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 2

Mrs. Fenwick knew before breakfast.

She cornered Iris on the second landing with a stack of linen in her arms and the expression of a woman who had run out of patience somewhere around 1809.

“You were in the library.”

“I was.”

“His grace does not permit the library.”

“His grace told me I might use it.”

Mrs. Fenwick’s arms tightened on the linen. “Quietly,” she said, in a tone that suggested she knew the word precisely and had been given it herself, once, years ago, and had never been sure what she was meant to do with it.

Iris waited.

The housekeeper looked down the empty corridor, and then down it again, and then said, in a quite different voice, “You’ll hear it from the kitchen by Thursday if I don’t tell you now.”

“Then tell me.”

“The north road. Four winters ago. Her grace was going down to her mother’s at Hartsmoor, and his grace was to go with her.”

Iris said nothing.

“He was to go with her,” Mrs. Fenwick repeated, “but there was a tenant matter at the far farms — a roof, a dispute, nothing, God knows, less than nothing — and he stopped to settle it. He told her to go on ahead. He would follow in the morning.”

The corridor was very quiet.

“The ice took the carriage on the bridge at Callan’s Cross. Went through the rail. She was dead before they got her out of the water.” Mrs. Fenwick’s jaw worked once. “He arrived eight hours later. Eight hours.”

“Mrs. Fenwick—”

“He has never forgiven himself for the delay.” She said it flatly, as though reciting a fact that had lost the power to surprise her long ago. “Which is a strange thing to say, Miss Hartley, because God knows the delay saved his life. Had he been in that carriage he would have drowned beside her, and would have changed nothing of hers. Nothing at all. She was already gone.”

She shifted the linen against her hip.

“And still.”

“And still,” Iris said.

“And still he has spent four years standing in that library at three in the morning, dry, alive, and entirely unable to forgive the one thing he did that kept him so.”

Mrs. Fenwick started down the stairs, then stopped. She did not turn around.

“He’s run through four housekeepers and two stewards in that time. He does not speak to anyone he is not required to speak to. He has not left this estate in longer than I care to count.” A pause. “And this morning, the grooms tell me he has ordered the west library fire lit at six, which he has never once done in my time here, and asked whether Miss Hartley takes her breakfast in her room or downstairs.”

Iris’s hand found the banister.

“I don’t know why I’m telling you any of it,” Mrs. Fenwick said. “Except that I have worked in this house for eleven years, and I am tired, and I have begun to suspect that the difference between a wound that scars and a wound that festers is whether anybody ever sits beside it long enough to witness it.”

She went down.

Iris stood on the landing for a long moment, looking at the closed door of a library she had been given permission to enter, and thinking, with a coldness that had nothing to do with the March air:

He was supposed to die in that carriage.

So why did it sound, when the housekeeper said it, less like a mercy — and more like a sentence?