The Duke's Inconvenient Lady (Inconvenient Courtships #1)

Chapter One

“That will be Farenwoode ahead, miss.”

Clara Ellsworth followed the driver’s nod through the smeared carriage window, and her first sight of the house she was to call home undid something she had spent the whole long journey holding together.

The manor rose out of the Yorkshire dusk like a thing grown from the land rather than built upon it, all grey stone and mullioned glass, with towers that reached toward a sky going violet at its edges.

It was beautiful in the way that cliffs were beautiful, or weather.

One did not warm to such a place. One only stood very small before it and hoped to be permitted to remain.

She tightened her grip on the single travelling case that rested upon her lap.

Everything she owned in the world was inside it now, which was a thought she had learned not to dwell upon, for it had a way of stopping her breath if she let it.

Six months ago, she had possessed a home, a mother, an observatory in which the two of them had passed every clear night the sky allowed.

Six months ago, she had not known how a household could be dismantled and carried out the door by strangers, the bookshelves emptied, the brass instruments wrapped in sacking and borne away to settle the debts of a dead man.

She had stood in the cold of the front hall and watched it go, and she had not wept, because weeping changed nothing and an audience of bailiffs deserved none of her grief.

She had survived that. She could survive being looked at by a house.

The carriage drew up before the great oak doors, and the doors opened before the wheels had wholly stopped, which told her she had been watched from some window for the length of the drive.

A woman stood upon the step. She was perhaps fifty, with hair the colour of iron filings drawn back without a single ornament, and a gaze that travelled over Clara’s plain grey travelling dress, her worn half-boots, and the brown hair already escaping its careful pins after a day on the road, and arrived at its conclusions without troubling to share them.

“Miss Ellsworth.” It was not a question. “I am Mrs Hutchins, the housekeeper. Her Grace is expecting you.”

“Thank you.” Clara stepped down on legs stiff from sitting and made herself meet the assessing grey eyes squarely, because a person who looked away first was a person who had decided she deserved to be looked down upon, and Clara had not yet decided any such thing about herself.

“I am much obliged to Her Grace for receiving me so late in the day.”

“Her Grace keeps her own hours.” Mrs Hutchins turned without further comment and led the way inside.

The hall was marble and silence. Their footsteps rang up into a darkness where Clara supposed there must be a ceiling, though she could not see it, and the candles in their sconces did little more than mark the distance one had still to walk.

She followed the straight grey back of the housekeeper through a corridor hung with portraits whose painted faces watched her pass with the same incurious thoroughness as the living woman ahead, and she kept her chin level and her step even, and she thought, with a small private steadiness that her mother had taught her, that the stars above this roof were the same stars that had hung above her own.

Mrs Hutchins opened a door upon a drawing room decorated in blues and silvers, every cushion placed as though measured, every surface gleaming, and not one thing in it that suggested a person had ever sat down to be at ease. “You will wait here. Her Grace will receive you presently.”

The door closed. Clara did not sit.

It would have been the natural thing, after such a journey, to sink into one of the silk-covered chairs and let the ache go out of her back, and that was why she remained on her feet in the centre of the cold and lovely room.

She had learned a great deal in six months about the difference between being a guest and being a charity, and she did not intend to be discovered too comfortable in a house where her comfort was nobody’s concern.

So she stood, and she folded her chilled hands before her, waiting until, presently, the door opened a second time.

The Dowager Duchess of Farenwoode entered as if the room had been arranged expressly for her arrival, which, Clara thought, it very likely had.

She was tall and held herself taller, gowned in lavender silk that whispered with each unhurried step, her silver hair dressed to perfection, and her grey eyes, a clear, cold, deliberate grey, came to rest upon Clara with an attention that left nothing unexamined.

Clara sank into a curtsy that was as deep as it ought to be, and not one degree deeper.

“Miss Ellsworth.” The Dowager seated herself, arranged her skirts, and did not invite Clara to do the same. “You are younger than I had supposed.”

“I am three-and-twenty, Your Grace.”

“Hm.” The faint sound seemed to set the fact aside for later consideration. “You understand the nature of the position you have come to fill?”

“I believe so, ma’am. I am to be your companion.”

“You are to make yourself useful,” the Dowager corrected, kindly enough, but with the air of a woman who preferred a thing named correctly from the outset.

“You will assist me with my correspondence, which is considerable. You will read to me in the evenings, for my eyes tire sooner than they once did, though I should be obliged if you would not mention that to anyone. You will provide company through the hours of the day when company is wanted, and you will know, I trust, when it is not.” She paused.

“You come to me in reduced circumstances, I understand.”

It was very delicately done. Clara felt the point of it go in all the same.

“I do, ma’am.”

“Then we understand one another, and there is no need to dwell upon it.” The Dowager’s gaze flicked once more over the plain grey dress, and softened by a single degree, which stung worse than the coldness had.

“You will be treated fairly in this house. I do not promise warmth, Miss Ellsworth. I have not a great deal of it to spare. But I am not unjust. See that you give me no cause to be.”

“That is very kind of you, Your Grace.” The words came out steady. Of late, Clara had a great deal of practice at sounding grateful for things that cost her something to receive.

The Dowager inclined her head, satisfied, and rose.

“My son resides at Farenwoode, but you need not concern yourself with him. He keeps to himself, and has done these four years, since the death of his wife. You will rarely see him, and you will not seek him out.” She drew on a pair of fine grey gloves, finger by finger, and added, as though it were of no consequence, “We shall have a guest before the month is out. Lady Honoria Vane, the daughter of the Earl of Hartwick. A young woman of excellent sense and breeding, and I have every expectation that she and my son shall suit. You will make yourself agreeable to her when she comes.”

“Of course, ma’am.”

“Mrs Hutchins will show you to your room.” And with that, the Dowager Duchess swept from the chamber, leaving behind the faint scent of orris root and the understanding that Clara Ellsworth’s purpose in this house had been weighed and found sufficient.

Clara let out a slow breath in the empty blue room, and let herself feel, for three heartbeats and no longer, how far from home she was.

***

The chamber she was given lay in the servants’ wing, narrow and plain, with a single window, a bed that did not quite fill its frame, a washstand, and a chest for the contents of her case.

It was clean, and it was warm enough, and Clara had learned the great lesson of the poor, which was that clean and warm were large things, to be received with proper thankfulness.

Her supper came up on a tray: a cut of cold mutton, bread, a little cheese, plain fare but honest, and more than she had eaten some evenings in the last half-year.

She sat upon the edge of the bed and ate it alone, and listened to the great house settling around her in ticks and sighs, and told herself that she had landed on her feet, which was nearly true, and ought to have been comforting, and was not.

When the tray was cleared, she lay down, and could not sleep.

It was the sky that kept her wakeful. The night had cleared entirely while she ate, and through the small uncurtained window, she could see a depth of stars such as she had not known since leaving her mother’s house.

The Yorkshire air was cold and dry, and gave up its stars generously; and there, above the dark shoulder of the moor, hung the whole quiet, glittering company of them, as constant and as familiar as the faces of friends.

The stars will always be there, her mother had told her in those last, terrible, fevered days, the words coming thin between cracked lips. Even when I am not. Look up, Clara, and remember: you are part of something vast, and beautiful, and far larger than any grief.

She had not been able to look up, those first weeks.

It had hurt too much, like pressing upon a bruise.

But now, lying in a stranger’s house at the edge of the world, she found that she wanted to.

The wanting had crept back into her without permission; and so she rose, drew her shawl about her shoulders, and went out into the night.

The garden behind the house gave way to rough ground, and then to the open dark.

The cold was clean and sharp, and smelled of heather and wet stone.

Clara walked a little way with her face turned up, naming what she saw out of old habit and older love; and it was as she lowered her gaze to find her footing that she saw the building on the hill.

It stood apart from the house, low and round, and crowning it was a shape she would have known anywhere on the earth. A dome. A dome with a long seam down its side where it might be opened to the sky.

An observatory.

I should turn back, she thought, even as her feet found the path. I have no right. I was warned in plain words to keep to my place.

But grief was a poor respecter of warnings, and longing a worse one, and there was a pull upon her in that moment stronger than caution and stronger than sense, the pull of the one thing in all the world that had never once failed to make sense to her, and so she climbed the hill with her heart beating high in her throat, and she put her hand to the door, and the door was unlocked, and it gave.

Inside, the dark was different, closer, scented with brass and oil and old wood, and when her eyes adjusted, she stopped breathing altogether.

The telescope stood in the centre of the floor beneath the open seam of the dome, and a shaft of starlight fell along its length, and it was magnificent.

It was beyond anything her mother had ever owned or hoped to own, a long gleaming body of polished brass upon a mount so fine that Clara, who knew exactly what she was looking at, felt tears prick hot and sudden behind her eyes.

Her mother would have wept to stand where she now stood.

Her mother would have laughed aloud with the joy of it.

She crossed the floor without deciding to, and she lifted her hand, and she let the very tips of her fingers come to rest against the cold brass with the lightness one gave to a sleeping child, or to something holy, barely a touch at all, only enough to know that it was real, that the stars she had thought lost to her were after all still within reach of her hand.

“And who,” said a voice behind her, low and hard and cold, “gave you leave to be in my observatory?”