Chapter Eight
“From his lordship, ma’am. He gave it me himself, in the passage, and said I wasn’t to let you stir before you’d read it, and I wasn’t to explain it neither, on account of it explaining itself.”
Renae took the folded paper from Annie’s careful fingers, mortified before the seal was even broken, certain it would prove one of two things. An apology that made the night larger than it had been, or a coolness that pretended the night had not happened at all.
“Did he say anything else, Annie? When he gave it you.”
“Only that I wasn’t to drop it, ma’am, and that if I read it myself I’d not understand a word of it, which I took for him being kind, on account of I did read the corner, and he was right. I didn’t understand a word.”
It was neither of the two things she had braced for. What he had written, in his plain unhurried hand, was this.
“Mrs. Trelawney is not to be disturbed before ten. Any household emergency incapable of surviving two hours unattended was poorly constructed and may be left to collapse as a lesson to us all.”
She read it twice. The second time, the thing in her chest that had braced itself for awkwardness set quietly down.
He had found the one register in which he might be kind to her after she had begged him not to be.
He had disguised the kindness as an administrative order and signed it like a man docking a footman’s wages.
“Is there an answer, ma’am?”
“There is. Tell his lordship the household collapsed promptly at half past eight, and that I have decided, upon his written instruction, to leave it lying where it fell until ten on the hour, as a moral lesson to the survivors.”
A sudden alarm overtook Annie’s countenance, the startled apprehension of a girl thrust a lighted flame, left ignorant that it is merely a harmless taper.
“This is merely a jest, Annie. You may carry it to him entire, word for word. He will know precisely what to do with it, which is a great deal more than I can say of most things under this roof.”
“Yes, ma’am.” She paused at the door. “I’m glad of it, ma’am. The note. The girls thought it’d be a hard morning, after, on account of mornings being hard, mostly. I shall take your jest down to him.”
Renae let the girl go and sat a moment with the absurd warm fact of being undisturbed. Nine years of matrimony had trained her to wake before she was wanted, and it had taken a stranger’s dry kindness, written out like a reprimand, to teach her that she might wake when she chose.
***
The house had changed under her hands in a few short weeks, and she let herself see it that morning for the first time, as a person sees a child’s growth only when a visitor remarks on it.
She went down later than she had gone down on any morning of her matrimony, and the kitchen did not fall upon her like a creditor.
“You’re late down,” Mrs. Croft said. She said it to a pot. A cup stood already poured beside the pot and going cold in the waiting, and that was the nearest the cook had yet come to flinging her arms about anyone.
Renae took up the waiting cup. “I was instructed to be late down. In writing, no less. I intend to have it framed.”
“Hmf.” Mrs. Croft pushed the cup an inch in her direction. “There’s them as would say a housekeeper kept abed till ten is a housekeeper getting above her station.”
“And what do you say, Mrs. Croft?”
“I say the bread’s risen true for the first time since Mrs. Bellamy had the keys, and the girls aren’t weeping in the scullery of a morning, and I slept clean through last week without once wondering would the roof outlast me.
” She thumped the dough over. “If that’s what comes of you lying abed, I’ll carry the water up the stairs myself. ”
“You will not. You will give it to Annie and complain to the parish that I have made you sentimental.”
“I’ll complain regardless. It’s the only seasoning I’ve got left that doesn’t cost me a thing.
” She worked the dough a moment, deciding something.
“You want to know what’s altered, you’ll not get it out of me twice, so mind it the once.
Mrs. Bellamy ran this kitchen on fright.
You eat short when you’re frightened, and you waste long, and the master’s table groans while the scullery goes hungry, and the whole sorry business gets itself called grandeur. ”
“And now?”
She wiped her hands down her apron. “Now somebody counts. Nobody’s counted in this house since the old butler took fright and went off in March, and a kitchen that’s counted is a kitchen that’s trusted, and a kitchen that’s trusted stops stealing from itself.”
“Even the footmen who were fond of Thomas?”
“Thomas’s particular friends ate best of anyone and laboured least, and they’ve gone quiet as church mice since he went, which tells you they were his audience and never his friends.
” She jabbed a floury finger at the cup.
“Finch does the work of three and asks nothing back for it. That one I’d keep through a famine. ”
Renae said nothing to that. She had her own column open for Finch, and it had not yet balanced, and she had told no living soul that it was open.
“Drink your tea, Mrs. Trelawney, before I take it back for the loaf. You are growing fond of me.”
“I’m growing used to you. It’s cheaper than fondness and it lasts a great deal longer. Don’t mistake the one for the other and we shall do very well together.”
***
The duke had stopped eating, as is the way of those who fast decline when food becomes one more thing the body is too tired to want, and Renae took it for a professional affront and carried the soup up to him herself.
“I am not hungry, Mrs. Trelawney.” His voice was papery thin now, worn thin at the folds. “Though it is kind in you to climb all these stairs only to be refused.”
“Hunger has very little to do with it, Your Grace. You will take it because the alternative is that I draw that chair to your bedside and describe to you, in considerable detail, the present condition of the third-floor linen cupboard, until you swallow the soup purely in self-defence.”
A sound came out of him that she did not at first place, because she had never once heard it from him, and it plainly cost him breath he could ill afford, and it was worth the spending. He was laughing.
“You are a tyrant, madam.”
“Your Grace, I have bullied footmen twice your size into taking soup they had sworn off for life. I should be sorry to add a duke to the list, but I will, and you would not enjoy the boasting afterward.”
He took the soup. He took it slowly, a spoonful at a rest, and between the spoonfuls he watched her with eyes that had read a great many men over a long life and had not yet mislaid the trick of it.
“Sit, if you will. A man eats poorly with someone standing over him like a gaoler. You may guard the bowl from the chair.”
She sat, and kept the tray balanced on her knee where he could see the soup was still in play.
“You have done a great deal to this house in a very short while.”
“I have counted it, mostly, Your Grace. It seems that a house wants counting more than it wants anything else, rather as a child wants looking at. The most of what I have done is look at it honestly and write down what I found.”
He set the spoon to rest before he asked it. “And what did you find, when you looked at it honestly.”
“A house that had been frightened into pretending it was affluent, Your Grace. There is no shortage of that about. Fear in its best coat, calling itself plenty, and everyone too well bred to mention the elbows have gone through.”
He was quiet, and the spoon stayed where it lay. “That is the truest sentence anyone has spoken in this room in a year, and they have sent me clever men past counting to speak in it.”
“Clever men are paid by the word, Your Grace. I am paid by the quarter, which obliges me to be brief.”
“Brevity.” A breath dragged in and out of him.
“My dearly departed wife had it. I had wedded her for her settlement and kept her for her brevity, and learned far too late that I had set the valuation the wrong way round. There is the whole of my life’s economy, madam, in a single sentence, and you may have it for nothing. ”
“I am sorry, Your Grace.”
“Do not be. Sorrow is wasted on the reckonings of deceased men, and I have reckoning enough still to settle before I am one of them, so we shall not squander the daylight upon it.” His eyes came back to her face.
“My son does not laugh. You will have remarked as much. He was a warm child, whatever you would credit of it now, and the warmth was schooled out of him under this roof by people who ought to have weighed the cost of the lesson, and I was the chief of them.”
“Your Grace.”
“Let me finish. I have so little breath that I cannot afford to spend any of it being interrupted.” He drew in another long breath of air.
“I heard him laugh last week. Through a wall, over a ledger, at something I could not comprehend and would not have asked to be told. I am departing this world, madam, and an expiring man must count his pennies close, and that laugh was the richest coin anyone has put into my hand in this house in a decade.”
“Your Grace flatters the ledger.”
“I flatter nothing. My time is clearly spent. It is the one economy that leaving this world makes easy.” His look held her, mild and merciless together.
“I shall say no more upon it. I have said a great deal too much already, which is the single privilege of a man who will not be here long enough to be embarrassed by the saying of it.”