The Duke Had Four Months to Marry or Lose Control of a Powerful Estate — So He Stopped His Carriage, Told a Woman Kneeling in Turnips, “I Need a Wife. Come With Me,” and She Gave Him One Shocking Condition.
PART 7
It was the housekeeper, in the end, who told her — though not the secret itself, not yet, only the crack that led to it.
She came to Alice one morning in the fourth month with the household account book under her arm, and stood in the doorway of the small parlour with an expression Alice had learned, by then, to read as trouble arriving in its most polite possible form.
“Your grace, I have been three months waiting for you to ask me for this, and you have not, and I have decided you are not going to, and that I had better say why I haven’t offered it.”
“Say it.”
“I thought you would not know how to read it,” said the housekeeper. “I have been three months arranging how to be kind about that. And last week I heard from Mr. Fenwick’s clerk that you have kept your own farm accounts for six years and paid off three hundred pounds, and I have been extremely ashamed of myself for a week.”
“Mrs. Dodgett,” Alice said, “I have been three months in this house being frightened of you, and I haven’t asked for that book because I couldn’t decide whether asking would be taking something away from you. So we’ve both spent a quarter of a year being careful. I should like to stop. I don’t know how a house of this size is run. I’ve never seen one. I want you to teach me.”
That afternoon, over the household ledgers, Mrs. Dodgett let something slip that she plainly had not meant to — a name, half a sentence about “the old duchess’s sister,” cut off almost as soon as it began, followed by a silence so abrupt that Alice, who had learned to read silences at Salow End, knew at once that she had brushed against something the house had been keeping for longer than three months.
“Mrs. Dodgett,” she said carefully, “who was the old duchess’s sister?”
The housekeeper’s hands went still on the ledger. “That is not mine to tell, your grace. I’ve said more than I ought.”
Alice did not press her. She had learned that too, at Salow End — that a thing pushed too soon closes like a hand. She let it sit.
It was Fenwick who finally gave her the shape of it, weeks later, not because he meant to, but because Alice had by then earned exactly the kind of trust that makes a careful man forget to be careful. They were going over the Witkim rent audit together in his office — Alice’s own idea, born of the nine days at the kitchen table, now a monthly fixture — when she asked, almost in passing, about a small annuity line in the estate books that had puzzled her for a month: a payment of forty pounds a year, made quietly, to an address in Bath, under no name she recognized.
Fenwick’s pen stopped.
“That is a private matter of the family’s, your grace, and I am not the person to explain it to you.”
“Who is?”
“His grace,” Fenwick said, “if he chooses to. And I would ask you, ma’am, not to press me on it, because I have kept that line in the books for nineteen years without one question, out of respect for a promise made to his late father, and I would rather not be the man who breaks it.”
Alice did not press him either. But she carried the forty pounds and the address in Bath with her for a fortnight, turning it over the way she turned over a bad debt — quietly, at night, without letting it show on her face — and she began, without quite meaning to, watching Robert differently. Not with suspicion. With the particular attention of a woman who has learned, over six years of ledgers, that the numbers which don’t add up are never the ones anybody explains first.
She found her opening on a wet evening in the ninth month, when Robert came in from the audit looking the way he had looked exactly twice before in her memory — once on the night Fenwick first came to Salow End, and once the night they sat up till midnight over the settlement. He sat by the fire without speaking for the better part of an hour, and Alice, who had learned when to wait, waited.
“There was a woman at the audit today,” he said finally, “asking after a cottage that was promised her mother, years ago, before I was born. And I had to write to Fenwick’s predecessor’s old ledgers to find out whether the promise was real, and it was, and I honored it, and it took most of the afternoon, and none of it is the thing that’s sitting on me tonight.”
“Then tell me the thing that is.”
Robert looked into the fire for a long moment. “There is a line in the accounts,” he said. “Forty pounds a year, to Bath. You’ve seen it — I know you have, because you go through everything, and I have been waiting nine months for you to ask me about it, and you never have, and I’ve been grateful for that in a way I haven’t earned.”
“I asked Fenwick,” Alice said. “He wouldn’t tell me. He said it was yours to tell, if you chose.”
“It is not mine, actually,” Robert said. “That’s the trouble with it. It was never mine to tell, and I have kept it exactly as my father kept it — silently, and out of a kind of loyalty I have never once examined until this year, because I have spent this whole year learning that silence is not the same thing as kindness, whatever I once believed.”
Alice sat very still.
“There is a woman in Bath,” Robert said, “about nine and forty years old now. Her name is Margaret. She was my mother’s younger sister.”