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 7

Mrs. Puit reached the top of the stair with one hand pressed to her side, and Sabine held the letter out to her without a word.

The little woman took it to the slant of the hot window, held it at arm’s length, brought it close, and her round face changed by degrees.

“Whose is it?” Sabine said.

“Not the hand that signed your paper last night, and that I’ll swear to anything you like.” Mrs. Puit tilted the sheet so the light ran across the ink. “I saw your duke write his name three feet from my nose in your uncle’s drawing room. Quick, it was — a great slashing R, and the rest run together like a man in a temper with his own pen.” She tapped the copper plate. “This is an old man’s schooling. Every letter minding its manners. This was written by somebody taught his hand forty years ago and beaten for a blot.”

She lowered it.

“There’s been more than one Ravensmore, my dear. And only one of them came to you in the rain. The elder brother. Gideon, he was the Duke three years ago.”

Sabine’s mouth had gone dry as the road.

“He had the letter of my father. And he answered it in his own hand. And he refused.” She took the sheet back and read the three lines again — I do not think I shall sleep on this — and something in her chest turned right over. “And last night the man who came was Rafe, who told me to my face that he had refused my father.”

She looked up.

“Puit. He lied to me. He sat at that desk and took a shame that belongs to a man who is gone, and he wore it as if it were his own — and I do not understand why a person does that.”

“Then,” said Mrs. Puit, folding her hands over her apron, “you’d best go four miles the far side of the beeches and ask him, hadn’t you? And take the gig. I’ll not have you walk it in this heat and arrive looking like something the hedge kept.”

The gig was old and the pony older, but the road had dried to a firm dark ribbon after the storm, and the July morning lay over the county washed and glittering. Sabine drove herself. She had learned it as a girl, her father beside her on the seat with his plain coat and his quiet — and she had not let herself think until this morning how much of that quiet had been a man saying nothing about what he had done.

The hedgerows steamed. Meadowsweet frothed white in the wet ditches, and the whole air was thick with it, cloying and clean at once, and dog roses had opened overnight in the thorn, so that she drove between banks of pale pink that shed at the touch of the wheel-hub. A yellowhammer scraped its small song from a gatepost. Her mother’s amber silk was wrong for the road, and she wore it anyway — because she had not slept, and because she meant to arrive as herself.

The beeches on the ridge were a wall of green shade, and the road went up into them cool and sudden, the light coming down in coins through the leaves, the smell changing all at once from hot meadow to leaf mould and bark and the mineral damp of a place the sun did not dry. She heard the lodge before she saw it — a dog barking once and thinking better of it, the ring of a hoof on cobble. Then the trees opened, and there it was: a low grey house of no great size, ivy to the eaves, a raven weathercock above the stable arch turning slow in a wind she could not feel on the ground.

He was in the yard. Coat off, shirtsleeves rolled, rubbing down a big grey horse himself, no groom in sight. He heard the wheels and straightened.

And for a moment the two of them only looked at one another across the sunlit cobbles — she in her amber silk holding the reins, he with the cloth still in his hand and the hard face gone briefly and completely blank with surprise.

“You were to write,” he said.

“I have never in my life done a thing merely because I was told it would be more convenient.”

She set the brake.

“You will help me down, your grace. And then you will tell me who wrote this — because I already know. And I want to watch your face while you decide whether to lie to me twice.”

He came and handed her down. His grip was warm and dry and entirely steady, and he smelled again of cedar and cold water under the horse and the leather, and he set her on her feet and did not let go of her hand at once. Then he did, as though he had caught himself.

She held the green-threaded packet up between them. She watched his eyes go to the broken seal — the raven above the tower — and she watched the colour go out under his brown.

“Where did you get that?” he said. Very low.

“From my father’s desk. Where he kept it for me, tied in thread, marked for after. I never knew it was there, because I never knew there was anything to look for.” Her voice did not shake, and she was fiercely glad of it. “It is a refusal, your grace. Three years old. Signed Ravensmore — and it is not your hand.”

The yard held its breath. The weathercock creaked. The grey horse blew softly. Somewhere in the beeches a wood pigeon turned its five soft notes over and over.

“So I will ask you the plain question I was too tired and too grateful to ask you in the rain.” She looked up at him. “Who refused my father?”

Rafe Ravensmore looked at the letter in her hand. Then he looked at the cobbles. And then he did a thing she had not expected of the most certain man she had ever met.

He sat down on the mounting block as though his legs had stopped consulting him, and put the heel of his hand briefly against his eyes.

“My brother,” he said. “Gideon. He had your father’s letter that autumn. I was not here — I was with my regiment in the north and knew nothing of any of it. Not the letter. Not the asking. Not the river land your father sold. None of it. Gideon answered it alone, and refused it, and put it away, and told no one.”

He dropped his hand and looked at her, and the hardness had all gone somewhere, and left a man of nine and twenty who had not slept either.

“I found it after. When he was gone, and the whole tangle of the estate came into my hands, I found his honest page — the record of what your father did for us — and folded inside it, a fair copy of what he had written back.” He nodded at the packet. “I have carried it a year and a half, wondering what manner of family lets the one man who saved it beg a single kindness and turns him from the door.”

“Then why,” Sabine said, and her control cracked at last, down the middle, “why did you tell me you refused? Why sit in my uncle’s house and put your brother’s cowardice on your own back like a coat, when a word would have cleared you? You had only to say it was not I.”

“Because he cannot say it,” Rafe said. “He cannot stand where I stand and answer for it. And I can. The debt is the family’s, Miss Carr. And I am the family now — the whole of it that signifies. I will not clear my own name by blackening a man’s who is not here to give his account. Even when the account is a poor one. Especially then.”

He rose.

“And because you had grief enough last night without my handing you a new one. It is a hard thing to learn that your father begged in silence. It is a harder thing to learn that the man he saved spat on the debt with his own pen. I thought to spare you the second. I see I have only made you drive four miles in the heat to have it anyway.”

She stood in the cool of the beeches with the letter in her hand and the yellow coins of light shifting over the amber silk. And she found that the anger she had brought all this way had nowhere left to go. It had been meant for him. He had taken it out of her hands as gently as he had taken the reins, and left her holding only the grief.

“You will not blacken your brother,” she said slowly. “But you will let a whole county believe you bought me for your bed. You will wear that instead.”

“That costs me nothing.” A muscle moved in his jaw. “I have been called worse by better people. Ruthless, they say. Cold. A man who ruins markets for sport. It is a useful reputation, and largely earned, and it will mend within a season.” He looked at her steadily. “Yours will not mend at all. That is the sum I got wrong last night, Miss Carr, and I have been sitting in this lodge since dawn, adding it up. I meant to do one clean thing in a dirty room. I did not reckon that clean, done in public to a woman with nothing, would look exactly like the dirtiest thing of all.”

“Your uncle has already found the use of it.”

“He has.” She heard herself say it flatly, the whole shape of it. “He was at breakfast with his attorney before I was down. He means to have the settlement set aside as coerced, pay the debt out of it first, and marry me to Lord Merik before the quarter sessions — so that a respectable, dull name may cover the scandal you gave me. And your sister-in-law came after, and offered me twelve thousand to vanish to Bristol and never let the name Carr be spoken beside Ravensmore again — for fear a courtroom would unbury your brother’s business and finish her sister at forty.”

Rafe went very still.

“Estella came to you.”

“Four hours over a flooded road. She thought I held your family’s old disgrace and meant to squeeze you with it. She was almost disappointed to find I held nothing but my father’s account book with no Ravensmore in it.”

Sabine lifted the packet a fraction.

“She did not know about this. I did not know about it either until an hour ago. And now I find I hold rather more than she feared.” She looked at him. “For I have not shown you the rest, your grace. And I think you had better see what my father kept tied against my name — because it changes the board for everyone standing on it.”

She unwound the faded thread the rest of the way, there in the beech shade, on the flat top of the mounting block, and spread the packet open between them.