Every Lady Curtsied as the Duke Entered — But He Walked Straight to the Woman Reading Alone by the Window, Unaware She Was About to Become the Only Choice That Truly Mattered

 PART 6

Three days after the ball, the Duke of Gaspre’s carriage — the black one, with the silver crest on the door, that half the district had seen only in engravings — turned in at the sagging gate of Sir Halbert Pike’s modest manor.

It caused something not far short of a riot below stairs.

Kitpatrick was aware of the commotion. He heard the shriek of a maid, the crash of something dropped in the kitchen, the frantic scuffle of a household caught utterly unprepared. He sat in his carriage a moment longer than he needed to, from a mercy he had not known he possessed, to give them time.

He had chosen the hour with care — the middle of the morning, when callers of fashion never came — precisely because he wished to find the house as it truly was, and not scrubbed and starched into a lie.

He was admitted by a flustered manservant into a parlor that had once been handsome and was now merely clean. The carpet was worn to its threads in a path between the door and the fire. The curtains had been turned to hide their fading. A great many small economies had been practiced here with great dignity for a great many years.

Kitpatrick, who had never in his life wanted for anything, looked at them and understood more about Orwenna Kyniston in that silent minute than a season of ballrooms could have told him.

She came in with ink on her finger.

She had not had time to change or to arrange herself, and he saw at once that she had been interrupted at some work. There was a smudge of ink along the side of her right hand — the mark of a person who writes a great deal and quickly — and a pen’s callus where her finger met her thumb. Her hair was less careful than it had been at the ball, and it suited her better.

She stopped in the doorway when she saw who it was. For the first time since he had met her, he saw her genuinely at a loss — and he found it strangely dear.

“Your Grace,” she said. “You have come to the wrong house. There is no one here worth the mud on your wheels.”

“I have come to the right house,” said the Duke, “for the first time in my life. May I sit?”

She recovered herself. She always recovered herself. It was one of the things he was coming to admire in her — the way she righted herself after a blow, like a boat built for rough water.

She rang for tea and apologized for the tea before it came, and told him plainly that it would be weak because good tea was dear, and they kept the good tea for company that mattered. He understood that she was testing him — laying her poverty out on the table between them to see whether he would flinch.

He did not flinch. He saw her mark that he had not.

“I have been thinking about your fen,” he said when the weak tea had come.

She blinked. “My fen?”

“Your uncle’s flooded land. The winter wheat that drowns. You told me the fault lies in neglected ditches, not in the sky. I have thought about it a good deal these three days.”

He set down his cup. “I rode out yesterday and looked at the low ground along your uncle’s boundary where it meets my own tenant’s holding at Marsh Corner. You are quite right. The main drain has silted, and the fall of the land carries the water back onto your uncle’s field instead of away from it. It has been getting worse for years, and no one has troubled to look at it because it lies at the edge of two properties, and each assumed it was the other’s to mend.”

Orwenna stared at him. “You rode out to look at a ditch.”

“I rode out to look whether you were right,” said the Duke. “You were. You are a better surveyor than the man I pay forty pounds a year to be one. I have given orders that the drain be cleared and recut this autumn at my expense — since half of it lies on my land, and the other half will do my tenant no harm to mend. Your uncle’s wheat will not drown next spring.”

He paused. “I did not do it to purchase your gratitude, Miss Kyniston. So you may put away the look you are preparing to give me. I did it because you were right, and the thing was wrong, and it was in my power to mend it. But I will not pretend I was sorry for the excuse to call.”

She was silent for a long moment. When she spoke, her voice was not quite steady.

“Do you know,” she said, “in nine years of telling people about that ditch — my uncle, his steward, his neighbors, the man from the parish — you are the first who has listened? Not the first who has been polite. The first who has heard the words and gone and looked and found them true and acted.”

She looked down at the ink on her finger. “I had begun to think I was talking to myself. It is a strange thing, to be believed. I find I hardly know what to do with it.”

“You might,” said the Duke, “tell me what else you are right about. I find I am forming the habit of acting on your opinions, and I should like a fuller list.”

She laughed — a real laugh, surprised out of her — and the sound of it did something to the mended, dignified, threadbare little room that all his forty thousand acres could not have done.