“I Never Should Have Married You,” the Duke Told His Steward — But When His Wife Smiled and Replied, “Good News, You No Longer Have To,” He Had Only Five Weeks to Stop Her Leaving and Confess the Love He Had Hidden for Nearly a Year

 PART 3

He crossed to the sideboard and poured himself a brandy he did not drink. He turned the glass instead in his hand, staring into the fire as though it might yield him an answer to the question he had not asked her outright: what he would do with five weeks and a wife who had just handed him, with perfect composure, the exact instrument of his own freedom — and made him understand, in the handing, that freedom was the last thing on earth he wanted.

He thought of his father, dead these fourteen months, who had built the clause into the settlement as a mercy to a girl he had never expected his son to want to keep. A way out, drawn up out of guilt over a debt of honor decades old, never intended as anything but an escape hatch for two strangers bound by a dying man’s conscience. His father had not accounted for the possibility that the strangers might, over eleven cold and combative months, cease to be strangers at all.

Ketrick was not certain he had accounted for it himself until tonight. Until the moment she had looked him dead in the eye and offered to disappear, and something in him had roared no with a violence that frightened him more than Ashwell’s insult ever could have.

Five weeks.

He set the untouched glass down and went to find Hollis. Not to apologize, though he owed the man that too, but to ask him quietly, without quite admitting why he wished to know, whether Her Ladyship had truly begun this very night to speak of packing.

Hollis, found in the servant’s passage, still nursing the memory of his master’s temper, only looked at the Duke for a long moment before saying, with the particular gentleness of a man who had served the family since Ketrick was in short coats: “Her Ladyship has not spoken of packing to me, Your Grace. She has, however, asked Mrs. Burch for writing paper. Three sheets. I could not say to whom she means to write.”

Ketrick stood very still in the dim passage, five weeks suddenly feeling like considerably less time than it had ten minutes before.

The three sheets of writing paper, it transpired the following morning, had gone to Odelina’s old nurse at Alcott Grange, to a cousin in the north she had not seen since her father’s funeral, and to no one who might spirit her away before the eleventh of next month. Ketrick learned this from his mother, who learned it from Mrs. Burch, who had steamed the seal of none of them but had, in the manner of housekeepers since the beginning of time, simply known.

“You look,” the Dowager Duchess said over her chocolate the next morning in the small breakfast room that caught the only decent light in the whole gloomy pile of Fossborough, “like a wasp that is too proud to admit it stings.”

“I do not know what you mean, Mother.”

“You never do, when it is convenient not to.” She set down her cup with the precise, unhurried grace of a woman who had survived forty years of marriage to Ketrick’s father and considered very little on earth worth hurrying for. “I understand you told Hollis at some volume that you never should have married your wife. Word travels through Fossborough’s stone corridors faster than fire through dry thatch.”

“I spoke without thinking.”

“You very often do when it comes to that girl. It is the only unthinking thing you do at all, which I find rather illuminating.” His mother’s eyes, so like his own in color, though nothing like his own in temperament, studied him over the rim of her cup. “She has been a duchess for eleven months and has not once come to me in tears, though heaven knows you have given her cause enough. I confess I did not expect to like her, Ketrick. Your father chose her for you the way one chooses a tenant for a difficult farm — out of obligation and a certain grim satisfaction in discharging a debt. I expected a mouse. I got a woman who told Lady Penrith to her face at my own table that a duchess’s chief duty was not ornament but usefulness, and that she intended to be considerably more useful than ornamental.”

The old duchess’s mouth curved, reluctant and fond.

“Lady Penrith has not recovered. I have rarely enjoyed an evening more.”

Ketrick said nothing, because there was nothing to say that would not require admitting that he too had enjoyed that particular evening rather more than he ought. He had sat at the foot of his own table with his wine untouched, watching his wife dismantle a marquess’s condescension with nothing but perfect manners and a scalpel of a tongue, and had felt something unfamiliar and unwelcome kindle in his chest that he had spent the following week pretending not to notice.

He noticed it again three days later in the estate office, when he came upon her seated at Hollis’s desk with the quarter’s ledgers spread before her and a small furrow between her brows that he was coming, against his will, to recognize as the shape her face took when she had found an error and was deciding how diplomatically to point it out.

“You are in my steward’s chair,” he observed from the doorway.

“Your steward’s chair was empty, and your steward’s arithmetic was wrong, and I dislike wrongness the way some women dislike spiders.” She did not look up. “The Thornwick rents column. Hollis has carried the sum forward incorrectly for two quarters running. A transposition, nothing malicious, but it wants correcting before Michaelmas, or your tenants will be paying for a debt that does not exist.”

He crossed the room and looked over her shoulder, close enough to catch the faint scent of ink and lavender water that seemed to follow her everywhere. And found, with the particular irritation of a man discovering he has been wrong about something he was certain of, that she was entirely correct. The column had been carried forward with an error of some forty pounds, compounding quietly for half a year.

“How did you find it?”

“I read numbers the way other women read novels, Your Grace. For pleasure, and because I cannot help noticing when the plot does not add up.” She glanced up at him then, and there was a challenge in it, daring him to be offended that his wife had corrected his steward’s sums without being asked. “My father kept the Grange’s accounts himself — badly — and taught me to keep them better out of sheer self-preservation. I do not offer this as an accomplishment. Only as an explanation, in case you were about to accuse me of witchcraft.”

“I was about to thank you,” he said, and watched with some satisfaction the surprise flicker across her face before she mastered it. “Hollis will want the correction before quarter day. If you would be good enough to show him where the error lies, rather than simply informing me of it, I imagine it will save us both a great deal of future trouble.”

“You wish me to instruct your steward.”

“I wish my steward not to make the same error a third time. And I have observed that you are considerably more patient with fools than I am.”

It was, he realized only as he said it, the nearest thing to a genuine compliment he had paid her since the wedding. He watched it land. Saw the faint color rise in her cheeks, quickly suppressed, before she bent her head back to the ledger to hide it.

“I shall try not to enjoy that too openly,” she said, to the page rather than to him. “It would ruin the effect of my being terribly put upon.”

He found, walking away down the corridor a few minutes later, that he was smiling. An act so unfamiliar to the muscles of his face that Hollis, passing him on the stair, actually startled.