The Duke Rode Two Days Through Rain to Reach His Dying Aunt—Only to Find Her Well and Her Companion Defying His Every Command, Until One Look Across a Chessboard Made Her Fall for the Man She Could Never Have

PART 4 

In the first days, he watched her the way he watched everything — coldly and completely, telling himself it was only prudence. A man ought to know the character of a stranger given the run of his house and the ear of his aunt. This was the reason he gave himself for noticing that she rose before the maids and laid the fire in his aunt’s room with her own hands rather than wake a girl who had been up half the night with a kitchen maid’s infant. It was the reason he gave himself for noticing that she spoke to Pentworth as though the old butler were a person and not a fixture — and that the old butler, who had served three generations of Danaherns with the frozen dignity of a man who had never once been asked how he did, unbent to her by inches.

He told himself he watched her out of prudence. He was lying to himself, and some cold, honest part of him knew it. And he ignored that part with the practiced ease of a man who had been ignoring inconvenient truths about his own heart for the better part of a decade.

Their second true clash came over a matter of a dismissed under-gardener. The man had been let go in the spring in Oldwin’s absence by the steward — caught poaching, or said to have been. The steward had wanted him gone, and the thing had been done in the summary way such things were always done. A family turned off a cottage they had held for two generations and sent onto the parish with the winter behind them and nothing ahead.

Oldwin, reviewing the estate papers, had come upon the entry and passed over it without a second thought. It was the sort of decision he made or ratified a hundred times a year. A man poached, a man was dismissed. The estate was not a charity.

Fay did not think so. And Fay said so at dinner, in front of his aunt and two footmen, with the directness of a battering ram.

“Collier did not poach. Or if he did, it was one rabbit, once, in February, when his wife was near her time and there had been no work all winter. And he took it from the top wood where the keeper himself sets snares and calls it his perquisite. I know because I went to see them in March after they were turned off. They are in a hovel by the Devizes road with four children and a fifth born in it. And Collier breaks stones for the turnpike now, when there are stones. And his eldest girl — who is nine and quick as a whip — might have gone into service in a good house and made something of herself. And instead she minds the babies while her mother takes in washing. And that is what your estate papers mean, Your Grace, when they say ‘dismissed for cause’ in the steward’s tidy hand. They mean a nine-year-old girl who will never now be anything. Over one February rabbit. Decided by a man who wanted the cottage for his own nephew — which he has, I might add, since installed in it.”

The dinner table had gone very quiet.

Oldwin set down his glass. “You went to see them. A family turned off my land, some miles distant. Alone.”

“I walked. It is not far if one is not afraid of a little mud. And I am poor, Your Grace. I have been near enough to a hovel by a turnpike myself to feel the weight of it. And I do not find it in me to look away.” Her chin was up. Her voice did not shake. “You may dismiss me for impertinence if you like. I have said worse and meant it less. But you asked me once to understand that you were not to be managed. And I have thought about it. And I find I would rather be managed than be the sort of person who lets a child be ruined over a rabbit because it was tidy in a ledger. So there it is. That is my impertinence. Do with it as you please.”

He should have been angry. He waited to be angry, and it did not come. What came instead — slow and cold and unwelcome — was the understanding that she was almost certainly right. And that he had ratified an injustice without a second thought, because a second thought was a luxury he had trained himself out of. And that this small, poor woman in a turned gown had walked miles through the March mud to give a ruined family the only thing she had to give — which was the refusal to look away. And that no one in his whole cold, correct life had ever once made him feel, as she made him feel now, precisely and unmistakably ashamed.

He did not answer her at dinner. But in the morning, he sent for the steward. And there was an interview behind a closed door that left Collier reinstated to his cottage, the nephew turned out of it, and the keeper spoken to about the difference between a perquisite and a snare set for a starving man. And the nine-year-old girl who was quick as a whip was found a place by the Duke’s own arrangement in the household of a cousin who could be trusted to make something of her.

He did not tell Fay he had done it. He found he did not want her thanks. He wanted obscurely — and against all his habits — only to have done the thing, and to know that she would learn of it and think… He could not finish the thought. Could not name what he wanted her to think. And pushed it away.

She learned of it, of course. Nothing happened at Danahern that Fay did not learn of within the week. She said nothing to him either, for two days. And then on the third morning, she set his coffee before him at breakfast without being asked — the first time she had done it. And as she poured, she said very low, not looking at him: “The girl goes to your cousin’s at Michaelmas. Collier’s wife wept when she heard. I thought you would want to know that a thing you did in a ledger has turned in the world into a woman weeping for gladness instead of grief. It does not often. You should remember it — once.”

And she went back to her account book and did not look up.

And the Duke of Danahern drank the coffee she had poured him and found that his hand was not entirely steady. And that a north-facing morning in Wiltshire had somehow become the warmest hour of his day.