She Gave a Hungry Stranger the Larger Half of Her Last Loaf — Then at Midnight, a Duke’s Carriage Arrived to Take Her to the Great House That Had Spent Forty Years Trying to Repay Her Family’s Kindness

PART 5

“She sent old Kumb out along the western roads in a beggar’s coat, with orders to knock at twelve doors and ask for bread. And she set her whole belief upon the twelfth.”

“And the twelfth,” Eleanor said slowly, “was mine.”

“The twelfth was to be whatever the twelfth turned out to be. She did not know it would be a bake house with an empty till. She did not order it. That is rather the point of the thing.” For the first time, a line of something that was almost feeling crossed the severe mouth and was gone. “Eleven doors turned him out. Yours had nothing. And yours opened all the way.”

He stopped. “And before Kumb left this county, my grandmother had set her hand to a paper — before her solicitor and two witnesses and her own chaplain — binding herself past any unbinding of mine, that whatever soul fed her messenger with kindness she could not spare should be brought to Ravensmere and offered —”

He stopped again.

“Offered what?” Eleanor whispered.

“That,” said the Duke, “you will hear from her, and not from me. For it is hers to give, and I will not have it said I put a word of it in your mouth to serve my own ends. I will tell you only this, Miss Puit, since you have asked me twice to be plain: what she means to offer changes the whole standing of my house. And there are those who have waited a long while upon its not being offered. And if you refuse it — as I devoutly hope you will — it must be refused to her face, under her roof, or it is not refused at all. A note sent back by carrier will not answer. She will hold it open till the frost.”

“Do you begin to see?”

She saw a little of it. And what she saw she did not like.

“You want me to come and say no to her, so that you need not?”

“I want the thing ended,” he said cleanly, “tonight, before it can grow teeth. And you cannot end it from this doorstep.”

Eleanor looked past his shoulder at the grays steaming in the moon, at the footman standing so still he might have been cast in the same iron as the wheels. And then back into the small swept dark of her own room — the cold second oven, the open tin, four shillings and a bent sixpence against the whole weight of the summer quarter.

And a thought came to her, cold and clear as well water: that she was ruined already. That Silito would come at cockcrow, whether she was here to meet him or not. That a girl with nothing to lose is the one person in the world a duke cannot buy — and might, if she kept her wits, use.

“I will come,” she said.

The Duke’s brows drew a fraction.

“I will come,” she repeated, “on three conditions. And you will hear them before I fetch my cloak, for I have no wish to arrive at your grand house and find the terms have shrunk in the carriage. First: I go to say no, as you wish it. And I go by my own choosing, and not because you had the horses. Second: whatever your grandmother offers and I refuse, you will bring me back to this door by tomorrow’s dusk. And you will not use the journey to work upon me for your own comfort.”

“And third —” Her voice caught only a little, and she despised it. “You will send word to Mr. Silito, the miller, that Puit’s is not to be touched, nor sold, nor entered until I am home to answer for it. That much you can do with a single letter, and it costs you nothing. And I will not stir a foot without it.”

For a moment he only looked at her, and she could not read the look at all, which frightened her more than temper would have.

“Silito,” he said. “The note on this house is Silito’s.”

“The note, the mill, half the lane, and his good opinion of himself, which is the largest holding of the four.” She managed it dry. “Have I asked too much? You may keep your fifty pounds, Your Grace. I would sooner have the letter.”

“You are the first person in some years,” said the Duke of Ravensmere, “to name me a price I had not already guessed.”

He turned his head a bare inch. “Kumb.”

And out of the black seam between the hedges, where he must have been standing this whole while in the beggar’s coat she had fed a stranger in, came the old man — unhurried, wiping crumbs of her barley loaf still from his cuff — and his clear gray eyes found her over the Duke’s shoulder and creased at their corners in a way that undid her all over again.

“I told you, mistress,” said old Kumb, “that it would be remembered before the moon was high.” He looked up at the tower, where the moon indeed hung white and swollen over the leads. “And so it has been. I am sorry for the fright of the horses. Her Grace has no notion how a carriage sounds to a body that was expecting only sleep.”

“You ate my bread,” Eleanor said, “and never said a word of what you were about.”

“A word would have spoiled it.” He said it gently, without a shred of shame. “Kindness that knows it is being weighed is only manners. And manners her Grace has in plenty at home. It was the other thing she wanted. And the other thing cannot be asked for. It can only be caught in the act.”