Chapter 18
“That cannot possibly be correct.”
Rosamund turned the page of the household ledger and frowned at the column of figures Mrs Alcott had prepared.
The numbers were perfectly legible—Mrs Alcott’s penmanship could have shamed a clerk at the Bank of England—but the sum at the bottom refused to reconcile with the receipts, and Rosamund had been staring at them for twenty minutes with the growing suspicion that someone in the kitchen was either spectacularly bad at arithmetic or spectacularly good at cheese.
“Your Grace, if I may.” Mrs Alcott leaned forward and tapped the second column. “Cook has been recording the Stilton under sundries rather than provisions. She considers it a philosophical matter rather than a dietary one.”
“A philosophical matter.”
“She maintains that Stilton transcends the category of food, Your Grace. I believe her exact words were ‘it is an experience.’”
Rosamund pressed her lips together. “Please inform Cook that the household accounts do not accommodate experiences. Stilton is cheese. Cheese is provisions. We shall all survive the indignity.”
“Very good, Your Grace.”
The rain had begun at dawn—not the polite, intermittent variety that London produced as a courtesy, but the flat, committed sort that announced itself against the windows like a debt collector and showed no intention of leaving.
Clara had pressed her face to the nursery glass, declared the weather a personal affront, and retreated to the rocking horse with the grim resolve of a cavalry officer whose campaign had been delayed by logistics.
Mrs Alcott gathered the ledger and paused at the door. “Shall I send tea to the library, Your Grace? His Grace has been in there since seven. I do not believe he has eaten.”
“Since seven?”
“I brought a tray at half past eight. It remains untouched.”
Rosamund closed the accounts book. “I will see to it.”
She needed a household reference Mrs Alcott had mentioned—annotated by the previous duchess—and the library was the most likely place to find it. She pushed the door open without knocking, because it was her library too, and stopped.
Tristan sat on the floor. His back was against the leather chair nearest the hearth, papers fanned across the carpet, his coat draped over the armrest—discarded, not placed. His waistcoat hung open. His head was tipped back against the cushion, eyes closed.
“You will catch your death,” she said.
His eyes opened at once, his entire body alert within seconds.
“I was not asleep.”
“Your eyes were closed.”
“I was thinking.”
“With your mouth open.”
He looked at her. Properly, without the careful rationing of attention he usually imposed on himself. The faintest pull at his mouth—not a smile, but the wreckage of one suppressed a fraction too late.
“Have you eaten?” she asked.
“Mrs Alcott sent a tray.”
“Have you eaten anything from the tray, or have you stared at it with the same attention you are giving those documents—which, if I am not mistaken, are upside down.”
Tristan glanced at the paper on his thigh. Turned it with deliberation. “It is a surveyor’s report. It reads equally badly in either direction.”
“I am ringing for tea.”
“You do not need to —”
“I was not asking permission.”
She pulled the bell before he could object. A maid set the tray between them with nervous efficiency and fled.
Rosamund poured—one cup, then the other—and held out his.
Tristan took it. “Thank you.” And then, with a bewilderment so genuine it nearly undid her: “No one has poured me tea in this room before.”
“Surely Mrs Alcott —”
“Mrs Alcott sends trays. I pour my own.” He turned the cup in his hands. “It is a different thing entirely to have someone sit beside you and do it.”
She drank her tea and said nothing, because the truthfulness of it had lodged somewhere she could not reach with a ready answer.
“Clara has a theory about you,” Rosamund said, after the silence had stretched past comfort. “She believes you live in the library and only emerge when summoned by the smell of breakfast.”
“Clara has excellent observational skills and a distressing lack of discretion. What else has she told you?”
“That you read her three chapters of Thornwick’s adventures last night instead of two, and that when she asked for a fourth, you said ‘absolutely not’ and then read it anyway.”
“That is a gross mischaracterisation. I read three and a half. The fourth chapter is still outstanding.”
“She also told me you do different voices for the characters.”
Tristan set down his cup with the careful precision of a man buying time. “Clara is prone to exaggeration.”
“She demonstrated. Your villain voice is, apparently, this.” Rosamund dropped her chin and produced a strangled growl that emerged from the depths of her throat like a badger with indigestion.
“That is a grotesque distortion of what is, I assure you, a perfectly serviceable dramatic interpretation.”
“She fell off the rocking horse laughing.”
“The horse has poor balance. I have spoken to Mrs Alcott about replacing it.”
“The horse is not the problem, Your Grace.”
He looked at her. She looked at him. The rain drove against the windows, and for a moment the library held nothing but the fire’s murmur and the particular quality of a silence shared between two people who had discovered, despite formidable efforts to the contrary, that they enjoyed each other’s company.
Rosamund set her cup aside. “Tell me about the Kent estate. The drainage you mentioned at dinner—is the situation as bad as the surveyor suggests?”
He blinked. It was the first time she had seen surprise arrive on his face without being immediately suppressed.
“You wish to discuss drainage.”
“I wish to discuss whatever occupies you at seven in the morning and keeps you in a library without food until noon. If that is drainage, then yes.”
He studied her for a beat that lasted longer than it should have.
Then he reached for the surveyor’s report, turned it the right way up, and began to explain.
The eastern fields. The tenant cottages along the river.
A system of ditches built by his grandfather that had been adequate for sixty years and was now failing under the weight of three consecutive wet springs.
She followed. She asked questions. She did not pretend the details were beneath her, because they were not, and because the tenants who lived in those cottages were real people whose roofs leaked while a duke sat in a London library and wrestled with the numbers that would fix them.
“The lower fields could be diverted through the old mill channel,” she said, tracing the surveyor’s map with her finger.
“My father did something similar at our estate in Hertfordshire. The western pasture flooded every spring until he redirected the stream through a channel cut along the boundary wall. It cost a fraction of what the engineer proposed.”
Tristan went very still.
“You know land management.”
“I grew up on an estate, Your Grace. Before it was taken from us, I spent every autumn at my father’s side while he reviewed the accounts and walked the fields.” She withdrew her hand from the map. “Just because a life was destroyed does not mean the knowledge gathered in it was destroyed too.”
He held her gaze with an intensity that bordered on reckless.
“I will write to the surveyor,” he said. “About the mill channel. If the gradient supports it —”
“It will need to be measured. But the principle is sound.”
“Yes.” He did not look away. “It is.”
They spent the next hour over the maps. When the clock struck one, Rosamund realised she had missed luncheon entirely and Clara had almost certainly staged a coup in the nursery. She stood.
“I should rescue Parsons.”
“Parsons has survived worse. She weathered my grandmother.”
“Your grandmother was not six years old with a grudge against rain.”
She crossed the room. At the door, she turned back.
“Eat the tray, Tristan. Your tenants will not benefit from a duke who collapses from self-neglect.”
“Is that concern I detect, Duchess?”
“It is practicality. Dead dukes are notoriously poor at drainage reform.”
She left before he could answer—before the warmth in his expression could settle into a shape she would have to do something about. The corridor swallowed her footsteps, and she climbed the stairs with her pulse running faster than the conversation warranted.
That evening, after Clara was asleep and the house had settled into its nighttime quiet, Rosamund sat at her writing desk to answer Eleanor’s letter. The quill hovered. She stared at the blank page, composing and discarding sentences.
From somewhere deep in the house—two floors below, behind closed doors—she heard the unmistakable sound of a pianoforte. A single melody, played slowly, played badly, albeit persistently.
She recognised the tune. It was one her mother used to play.
The quill dropped from her fingers. She pressed both palms flat against the desk and held herself there, very still, while the notes climbed through the floorboards and the walls and the careful distances he had built into the architecture of this arrangement, and reached her anyway.
He was learning her mother’s music. Without telling her. Without asking. Without any expectation that she would hear.
From the nursery, Clara murmured in her sleep. The melody stumbled, recovered, pressed on.
Rosamund picked up the quill.
Dear Eleanor, she wrote. I find I have rather less to say than I thought, and rather more to feel than I know what to do with. Come on Thursday. Bring the Cowper.
She sealed the letter. Set it on the tray.
The pianoforte played on—reaching for a melody it could not yet hold, refusing to stop trying.