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 6
He inclined his head toward the house. “Fetch your cloak, child. And bank your fire proper. For the nights are warm, but the mornings on the Ravensmere road come up off the water cold as charity. I will see to the letter to your miller myself. And I will see it says more than His Grace would trouble to say — which is a servant’s whole art.”
She left them on the step.
Inside, she moved through her own small kingdom by the light of the guttering dip, and did not let herself think, because thinking would have stopped her hands. She raked the embers down and set the fire cover over them the way her father had taught her, so the heat would keep till morning, and there would be a fire to come home to — if there was a home. She folded a change of linen into a cloth. Her fingers hovered over the proving cloths on their shelf — his cloths, worn soft as skin at the corners, where his palms had smoothed a thousand risings — and she did not take them. Because to take them felt like admitting she might not come back. And she would not admit that, not on any road, not for any duke.
At the last, she took down the good gray cloak that had been her mother’s. It smelt still, faintly, under the flour and the woodsmoke, of the lavender her mother had laid in the press against the moth. She pulled it round her shoulders in the dark, and stood a moment with her hand on the cold iron of the door latch. And she said the small, graceless prayer — not for herself, but for the house, that it might stand.
Then she went out into the moonlight.
The footman handed her up into the carriage, as though she were made of the same porcelain as its lamps. And the door, with the crest she could not read, shut upon her with a sound like a book closing.
The Duke sat across from her — all shoulder and shadow, filling his side of the carriage as he had filled her door. Kumb rode above with the coachman, having refused with great firmness to sit inside: “A servant that forgets his place gives his mistress two problems where she had none.” And so it was the two of them, and the swaying lamplight, and the long white road unspooling under the four gray horses.
For the better part of a mile, neither of them said a word.
It was Eleanor who broke first, because silence had never yet baked her a loaf.
“You said there were those who had waited a long while upon your grandmother’s offer not being made.” She kept her eyes on the dark hedge sliding past, sweet with the last of the dog roses and the heavy green smell of hay lying cut in the water meadows. “You had best tell me who I am to be a disappointment to. I would not like to walk into a room and be hated without knowing the shape of it.”
The lamplight rocked across his face and left it.
“You are quick,” he said. “I had not looked for that.”
“You had looked for a slattern or a schemer or a fool. You told me so on the step. So you need not pretend now to a courtesy you have already spent.” She turned from the window and met the dark eyes square. “Who, Your Grace?”
He was silent long enough that she thought he would refuse her. When he spoke, it came flat and careful — the voice of a man laying down a card he would rather have kept.
“There is an understanding — of some years standing — between my house and the house of Cray. Not a betrothal. My grandmother would tell you loudly that nothing has been signed and nothing is owed. But the world has understood it. And Lady Onoria Cray has understood it. And her brother, Sir Julian, has understood it best of all, for the joining of the two estates would clear a mortgage on his that no other joining will clear.”
His jaw tightened by the width of a hair — the same small motion she had seen on the step. “My grandmother’s paper does not name marriage in so many words. But its plain effect, if the woman she has bound herself to should accept what is offered, is that no such joining with the Cray can ever come about. Sir Julian knows this. He was at Ravensmere within the day of hearing of it. And he has not gone home.”
The carriage went over a rut, and the lamp swung, and Eleanor’s stomach swung with them — though it was not the road.
“Marriage,” she said, and the word came out of her small and disbelieving in the dark. “Your grandmother means to offer me — she means for you to —” She could not finish it. A laugh tried to come and found no purchase. “That is not an offer, Your Grace. That is a madness. I am a baker. I have flour under my nails that will not come out for scrubbing. I have never in my life been nearer a duchess than the far side of a churchyard wall. And your grandmother has never in her life clapped eyes on me. She cannot mean it. No one could mean it.”
“She means it entirely.” His voice had not changed, and that was the dreadful thing. “You have not met her. When you have, you will understand that my grandmother has never in ninety years wanted a thing she did not eventually hold in her two hands. And she wants this more than she has wanted anything since my grandfather went into the churchyard. She has got it into her head that the blood of my house has gone cold, and that a woman who gives away her last bread in an empty year is the one physic in England that might warm it. She does not care that you are a baker. She cares that you are the twelfth door. To her, that is not a low thing. To her, it is the only high thing left.”