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 7

“And to you —”

The question was out before she had weighed it, and it landed between them and sat there.

“To me,” said the Duke of Ravensmere, and for one moment — one only — the moonlight and the lamplight caught his face together, and she saw under the cold something that looked worn nearly through, “it is the ruin of a plan I have spent eight years building stone on stone, to save what my father —”

He stopped himself hard as a man reins a bolting horse.

“— to save this house. I am not free to be warmed. Warmth is a thing for men who can afford the price it fetches. And I have never once been able to afford it. So you will go in tomorrow, and you will refuse her with all the plainness you showed me on your step. And you will be home by dusk with your bake house safe. And Sir Julian Cray will take his sister home. And the world will run on in the one channel it can run in without flooding. That is the whole of what I want. I am telling you so that you will know it is not you I am refusing. It is the flood.”

She should have felt relief. He was handing her the very freedom she had bargained for: go, say no, come home. Instead, she felt something turn over in her chest that had no name she cared to give it — a small, perverse ache at being spoken of by a man she had known two hours as a flood to be damned.

“You are very sure,” she said, “that I will say no.”

The dark eyes came back to her, sharper. “Will you not?”

“Oh, I shall.” She looked away out at the moon-silvered hay. “I have a bake house and a fire banked to come home to, and no more wish to be a duchess than to be the moon. But I will thank you all the same not to spend my answer for me before I have been asked the question. It is the one thing I own outright tonight, Your Grace — my own no. And I find I do not care to have even that taken out of my hands by a man with better horses.”

He said nothing to that. But she felt him look at her in the dark a moment longer than a man looks at a flood. And she turned her face resolutely to the window, and did not let him see that she had felt it.

They changed horses at a coaching inn at the county’s edge, where the ostlers came out yawning with lanterns, and the yard smelt of straw and hot iron and the ale-sour spillings of the tap. Eleanor took a cup of small beer standing by the mounting block, and watched the moon go behind a rag of cloud.

It was there, in the guttering light of the inn yard, that the first hard thing happened.

A rider came in off the Ravensmere road, going the other way, fast — a young groom on a lathered cob — who flung himself down and would have run straight past their carriage had Kumb not stepped from the shadow and caught his arm. There was a low, quick exchange she could not hear over the stamping of the fresh horses. Then Kumb came to her, and his face — that had been kind at her door — had gone grave.

“Mistress,” he said quietly, drawing her a pace apart from the Duke. “I will tell you, for you have the right of it more than His Grace allows, and you will bear it better for not being ambushed.”

“Sir Julian Cray has not been idle at Ravensmere this day. He has sent to Malborough for a lawyer of his own. And he has been about the servants’ hall with a loose purse and a loud voice, saying to any who will hear him that the woman her Grace means to raise up is a scheming baggage who fed a beggar on purpose — having somehow got wind of the whole design beforehand.”

His gray eyes held hers. “It is a lie, and a clumsy one. And no one who was at your door could believe it. But you were not seen at your door by the folk who matter. And Sir Julian is handsome, and highborn, and free with his money. And a lie in a fine coat travels faster than the truth in a beggar’s.”

The cold that went through Eleanor then had nothing to do with the mist coming up off the inn yard cobbles.

“He is calling me a cheat,” she said, “before I have so much as set foot in the place. Before your grandmother has offered me a thing to cheat her of.”

“He is frightened, mistress. Frightened men are the cruelest, having the most to lose.”

Kumb glanced back at the carriage, where the Duke stood tall and unmoving against the lantern light, watching them, too far to hear.

“There is a thing I will say to you, and no further, for it is not mine to tell, and I have said too much of it already at your oven. Her Grace’s reasons are older than you know. And they are not all of them so pretty as a loaf of bread. It is not the first time a kindness done at a low door has come home to that house and changed its fortunes past mending. Ask her, when you are alone with her, why she chose the western road and no other. Ask her that, and watch her hands.”

He pressed something into Eleanor’s palm — cool and small. The bent sixpence from her own tin, that she had not known was gone.

“You left this behind. A woman should never come to a great house with nothing at all in her pocket. It puts her at their mercy. And their mercy is a chancy weather.”