She Was Offered to the Highest Bidder to Settle Her Father’s Debt — Then the Ruthless Duke Laid Ten Thousand Pounds on the Table and Did the One Thing No One in That Room Had Imagined

 PART 5

The Duchess filled it — not in size, for she was slight, but in the way certain people occupy a doorway, as though the room beyond has been waiting for permission to exist. Her gaze went over Sabine once, head to hem: the amber silk, the shadowed eyes, the ungloved hands. And something in the cool assessment sharpened, as if she had expected a serving nobody and found instead a woman looking straight back at her.

“So you are the Carr girl.” She drew off her gloves finger by finger. “You are handsomer than they said, which is unfortunate. It will make the talk worse. I will be brief, because I am tired and this house is intolerable. My husband’s family does not throw ten thousand pounds into the lap of a stranger. It has never in three hundred years done anything so vulgar as a grand gesture, and I do not believe it has started now for the sake of a pretty face in a made-over gown.”

She dropped the gloves into her lap.

“So you will tell me, Miss Carr — and I will know at once if you lie, I am very practised — what precisely you have on Rafe that made him do it. What you know. What you hold. What letter, what promise, what old sin.”

“I have nothing on him.”

“Because I have known Rafe Ravensmore since he was a boy,” the Duchess went on, unheeding, “and I have never once seen him give anything away that he did not expect to buy something with. And I mean to find out what he thinks he is buying — before the whole world decides it knows, and settles on the ugliest answer, which it always does.”

She tilted her head.

“You have gone very white. Good. That means you understand me.”

Sabine’s hands had gone cold. But her voice came out level, and she was fiercely glad of it.

“My father,” she said, “was Thomas Carr of Car Court. And before you tell me what you have come to tell me, your grace, I will have one thing from you first — since you value brevity. Is his grace of Ravensmore a married man?”

For the first time, the cold bright face did something unrehearsed. The Duchess’s brows drew together — not in triumph, not in malice, but in a puzzlement that was, for one unguarded instant, almost pity.

“Married,” she said slowly. “Is that what he let you think?”

She lowered herself into the nearest chair without being asked, and looked up at Sabine with a new and far more dangerous attention.

“Oh, you poor, clever child. No. He is not married. He was to have been. That is the whole trouble, and always has been.” She smoothed the peacock silk over her knee. “Send for the tea. This will take rather longer than I meant it to.”

Mrs. Puit went for the tea, and she went unhurried, pausing in the doorway with her knitting still over her arm to look the Duchess up and down as frankly as a farmer pricing a heifer.

“Bergamot or plain, my lady?”

“Whichever your mistress keeps for herself.”

“We’ll have the good bohea your uncle keeps for himself, Miss Sabine, and I don’t doubt he’d grudge it, which is reason enough to make it.” Mrs. Puit inclined her round head an inch. “Her ladyship looks like a woman who takes it strong.”

“I take it as it comes, and I take it hot,” the Duchess said. “Which in this house I do not expect to be simple.”

“No, your grace. Nothing in this house is simple. It’s why I’ve stayed forty years.”

And she went out, and the small dry certainty of her tread on the stairs was for a moment the only steady thing in the room.

Sabine did not sit. She stood where the morning came slantwise through the half-drawn curtain and laid a bar of hot gold across the carpet, and she watched the woman in the peacock silk arrange herself in the shabby chair as though she meant to make it worthy of her by occupying it.

Outside, the drive was steaming. The storm had washed the county clean in the night and left it dripping, and now the July sun was drinking it up again, so that the whole garden breathed damp earth and the sweetness of stocks broken by the rain. A blackbird was going at it in the wet box hedge, loud and indecent with joy.

“You asked me a question,” the Duchess said, “and I will answer it, because it is quicker than watching you pretend not to want the answer. Rafe is not married. Sit down, Miss Carr. I dislike being loomed over by younger women. It is the one advantage they have, and they always use it.”

Sabine sat on the edge of the chair opposite, her spine straight and her hands folded in the amber silk.

“You said he was to have been married.”

“I did.” The pale eyes moved over her again, and there was calculation in them — the swift reckoning of a woman who had come expecting to fight and now suspected she had brought the wrong weapon. “Tell me first, and tell me the truth, because I promise you I will taste a lie the instant it leaves you. Did your father ever in your hearing speak of a debt? A service done? A kindness given? Anything owed to him by a family above his station?”

“No.”

“You answer very fast.”

“Because I have spent the whole of last night asking myself the same thing and finding the same nothing. My father spoke of everyone he had ever dealt with. He did not speak of yours.”

Sabine kept her voice level, but the effort of it thinned the words.

“He kept a book. Every man who owed him a shilling, and every man he owed a shilling, too. I read it after we lost him, cover to cover, hunting for something that might save us. There was no Ravensmore in it. There was no Vain.”

Something crossed the Duchess’s face — not the triumph Sabine had braced for, but a kind of grim, unwilling recognition. She smoothed the silk over her knee, and for a moment she looked less like a blade and more like a woman who had ridden four hours over a flooded road to confirm a fear, and had just had it confirmed.

“Of course there was not,” she said, half to herself. “He would not have written it down. He was that sort of man.” Her mouth curved without warmth. “I met him once, you know, when you were a child in the nursery and I was a bride who thought the world would be kind to me. Thomas Carr. Tall, plain-coated, quiet — the kind of man a room forgets is in it, until he says the one thing that matters. I remember thinking my sister might have done far worse than a man like that, and being told he was beneath us, and believing it, because I was two and twenty and a fool.”

“Your sister?”

“We are coming to my sister.”

The tea arrived. Mrs. Puit set it down with a small deliberate clatter and withdrew only to the far window, where she took up her knitting and made no pretence whatever of not listening.

The Duchess poured for herself with a steady hand, the steam rising bergamot-sharp into the warm air, and drank, and set the cup down.

“You will want to understand the shape of my family before I tell you what your father did to it. So I will be brief, and you will not interrupt me, because it does not improve in the telling and I should like to get it done.”

Sabine said nothing. The blackbird sang. A drop of last night’s rain fell from the eaves past the window with a small bright sound.

“There were two Vain brothers,” the Duchess said. “Gideon, the elder, who was to be Duke. And Rafe, who was not. I married Gideon when I was young enough to think a title was the same thing as a life. He was charming and weak, which is the worst pairing God makes, and within three years he had contrived to entangle this family in a business so sordid I will not name it to a stranger. Letters, Miss Carr. Letters he ought never to have written, and a man who had bought them, and meant to make the Vains pay for them until there was nothing left to pay with.”

Her jaw tightened.

“Gideon went to his father and was refused. He went to Rafe, who was a boy still and had nothing. And then — and I did not learn this for years, I learned it only when it was far too late to thank the man — he went, in his shame, to a plain-coated gentleman of no particular standing, who happened to be the one honest friend he had left in the world.”

The cup was very cold in Sabine’s hands, though she had not touched the tea.

“My father,” she said.

“Your father.” The Duchess looked at her steadily. “Thomas Carr bought those letters back. All of them. He sold the best of his land to do it — the acres nearest the river, the ones that gave the estate its worth — and he handed the whole packet to my husband, and Gideon burned them himself in the library grate at Ravensmore, so that he should never be tempted to keep even one. And your father asked for nothing.”

She lifted her cup and found her hand was not quite as steady as she wished, and set it down again.

“Nothing, Miss Carr. Not repayment. Not gratitude. Not so much as a dinner at our table, where he would in any case not have been received. He beggared his own house to save mine, and he did it so quietly that his own daughter grew up thinking her father a poor manager of money.”