She pulled a bleeding stranger out of a ditch in a freezing October storm and drove him three miles home in a supply cart. He gave her a name — Edmund — and nothing else. By the next afternoon, she learned he was the Duke of Ashmore — and when he rode back three miles carrying the washed harness rag she’d used to stop his bleeding, he offered the invisible maid a position that would change both their lives.

PART 9

They dined that evening in the properly furnished dining room, at a table set with two covers placed directly beside each other rather than at the formal, cavernous distance tradition mandated — a distance Elizabeth had decided, after one evening of shouting pleasantly across eight feet of mahogany, was a waste of perfectly good proximity.

After dinner they sat in the library.

The fire burned clean and even. The snow outside pressed its white silence against the moors. Elizabeth had a ledger in her lap. Edmund had a book, open at last, though he was reading the same page he had been on for some time.

“There is one thing I have not asked you,” he said.

She kept writing. “Ask.”

“Whether you were afraid. That night. On the road.”

The pencil stopped.

She looked at the fire for a moment before she answered, and when she did, her voice was the flat, practical voice she used for coal accounts and guttering.

“No.” “Why not?”

She turned a page she had already read.

“Because fear requires energy I could not spare. I had a cart, a horse, four miles of road, and a man who would have drowned in four inches of water if he had stayed where he was.” She looked up. “There was no room in the arithmetic for being afraid. So I did not.”

“And afterwards?”

“Afterwards I went home and hung my oilskin by the kitchen fire and mended a tear in the left sleeve and went to bed.” A pause. “I thought about it for a long time before I slept. But I was not afraid. I was —” She considered the word. “Curious.”

“You gave me a name and nothing else,” she said. “You knew who you were. You knew what I would think when I found out, and you gave me your name anyway and let me drive away. I spent a considerable part of that night trying to work out why.”

“And did you?”

“Not until you were standing in my kitchen yard holding a laundered harness rag.” She closed the ledger. “Then I understood. You wanted to be measured as a man before you were measured as a duke. You gave me the only thing you had that had not been handed to you by someone else.”

She looked at him levelly.

“I have been measured my whole life by things I was handed. A father who died. A wage. A room the size of a cupboard. A reference letter that said I was thorough without knowing my place.” She paused. “You were the first person who ever asked what I was worth and then waited for the answer.”

Edmund did not move for a moment.

Then he said, “I did not do it deliberately. In the ditch. I did not have a plan. I was cold and bleeding and humiliated, and when you asked my name, giving you the title felt like —” He stopped. Searched for it. “It felt like handing you the door of a house and calling it myself.”

Elizabeth set the ledger on the side table.

“In the morning,” she said, “I will need to see the northern tenant agreements. The figures in the second volume do not reconcile with the grain yields for the last four harvests, and I want to know why before the quarter day.”

Edmund blinked — and then he laughed. Short and rough, dragged up from his chest, exactly the sound he had made in the rain on the Anic Road when she told him about the shawl.

“Of course,” he said. “In the morning.”

“In the morning,” she agreed.

And then she reached out and put her hand over his. They sat like that for a while. Not saying anything. Two people with nothing left to perform.