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 3 

She went down to the library at six, and the fire was already lit.

He was not there. The room was warm and empty, the fire working steadily at the damp, and on the table beside the chair nearest the hearth someone had set a second candle in a fresh brass holder. Not lit. Simply placed, where whoever came next would find it.

Iris sat down in the chair. She did not light the candle. She opened a book — it happened to be a volume of agricultural surveys, which was not what she had meant to choose at all — and read four pages without understanding any of them.

At half past seven she heard his step in the corridor, and then it stopped, and then it went on past the door without coming in.

She stared at the page for a long time after that.

Over the next three weeks she learned the shape of him the way she had once learned the shape of her father’s ledgers: not from what he said, but from what refused to add up.

The tenants called him cold, but the widow of a far-farm labourer told the kitchen that his grace had paid her husband’s wages for a full year after the man died — paid them into her hand, through the steward, anonymously, so that she had believed for eleven months that the estate was simply generous and would never have known otherwise.

“Anonymously,” Iris said.

“That’s what I said.” The cook turned a joint on the spit. “He does that. Always has. Never once has he let anyone know it was him.”

The under-footman called him cold, but the footman also told her about the boy.

The grandson of Lord Pemberton, seven years old, sent down each summer while his parents went abroad, and possessed of a stammer so severe that most adults lost patience inside of a minute. Iris heard about it from Peg, the cook’s daughter, twelve years old and possessed of opinions on everything.

“His grace sits with him,” Peg said. “Every evening, when he’s here. An hour. Doesn’t make him talk about it. Just sits and waits, and lets the boy get there when he gets there.”

Iris set down her tea.

“Every evening.”

“Every evening. And the boy’s stammer’s getting better, if you ask me. Slow. But better.” Peg shrugged, twelve years old and certain of the world. “That’s what waiting does.”

That was what waiting did.

Iris thought about that for a long time.

She learned the third thing from Lady Cassandra, on an afternoon when the rain had settled in for the week and neither of them had anything to do but talk.

“He was not always like this.” Lady Cassandra’s hands worked at her embroidery without looking at it. “Before Margaret died, he laughed. Can you imagine that? Gabriel, laughing loud enough to be heard down the corridor. The servants used to stop and listen to it, I swear to you. They’d pretend not to.”

Iris said nothing.

“The accident took more than his wife from him.” The needle went in, came out. “It took whatever part of a man believes that the world will not simply take things from him again. That is the part that is gone. Everything else — the fairness, the decency, the sitting with that poor stammering child every evening of his life — that is all still there. All of it. He simply no longer dares to want anything with it.”

“You know what he does.”

“I know everything that happens in this house, my dear. I have known for seventy-three years and I have never once been told a thing I did not already know.” Lady Cassandra looked up sharply. “Do you know why I am telling you?”

“No, my lady.”

“Neither do I.” She went back to her needle. “But you have been here three weeks and my nephew has ordered the library fire lit every day of it, which he has not done in four years, and I am too old to pretend that is a coincidence.”

She found the orangery on a wet April afternoon, following a path that had clearly once been swept and had clearly not been swept in years.

The door hung half off its hinge. Inside, forty feet of glass roof had gone to ruin, panes cracked and missing, ivy working its way through the framework, and every bed beneath it dead or gone wild in a way that was somehow better than dead. But the bones of it were still beautiful. You could see what it had been, if you stood in the right place. You could see what it had been and what it had become and hold both in your mind at once.

It felt, in some private way she did not examine, like a place that understood her.

She was standing in the middle of it, looking up at the sky through a hole in the glass, when she heard the door.

He had stopped in the doorway. He had a folded paper in his hand, and his shoulders were set in a way she had learned to read across three weeks of silent dinners.

“Forgive me. I did not know you came here.”

“I did not know you did.”

“I don’t.” A pause. “Not since—”

He cut himself off. He folded the paper more sharply than the paper required and put it in his coat.

Iris should have left. It was the sensible thing, and she had promised to be a sensible sort of person, and she had promised it to herself more often than she had promised it to anyone else.

“It won’t improve by being walked away from,” she said. “Whatever it is. I have found it’s better to sit with a thing a moment before you decide what to do about it.”

“And what would a companion know of bad news?”

It should have stung. It didn’t. There was something in his voice — not cruelty, but a genuine, tired curiosity — that pulled the truth out of her before she had decided to give it.

“I watched my father lose four generations of land in eighteen months. I watched him die of the shame of it before the debts were even settled.” She held his eyes. “I have had, your grace, rather a thorough education in bad news.”

He was silent for a long moment. Then he took the paper back out of his coat.

“My sister. Her husband is dead. She writes that she does not know how she will manage the estate, the debts, the children.” He turned the letter over in his hands. “She asks me to come.”

“Then you should go.”

“I have not left Ashborne in two years.” He said it without self-pity, which was somehow worse. “I do not know how to be elsewhere. Useful. Needed by people who are not paying me to be so.”

And there it was — the whole of him, standing in a ruined glasshouse with his sister’s grief folded small in his pocket, more frightened of being wanted than of any storm England had ever produced.

“I think you already know how,” Iris said. “I think you simply haven’t let yourself practice in some time.”

He looked at her.

“You are remarkably forward for a companion who claimed to want to be entirely unremarkable.”

“I did say that, didn’t I.” She almost smiled. “I find that promise has become rather difficult to keep.”