The Dowager Ordered Her to Leave Ashborne Hall After She Made the Duke Laugh—But When She Whispered, “You Mustn’t Look at Me Like That,” He Growled, “I’ll Do Far More Than Look.”

PART 1 

She arrived on a wet Tuesday in March with one trunk, one borrowed dress, and a letter of introduction that undersold her in every possible way.

The carriage set her down at the foot of Ashborne Hall’s east steps, and Iris Hartley stood in the rain for a moment longer than was sensible, looking up at the vast façade of gray stone that had been standing since before her family had owned anything at all. The Hartleys of Fenmore had owned things once. Land, mostly, four generations of it, and horses, and a house with a library her father had loved more than he loved most people. It had taken eighteen months to lose all of it. It had taken him somewhat less than that to die of the losing.

She had not come here to be pitied. She had come here because this was the only offer she had received that did not require her to marry a man twice her age to settle her father’s debts, and she had decided, somewhere on the long road north, that she would rather be useful than owned.

The housekeeper met her in the hall. Mrs. Fenwick was a small woman with a large ring of keys and an expression that had stopped bothering to be polite some years ago.

“You’re smaller than I expected.”

“I am not a surprise,” Iris said. “I am a companion. I intend to be entirely unremarkable.”

Mrs. Fenwick looked at her for a moment, then made a sound somewhere between a cough and a laugh, and led her up the stairs without another word.

Lady Cassandra Rothwell was seventy-three, half-blind in one eye, and sharper than anyone in the house cared to admit.

She received Iris in a morning room that smelled of old roses, and she did not offer her a chair. She simply looked at her — a long, unblinking appraisal of the sort that had made lesser companions weep into their handkerchiefs before the tea had gone cold.

Iris held her gaze and said nothing.

“Well,” Lady Cassandra said at last. “At least you don’t flinch when I stare. The last one cried within the hour.”

“I have very little left to cry over, my lady. I find it saves time.”

Lady Cassandra laughed — one short, startled sound — and gestured at the chair beside her fire.

“Sit down, girl. I think you’ll do.”

The house told her the rest, in pieces, the way houses always do.

The Duke of Ashborne was a cold man, the under-footman said, and did not look up from the silver he was polishing. A fair man, said the gardener, but a cold one, and went back to his roses. A man who had not smiled in four years, said the girl who brought the coal, and crossed herself as though she had said something dangerous.

Iris did not ask. She was a companion. It was not her place.

But she noticed things. She had been raised to notice things, and the habits of a careful childhood do not leave a woman simply because her father’s house is sold.

She noticed that his grace ate alone, or with Lady Cassandra when duty required it. She noticed that he rode before dawn and returned after dark. She noticed that the servants moved around him with a particular quality of silence — not fear, exactly, but the way people move around a storm they have learned to expect and cannot predict.

She noticed that no one in Ashborne Hall said the word Margaret out loud.

On her fourth night, Iris could not sleep.

She had not slept well since the autumn, if she were honest, and honesty was cheaper here in the dark than anywhere else. She lay awake listening to the rain on the glass and thinking about a house that no longer had her name on it, and at some hour past three she gave up, wrapped herself in a shawl, and went downstairs.

The library was the first door she found, because she had been looking for it since the moment she arrived. The library had been the first thing lost at Fenmore, sold off in lots to a dealer from London who had measured her father’s books with a tape and offered a sum that was insulting and final.

The door opened without a sound.

The room beyond it was dark except for one candle, burned almost to a stub, guttering on the table nearest the window. And at the window — back to her, silhouetted gray against the rain — stood a man still in the clothes of the previous evening, a glass of amber whisky untouched in his hand.

He turned.

For one unguarded moment, before his face closed like a fist, she saw it: an exhaustion so deep it looked like grief, worn so long it had become a face.

“Who let you in here?”

The words were not cruel. That was the strange part. They were flat. Final. The voice of a man who had said no to so many people he no longer heard the sound of it.

“No one, your grace. I did not think the library required permission.”

She should have curtsied. She should have apologized and gone. Instead she stood in the doorway studying him the way one studies a wound — not with pity, which he would have hated, but with attention.

He looked at her for a long moment. Rain ran down the tall window behind him. The candle sputtered.

“Stay,” he said.

The word left his mouth before he seemed to have decided on it, and something crossed his face — surprise, perhaps, at himself.

She stayed.

“Iris Hartley, your grace.”

“Hartley.” Something moved behind his eyes. He knew the name. Everyone knew the name. “Of the Hartleys of Fenmore.”

“Formerly. There is very little of Fenmore left to speak of now.”

He did not offer her pity. She found she liked him enormously for that — pity from strangers had become its own kind of exhaustion in the year since the auction.

He only nodded once, as though filing the information away, and turned back to the window.

“You may use the library,” he said. “Quietly.”

She climbed the stairs an hour later with her heart going harder than it had any right to, and it was only at the top that the thought finished forming, so obvious and so strange that she stopped on the landing.

Half the house had called him cold. Half the house had called him fair. Not one of them had mentioned the full glass of whisky, or the candle burned to a stub, or the fact that the seventh Duke of Ashborne had been standing alone in the dark at three in the morning in the clothes he had worn all day, as though going to bed had become one more thing he no longer had the strength to do.