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 9

Something flickered across the handsome face. Not shame, she thought — but calculation. The small recalibration of a man who has found the ground softer — or harder — than he stepped for.

Behind her, the Duke’s voice came, level and cold as the stone. “Julian. You are up late.”

“Ravensmere.” Julian turned all warmth. And the two men looked at one another across the width of the hall in a way that made Eleanor think of two dogs that have long since worked out which is which, and go through the smelling of one another only for form’s sake. “I could hardly sleep with the house in such a ferment. Her Grace has scarcely let a candle go out. She has been asking for her guest this hour and more.”

“Then she will have her guest presently. And she will have her from me, and not from you.” The Duke came to stand at Eleanor’s shoulder — not touching, only there — a wall of dark cloth and colder purpose. “Onoria, I will thank you to send word up that we are come.”

Lady Onoria did not move to send any word anywhere. She stood with one hand resting on the newel post, the deep wine of her gown drinking the candlelight, and she looked Eleanor over slowly — from the crown of her fallen copper hair to the toes of her honest boots. And she smiled the smile that never once went near her eyes.

“Poor creature,” she said, to no one, to the room. “She does not even know what she has been fetched here to be offered. Look at her face. She has not the smallest notion.” The pale gaze came back up and fixed on Eleanor with a bright and pitying interest. “Has he told you, my dear? Has he told you in the carriage what her Grace means to make of you? Or has he only frightened you, which is his usual way with women he means to be rid of?”

“He has told me enough,” Eleanor said, “to know that I am wanted here by exactly one soul in this house, and that soul I have yet to meet.” She lifted her chin. “Which is one more than wants me in most houses. So I count myself ahead of the night.”

Julian laughed at that — an easy, pleasant sound with a wire pulled tight beneath it.

“Oh, she is sharp, Ravensmere. You did not tell us she was sharp.” He came a half-step nearer, dropping his voice to the register men use to make a threat sound like a confidence. “Miss Puit, before you go up those stairs, let me do you the one true kindness that will be done you in this house tonight. For I promise you no one else will trouble to. Whatever her Grace offers you — however grand, however golden — it is a rope, and it is dressed as a ribbon, and the far end of it is tied to a ruin you cannot see from where you stand. Refuse it. Take the fifty pounds His Grace was good enough to bring, and take your pretty conscience home to your oven. And be glad all your life that you got out of Ravensmere with your neck.”

He smiled, and it never wavered. “I say this as your friend.”

“You said it,” Eleanor answered, “as a man who has ridden very hard to get here first, and who calls me a cheat behind my back and his friend to my face inside the same four-and-twenty hours. I have a word for that in the trade, sir. But it is a baker’s word, and would not sit well on a knight’s ears.”

The wire under Julian’s laugh went — for just an instant — all the way tight.

They put her, before ever she was let up to the Dowager, into a small square room off the great hall — a morning room, she supposed it, though it was the black middle of the night — where a fire she did not need had been lit against the summer heat, so that the little room baked, and a decanter of wine stood ready on a table inlaid with more woods than she had names for.

It was Julian who steered her in, a hand hovering an inch from the small of her back and never quite landing. Onoria followed. The Duke came last, and stood by the door, with his arms folded and his face shut like a book with a lock on it.

“Sit, sit,” said Julian. “You must be worn through. Ravensmere works his horses and his guests the same — into the ground, and no thought for either.” He poured wine she had not asked for and set it by her hand. “Now, let us be sensible together, the four of us, before the poor old lady upstairs makes us all say things we cannot take back. Miss Puit, I am going to be very plain with you — plainer than is polite, because there is not the time to be otherwise.”

“I have found,” said Eleanor, “that men are only ever very plain with me when they are about to be very unpleasant. Go on.”

“You have a bake house.” Julian smiled. “Puit’s, in Little Dunore. A good little house. Or it was, in your father’s day. There is a note upon it — a mortgage — held by one Silito, a miller. Am I right so far?”

The heat of the fire pressed on the back of Eleanor’s neck, and under it a colder thing walked. “You are very well informed, sir, about a bake house forty miles from your own gate.”

“I make it my business to be informed.”

From inside his coat, he drew a folded paper — thick, sealed, the wax still faintly bright, as though the seal were newly set — and he laid it on the inlaid table between them with two fingers, and a care that made her think, horribly, of old Kumb setting down the last of her barley loaf on his knee.