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 8

Before she could answer, the Duke’s voice came across the yard, level and cool. “Kumb. The horses are put to.”

They took the road again in the deep of the night. And the country changed under the moon — the hedges giving way to long pale walls, the walls to iron gates, the gates to an avenue of limes that closed over the carriage like the nave of a church, and breathed down on her their thick honey scent till she was near sick with it.

And then the limes ended, and Ravensmere stood up out of the dark before her.

So vast and so lit that for a moment her mind refused it altogether. A whole cliff face of stone, with a hundred windows and half of them ablaze with candles at an hour when honest houses lay black. The moon riding the roofs. A fountain somewhere, throwing up a cold silver noise into the summer night.

“They are all awake,” Eleanor said faintly. “The whole house is awake.”

“My grandmother does not sleep when she is winning.” The Duke leaned to the window, and she saw his face harden by a further degree. Saw him go somewhere behind his own eyes. “No. Not all of them are hers.”

She followed his gaze. On the great pale sweep of the steps, under a lamp held high by a footman, a woman stood waiting for the carriage as though she had stood there some while. A woman gowned in something that took the light and gave it back as deep and dark as spilled wine. Her fair hair dressed high. Her beauty so complete and so cold that Eleanor felt her own flour-scarred hands curl shut inside her mother’s cloak.

Beside the woman, one hand resting easy on the stone balustrade as though the whole house already answered to it, stood a fair-haired gentleman, with a smile ready made upon his mouth and nothing whatever behind it.

The carriage rolled to its halt at the foot of the steps. The woman came down two of them, unhurried, and looked in through the very window where Eleanor sat. Her lovely mouth curved.

“Ravensmere,” she said to the Duke, without taking her eyes from Eleanor for an instant. “How good of you to bring her yourself. And to think we were told to expect a common little baker.” The smile widened, and did not reach the pale eyes at all. “But how tired you look, my dear. You must be quite worn to the bone. Do come in out of the night. Julian and I have been so very eager to make your acquaintance — before her Grace does.”

The footman drew the carriage door wide. The summer night came in with the smell of cut limes and cold fountain water. And Lady Onoria Cray’s gloved hand was already reaching to take Eleanor’s arm before Eleanor had so much as found the step with her foot.

“You will lean on me,” Onoria said, sweet as spilled honey. “These stones are treacherous to feet that are not used to them.”

“My feet have stood on a flagged floor since before I could talk,” Eleanor answered, and drew her arm out of the reaching hand as gently as she could manage — which was not very. “I will not fall down your steps, my lady, and shame the house before I have been let inside it.”

She heard behind her the Duke come down out of the carriage — that unhurried settling of weight that made the whole conveyance rock and right itself. She did not look back at him. She had decided, somewhere in the last mile of limes, that she would not look to him for anything in this place. For a woman who looks to a man in a strange house has already told the house where to strike her.

The hall swallowed them whole.

It was not a room so much as a weather. A vault of pale stone rising up past the reach of the candlelight into a dark she could not measure. A staircase wide enough to drive a haywain up. The flames of a hundred candles standing dead still in the airless heat, and throwing back off the marble a shine like ice on a February pond. It smelt of beeswax and hot-house lilies, and something under both of them — cold and mineral. The smell of a place that had never once in its life had to warm itself at its own hearth.

Eleanor’s boots rang on the floor. In her mother’s gray cloak, with the flour of the afternoon still ground into the palms of her knuckles, she felt herself go small — and hated the smallness, and stood the straighter for hating it.

Sir Julian Cray came off the balustrade where he had been leaning and crossed to her with his hand out and his ready smile turned all the way up. And by the light of the great hall she saw that Kumb had told her true. He was handsome as a picture of a man — fair and even-featured and easy — and there was nothing whatever living behind his eyes.

“Miss Puit.” He took the hand she had not offered and bowed over it, and his mouth did not touch her flour-scarred fingers, but she felt the warm breath of the word against them, which was worse. “Julian Cray, your very great servant. You must forgive my sister her eagerness. We have been on tenterhooks the whole night through, wondering what manner of paragon could have overturned a house at midnight. And here you are. And I declare the reality quite outdoes the report.”

“That is a kindness,” said Eleanor, “since the report, as I hear it, was that I am a scheming baggage who fed a beggar on purpose to trick a duchess out of her senses.” She let it sit a beat in the ringing air. “I would sooner outdo that than live up to it. So we are agreed.”