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 5 

The summer settled over Danahern like a hand pressing down. And the Duke, who had meant to endure a week and flee, found week bleeding into week with a persistence he blamed entirely on his aunt — and not at all on the fact that he no longer left the breakfast room early.

He told himself he stayed because the estate genuinely required his attention. This was true. Eleven years of an overpaid coal merchant proved to be the smallest of the leaks in a household that had been steered in his long absences by a kind steward with a talent for arithmetic that stopped abruptly at the number ten. Oldwin threw himself into the ledgers with the cold thoroughness that had rebuilt the family’s fortunes after his father’s death.

And he was not three days into the work before he understood, with an annoyance so complete it was almost admiration, that Miss Ward had been there before him. Every irregularity he found, she had found first. In the margins of the account books, in a small, upright hand, were notes and queries: See letter of Michaelmas. Overpaid. Corrected. This figure is a fiction. Ask Pentworth what became of the barley.

She had, in her spare hours, sitting up with a failing old woman, quietly caught more theft and waste and honest muddle than three stewards and a steward’s clerk. And she had done it without once being asked and without, so far as he could discover, ever being thanked.

“You might have told me,” he said to her, coming upon her in the estate office with a shawl around her shoulders against the stone chill and a candle burning though it was two in the afternoon — because the office faced north, and no one had thought in a century to give the companion a warmer room to work in. “Yesterday, when I said the accounts were a disgrace, you let me believe I had discovered it.”

“I merely discovered it in March. There is no law that the same truth may not be found twice. It is only vanity that minds.”

“You did not correct me. You did not ask.”

She set down her pen and looked at him, and there was for once no amusement in it — only a kind of level weariness that struck him more than any barb. “Your Grace, I am a companion. I am paid eighteen pounds a year and my keep to read novels to your aunt, to be pleasant to her callers, and to make myself useful in ways no one is required to notice. If I had come to you on your first morning and announced that I had been quietly saving your family several hundred pounds, do you know what would have happened? You would have been affronted that a woman in a turned gown presumed to understand your business. And you would have been quite right to be — because it is not my business. And I should have been dismissed by Friday for impertinence. So no, I did not correct you. I wrote it in the margins, and I let you find it. Because a truth a great man finds himself is worth ten a small woman hands him. That is not cynicism, before you frown at me. It is only arithmetic. I am rather good at arithmetic.”

Oldwin was silent. The candle guttered in the draft from the ill-fitting window. And he looked at the north-facing room and the shawl and the mended cuffs of her gown, and he felt a slow, uncomfortable heat that he eventually identified — with surprise — as shame.

“Move your work to the library,” he said abruptly. “It faces south. There is a fire laid every morning. This room is a cellar with pretensions.”

She blinked. It was the first time he had seen her surprised, and he found, absurdly, that he wanted to do it again.

“The library is yours.”

“The library is the house’s. I am merely its current custodian — as you were so good as to point out on the subject of books the night I arrived.”

He turned to go. And then, because he could not help it — because something in him had begun dangerously to enjoy this — he added over his shoulder: “Besides, if you are to save me several hundred pounds a year, Miss Ward, the least I can do is not permit you to freeze to death before you have finished. It would be poor economy.”

He heard her laugh behind him — a real laugh, surprised out of her, low and warm and entirely unlike the dry wit she armed herself with. And it followed him down the corridor like sunlight. And he was still hearing it an hour later. And he did not, this time, wipe the smile away.

They fell — without either of them consenting to it — into a habit of collision. It was not friendship. Oldwin would have rejected the word with contempt, and Fay, he suspected, would have laughed at it. It was something with more heat in it than friendship and more sport. They argued about the estate and about books, and about whether the new bridge should be stone or timber, and about the character of a poet whom she admired and he thought a sentimental fraud, and about the proper way to prune a rose, and about a great many things neither of them cared in the least about — purely for the pleasure of finding out whether the other would give ground.

Neither ever did. That was the whole of the pleasure.