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 5

She said yes at breakfast. Plainly, without ornament, setting down her cup first so her hands would be still.

“I have decided,” she said. “And I will tell you my reasons, because I do not want you thinking I chose you out of fear or hunger, which would poison the thing before it began. I am not choosing you. I am choosing the terms. A woman offered separate rooms, her own money, an unassailable name, and no chain — that woman would be a fool to walk out your door into a Sunday where every drawing room already has the other story. I would not be choosing you if you had asked me to be grateful, or charming, or anything at all except honest. You asked me to be honest. I can afford honest. It is the only currency I was left with.” She looked at him, level. “So — yes, on your terms. And I will keep your accounts, if you’ll let me, because I cannot abide idleness, and your household books, if they are anything like my father’s, are very likely a disgrace.”

“They are a disgrace,” Norwin admitted. “I have never opened one.”

“Then we shall get on,” she said, “better than either of us expects, which is not the same as well. And I make no promises past the books.”

But there it was again, at the corner of her mouth — the smile that would not quite come out, hovering just behind the plainness of her. And he found he was in no hurry at all, that he could wait a long time for that smile, and count the waiting no hardship.

They were married eleven days later, quietly, in the small gray church near his northern house, with no more witnesses than the law required. Lori wore gray — not because it was forced on her, but because she chose it, plain of line, and she carried nothing, and made her vows in a clear, even voice that did not tremble on a single word. Norwin, listening to her, found his own voice was the one that came near to failing.

Fosskar was vast and gray and cold, and Lori walked into it as its duchess with the same look she walked into everything — the look of weather, intending to pass through.

Within a fortnight she had turned the great cold place inside out. Not by decree — she gave almost no orders. She simply appeared in the kitchens and knew the cook’s name by the second day and the state of the linen by the third, and she opened the household books at the long table in the steward’s room and worked through them with a candle and a sharpened pen until two in the morning. Within six weeks she had found a butler skimming the wine accounts and a coal merchant charging a third more than he delivered, and eleven years of small, quiet thefts that no one had troubled to notice because the Duke was rich and the Duke did not look.

She laid it all before him on a single clean page, columns ruled, losses summed at the foot in her careful copperplate.

“You have been robbed,” she said gently, “for eleven years, by people who correctly judged that you would never open a book. I have not dismissed anyone — that is your affair, not mine — but you should know the size of it.”

Norwin looked at the page a long time. It was not the money. The money was nothing to him. It was that his wife of scarcely six weeks had seen his house more clearly than he had in twenty years of owning it.

“Keep them,” he said. “The books, all of them. I am putting the whole of the household into your hands, Lori — not because it is a wife’s work, but because you are plainly the best steward this house has had in a hundred years, and it would be a crime against arithmetic to waste you on embroidery. Will you take it?”

“I will take it,” she said — and there, at last, at the mention of being trusted with the thing she was good at, rather than the thing she was supposed to be, the smile came out whole and unguarded for the first time, and he had to look away, because the wanting of it frightened him.

They kept to their terms — separate rooms at the far respectable ends of a house so large that a man and his wife might live in it a week and never meet, if they wished. But they did not wish. Without either of them proposing it, they fell into breakfast together, because she was an early riser and so, it turned out, was he. Then the long gallery in the afternoons, where she walked when the weather kept her in, and he found himself, by pure coincidence he assured himself, in the library that opened off the gallery’s end, so that she paused at his door, and came in.

They talked of the estate, the tenants, the drainage of the low fields, the wickedness of the coal merchant. And slowly, of other things — her mother, dead six years, who had taught her the copperplate and the trick of holding a house together with will. His father, dead nineteen, who had taught him nothing except that money answered everything, and men were to be managed, and a Duke of Fosskar did not, under any circumstance, permit himself to be seen to want.

“That is a terrible thing to teach a boy,” Lori said, when he had told her that much. Not with pity — with the flat disapproval of a woman reading a bad account. “To want is the whole of being alive. A man taught not to be seen wanting is a man taught to starve himself in a full larder. I am sorry for it. I am not sorry for you — you’re a great cold duke and you can bear it. But I am sorry for the boy, who did nothing to deserve being made so hungry.”

Norwin did not answer for a while. The northern light was failing early, as it did, and she had said the truest thing anyone had said to him in his whole managed life, expecting nothing in return.

“You are the only person,” he said at last, “who has ever spoken to me as though I were a person rather than a duke. I have been very lonely, Lori. I did not know it.”