Her father staked her at a card table like a purse of coin — “my daughter, worth more than every guinea here.” The coldest duke in England looked at the wager and did something no one at that table expected: he refused to play.

PART 2

He did not sleep that night. He sat before his own fire with the folded paper open on his knee and read it over until he had it by heart.

Candles, one shilling and fourpence. Coal — a matter he had never once thought about — added to a sum. Sarah, cook, wages three weeks in arrears, and beside it, in the same even hand, a small firm word: soon.

She had promised her cook. Whoever kept these accounts had looked her servant in the eye and said soon, and meant it, and gone on holding a doomed house together with nothing but the promising.

In the morning he sent his man of business, a dry and scrupulous person named Mr. Auditly, to the address at the head of the account. He did not go himself. He told himself it would frighten her, the Duke arriving on her doorstep. This was true. It was also true that he was, for the first time in a decade, afraid — not of her, but of the look on her face when she learned what her father had done, and of standing in front of it.

Auditly returned at noon with his hat in his hands and an expression Norwin had never seen him wear.

“The house is as the account describes it, Your Grace. Very little in it that has not been sold. The father was not there — a neighbor says he took the mail coach north at dawn.” He hesitated. “The young lady received me. She had already learned of it. Word travels in a street like that. One of the men from last night’s table has a valet, and the valet has a sweetheart in service two doors down. She knew, Your Grace, before I ever knocked. She was quite composed. She gave me tea. There was, I think, almost nothing in the house to make tea with, and she gave me tea.”

The dry man turned his hat in his hands.

“She asked me one question. She asked whether it was true that the Duke of Fosskar had told her father he was buying his silence, and not his child. Whether those were the words. I said they were — that I had them from Your Grace’s own account of the evening. She was quiet a while. Then she said she would come and hear the terms from your own mouth, because she would not be disposed of a second time by proxy.”

Norwin stood at the window with his back to the room for a long moment.

“She is coming here this afternoon. I could not dissuade her, nor did I greatly try. She has a way about her.”

Auditly permitted himself the ghost of an opinion. “I do not think she is a woman easily disposed of at all, Your Grace. And I do not think her father ever understood that. I think it may be the thing he could least forgive her.”

She came at four, in a gown that had been good three seasons ago and was pressed to within an inch of its life, and gloves mended so finely at one fingertip that only a person who had done such mending herself would ever have noticed. Norwin, who had learned to read a room the way other men read a ledger, saw the mending and the pressing and understood, in a moment, more about Lori Hulsey than her father had troubled to learn in her whole life.

She had dressed to be looked at by a duke. She had had nothing to dress in. She had made the nothing into dignity with her own two hands and a cake of pressing soap, and she had walked into the house of the man who legally owned her ruin with her chin level and her eyes clear, and no more color in her face than the situation demanded.

“Your Grace,” she said, and curtsied exactly as much as courtesy required, and not the breadth of a hair more.

Norwin found he had risen without deciding to. It had not happened to him in years.

“Miss Hulsey. You did not have to come.”

“I would have arranged everything at a distance to spare you—”

“To spare me being managed,” she said. “Mr. Auditly is a kind man, and he was very gentle with me, and I am grateful. But I did not want gentleness, Your Grace. I have had a great deal done to me gently these last four-and-twenty hours, by men who mean well and men who mean nothing, and I found I could not bear to have the rest of my life managed in the next room while I waited in this one. So I have come to hear it from you.” She folded her hands, and her voice did not waver. “What is it that you own, exactly? Say it plainly. I keep accounts. I like a thing said plainly.”