are settled. Nobody will trouble to be cruel to you here. They have not the leisure for it, with the geese to sell.”

“We shall call on Mrs. Aldous first,” Ellen said, “before the silk. A rector’s wife made to wait grows opinions, and I have opinions enough aimed at me as it is.”

Mrs. Aldous proved round and warm and delighted, and pressed seedcake on them before they were fairly seated.

“I had said to the rector only Sunday, we shall never see the new duchess, she will be a London creature and find us all very dull.” She poured with a generous hand. “And here you are at my own table, and not London in the least. Tell me you mean to stay in the county and make an old woman happy.”

“I mean to stay, Mrs. Aldous. The county suits me far better than the town ever did.”

“Then you are wiser than your neighbors, for half of them cannot wait to be gone the moment the leaves turn.” She leaned in, lowering her voice to the pitch of confidence she plainly could not resist. “And you will have grander neighbors than you bargained for, I’m afraid. You know Greaves Court lies just across the river from your own little place.”

“My husband named the earl to me once. A political acquaintance, he called him.”

“Political.” Mrs. Aldous gave the word a small significant turn. “I daresay. They do not speak, the earl and your duke, not these nine years and more, and nobody quite remembers the why of it, only that it was something in Parliament and that the earl has never forgiven it. He is not at all liked hereabouts; indeed, he is held in very poor regard, Your Grace, and I shall say no more than that in my own parlor except that he has been buying up half the river through London men these four years, farms and meadows and water-meadows, all through agents so a body can never quite lay a hand on him, and the families that sold are mostly sorry they did.” She straightened, suddenly prim. “But I am indulging in mere tittle-tattle, “But I am indulging in mere tittle-tattle, and the rector says it is my one besetting sin, and I shall stop. Shall I have the pleasure of offering you another piece?”

Ellen took the cake. “And the families who sold. Are they about the parish still, or did they take their leave?”

“Some stayed, poorer. Some went. And one or two the earl’s men helped on their way, if you take my meaning, though I am sure I never said any such thing.” Mrs. Aldous’s eyes were shrewd under all the round kindness. “You have a particular look about you, Your Grace, when I speak of it. The look of a woman holding a question she means to keep.”

“I have a great many questions, Mrs. Aldous. I am only beginning to learn which ones the county will answer.”

“Ask me any of them, and I shall tell you which are safe to ask aloud and which you had best put only to your own hearth. It is the most useful thing a clergyman’s wife ever learns, and the slowest.”

“Then I shall ask you one, and you may decide which sort it is.” Ellen turned her cup. “The land down toward the river, below the Burton holding. It has changed hands, I am told, and not lately. Who holds it now?”

Mrs. Aldous’s round face did a small careful thing, a shutting and an opening, the look of a woman deciding how much daylight a question could safely bear. “Now there is a hearth question, Your Grace, if ever I heard one. London men hold it. Names on a paper, and the names mean nothing, for I have asked, in my idle way, and so has my husband in his.” She lowered her voice without seeming to. “But the parcels run all one direction, if a body troubles to walk them, and they all lie on the way to the same door, and it is not a door I shall name over good cake in my own parlor. I will only say it is a great door, and a cold one, and six miles north of yours.”

Ellen took the cake, and filed every word of it beside what Mr. Burton had told her of his lost forty acres and what she had set Crewe to discover, and said only that she found country gossip a great deal more instructive than the London kind.

She came away with a standing invitation and a cutting of late marjoram in damp paper, and went down the hill to the draper’s with the morning still bright on her and the puzzle of the river land turning quietly at the back of her mind.

The draper’s was halfway down the hill, and she stood at the window turning a bolt of grey-blue against her wrist, thinking it would make the gown she had been promising herself since the wedding money made such things possible, and in the dark of the window glass she saw, crossing the street behind her, a man in a red coat.

She turned without deciding to.

It was Vance.

He had not seen her. He stood laughing at something a brother officer had said, his head back, his coat brushed, exactly as he had stood in her own morning room with the whole afternoon before him, and her breath went somewhere she could not find it. Then his glance came idly along the street and passed over her and snagged and came back, and in the half-second before he arranged his face she saw the truth of it, the surprise, and behind the surprise a quick cold reckoning, the face of a man handed a column of figures he had not expected to add. Then it was smoothed away into a smile that reached his mouth and stopped there.

He crossed to her and bowed.

“Miss Middleton. What a remarkable surprise.” He caught himself, smooth as glass. “Forgive me. Your Grace.”