He Rode Out to Settle a £400 Debt and Found a Beaten Girl Kneeling in Icy Water Beneath Her Stepmother’s Roof — Then the Silent Duke Asked Her Name, and Everything in That House Began to Break
PART 3
He rode over again within the week, this time by the front, and was received with a great flutter and shown into the same cold parlor. The widow talked. The daughters — Prudence and Aurelia, names he learned and forgot in the same breath — paraded fresh ribbons before him. He said little and watched the door, and Isan came and went with the tea things, and he watched her the way a man watches something he has trained himself to see, having nothing else in the room he wished to look at.
He saw that she ate nothing, though a plate of small cakes stood on the table and the daughters ate freely. He saw that when the widow’s hand moved suddenly — to reach for the pot, to gesture in her talk — the girl’s whole body tensed for the space of a heartbeat before it stilled again. A flinch caught and mastered before it could fully form. He saw her wrists, thin as a child’s, marked with the small burns of kitchen work, and once, unmistakably, with a bruise in the shape of four fingers.
As he left, he stopped in the hall and said quietly, so only she could hear beneath the widow’s noise: “Do you go out? Do they let you walk?”
Her eyes came up, startled. “To the village, my lord. For the marketing, on Fridays.”
“By which road?”
“The low road. By the mill.”
On Friday he was on the low road by the mill, sitting his horse in the shelter of a stand of leafless beeches, as though he had merely paused there. When she came along with a near-empty basket, her thin shawl pulled tight, he let her see him and inclined his head. She stopped.
“My lord.” “Miss Olveston.” He looked at the basket. “You’ve done your marketing.”
“I have not the money for much, my lord.” She said it plainly, without complaint, as she said everything — a simple statement of the terms of her life.
In the plain gray light of the open road, without the shuttered dimness of that house about her, she was younger than he’d first taken her — two and twenty, perhaps — and beneath the thinness and the fading bruise there was a face of great sweetness. Not the showy prettiness her stepsisters strove for. Something finer and quieter. A clear, steady intelligence in the gray eyes that misery had bruised but had not put out.
“How long have you lived so?” he asked.
She understood him, and did not pretend not to. “Since my father died, my lord. Seven years.” Something moved in her face — an old grief long shut away. “Before that, it was different. He loved me. He was ill a long time before he died, and by the time he was gone, it was already too late to change how things were. I was fifteen. I had nowhere to go. I have nowhere to go now.” She lifted her chin a very little. “I do not tell you this to complain, my lord. You asked. I have found it is better to answer plainly and be done.”
“Yes,” the Duke said. “I have found the same.”
They looked at one another on the cold road, and it seemed to him that a great deal passed between them in that silence — more than had passed in all the words. Here were two people who had each learned the same hard lesson in different schools: that the world does not soften for asking, that a locked door keeps out the cold.
“Your hands,” he said abruptly.
She looked down at them, red and cracked about the basket handle. “The cold, my lord. And the scrubbing. It is nothing.”
“It is not nothing.” He was surprised at the roughness in his own voice. He reached inside his coat and drew out a small flat tin. “A salve. For horses’ hocks, chapped by the wet. My grooms swear by it. It will serve as well for hands.”
She looked at it and did not take it. “My lord, I cannot. If it were seen—”
“Say you bought it. Say a groom gave it you at the smithy. Say what you like.” He pressed it on her, and after a moment she took it, her fingers cold and rough against his glove, and slipped it beneath the twist of tea in her basket.
She looked up at him with an expression he could not read — weary, wondering, unaccustomed to kindness and not quite knowing how to receive it. “Why,” she said, just that. “Why should you trouble, my lord? Men like you do not know one. Men like you do not trouble.”
“No,” the Duke agreed. “No one troubles. That is precisely why I trouble.” He gathered his reins. “Go home now before you are missed, and it costs you. I do not wish to buy you a beating with a tin of salve.”
She flinched at the word, and he saw at once that he had named the thing that was never named, and was sorry, and did not know how to say so. So he only looked at her a moment longer and said, “Friday,” as though it were a promise, and rode away.
He came back the next Friday, and the next. He told himself these meetings were nothing — a few words, a small kindness, a wrapped parcel of good beef, a pair of woolen gloves she accepted at last because her hands were splitting with the cold. He told himself these were small things. But he found he lived from Friday to Friday, and that the great cold house of Dunbear, which had suited him so well, grew each week a little more intolerable in its silence.
Week by week, on that low gray road, he learned her. That her name, Isan, had been her true mother’s, and her father had never let it be shortened, and the widow used it cold and mocking, so that the sound of her own name had become a thing she braced against. That she could read, and had once had books, sold long ago. That she used to sing, before she learned that singing drew attention, and attention drew trouble — and that she hummed now, sometimes, very low, when she was sure no one could hear.
He learned, too, that her situation was worsening. The widow was in debt — not to him now, the note was paid — but to tradesmen and moneylenders in the town, with two daughters to marry off and no fortune to marry them with. And a woman in such straits, the Duke knew, grows crueler as she grows more frightened, and looks about her for something to punish, and finds it nearest to hand in the one person who cannot answer back.