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 6

He rode out the next morning before dawn, and the house let out a breath it had been holding for four years.

Iris did not know how she knew. It was not anything anyone said. It was the corridors. It was the way the maids spoke above a whisper. It was the way Mrs. Fenwick ordered the blue sitting room opened and aired, and the way the footmen carried logs up to the west wing without being told, and the way even Lady Cassandra’s embroidery took on a certain relaxed rhythm.

“He’s gone to his sister,” Lady Cassandra said, without looking up. “Eleven days at least. Perhaps a fortnight.”

“You sound pleased.”

“I sound,” Lady Cassandra said, “like a woman who has waited four years to hear that her nephew got on a horse and went somewhere.”

She did not count the days. She said so, more than once, to nobody in particular.

She did, however, know that it was eleven.

Ashborne Hall in the absence of the Duke of Ashborne was a different house. Not a happier one, exactly — the grief in it was structural, built into the walls. But it stopped bracing. It stopped moving around a storm. The servants laughed in the corridors. The cook made things that were not on the menu. Peg was permitted, by general unspoken consent, to do her lessons at the end of the long kitchen table instead of in the scullery.

Iris drank tea in the small room off the kitchen with Mrs. Fenwick, who turned out to have a wicked sense of humour once she had decided to trust someone, and who had decided, apparently, to trust Iris.

“Don’t tell his grace I said this,” Mrs. Fenwick said, over her second cup, “but he is not nearly so frightening as he thinks he is.”

“He does not seem to think he is frightening at all.”

“No.” Mrs. Fenwick turned her cup. “That’s the problem with him. He thinks he’s merely unpleasant company, and he has arranged his entire life around being as little of a burden as possible to everyone in it, and he has no earthly idea that this is the most frightening thing about him.”

Iris said nothing.

“He doesn’t eat enough,” Mrs. Fenwick added. “There. That’s a companion’s business, isn’t it. Tell him he doesn’t eat enough. He won’t listen to me.”

She found Peg in the kitchen garden on the fifth afternoon, sitting on an upturned bucket with a piece of charcoal and a scrap of paper, copying out letters with the ferocious concentration of someone who had taught herself most of them and was missing the rest.

Iris stopped.

“What is that?”

Peg went scarlet and tried to hide the paper. “Nothing.”

“It is not nothing. May I see?”

The paper had the alphabet on it, most of it correct, and beneath it, three times, the word Asborn, spelled with varying degrees of success.

Iris sat down on the ground beside the bucket, in her good dress, and did not think about it at all.

“Ashborne has an h,” she said. “After the s. Try it.”

They sat there for two hours. Nobody had been asked.

After that it became a thing they did — most afternoons, in the garden while the light held. Iris had never taught anyone anything. She found she was good at it, or at least that she liked it, which she was beginning to suspect was the same thing wearing a better coat.

“My mother taught me,” she told Lady Cassandra, when the old woman asked where she had learned. “She used to say that a person who cannot read cannot argue with the world on equal terms. And that every girl deserves the right to argue.”

Lady Cassandra looked at her for a long moment over the embroidery.

“Your mother sounds a formidable woman.”

“She was.” Iris turned a page. “I think you would have liked her.”

It was in that quieter house, with the Duke of Ashborne a hundred and fifty miles away, that Iris first allowed herself to imagine it.

Not the way one imagines a fantasy — she was past that, and had been past it since the auctioneer’s men had carried her father’s library out of the door in crates. Cautiously. Sideways. The way one imagines a thing one has not yet decided one is permitted to want.

She imagined belonging to a place. Entirely. Not as a companion, tolerated and salaried and always provisional, always one bad month from a trunk and a carriage. But the way a thing belongs that has roots, that could not simply be packed up and sent away.

She did not let herself finish the thought. She never did.

But she let herself get further into it each time before she stopped.

He came back on a Thursday afternoon, and he was changed.

Not transformed. Not suddenly warm and easy and full of laughter, like the men in novels. But softened at the edges, in a way that made her understand, watching him come up the steps, that a hinge that has been rusted shut for years does not swing open all at once. It must first be persuaded that it can move at all.

He found her in the library that evening, an hour after dinner. She was curled in the window seat with a book she had stopped reading some time ago, watching the last of the light go down over the park.

He did not say hello. He said:

“You were right.”

“About what?”

“Being needed.” He stayed by the door, as though he had not yet decided whether he was permitted to come in. “My sister. I had forgotten what it was to be of use to someone who required my presence and not my rank.”

“I am glad.”

“I missed a great deal, these past years.” He looked at the window, not at her. “I am only now beginning to understand how much.”

“How is she? Your sister.”

“Grieving. Frightened. Less alone than she was.” He crossed the room slowly, in the way he always seemed to move toward her — as though giving her every chance to leave. “I stayed with the children each evening. My nephew is frightened of the dark. I did not know that about him before. I did not know a great many things about my own family, because I had made myself so very difficult to reach.”

Iris closed her book.

“I thought of you,” he said.

The room went very still.

“More than was proper, given your position in this house.” He said it evenly, as though stating a figure from a ledger. “I found myself wondering what you would say of things. My nephew’s fears. My sister’s accounts. The daily wreckage of a household in mourning.” A pause. “I have not wondered what anyone would say of anything in a very long time.”

Iris’s hands were very steady on the book, which was a lie she was grateful for.

“I am glad to have been of use, your grace. Even from a distance.”

“That is not—”

He stopped.

“That is not entirely what I meant.”

He did not say the rest. She did not ask. The clock in the hall struck nine. And something in the room had shifted so completely that neither of them could pretend any longer that the other had not felt it.