Chapter 9
Ithought it would be larger.
That was her first thought when the carriage rolled through the gates of Blackmoor House and the estate opened before her.
Not that it was small, because it was not small at all, but after four days of calling it the dukedom, she had somehow begun to imagine something the size of a small country. The reality, though handsome, was simply a house.
A house she now lived in.
I live here. This is where I live.
The carriage drew up to the front entrance, and a footman appeared before it had fully stopped moving, which suggested the staff had been watching for them, which suggested they had been told something, which meant the next few minutes were going to require a degree of performance she was not entirely certain she had in reserve after the morning she had just had.
She did not look at William. She had been managing the looking-at-William situation with moderate success since the church.
Since the moment at the altar, when he had stepped back and she had understood, with a quiet and complete clarity that she had not permitted herself to examine in the carriage, exactly what the terms of this marriage were going to feel like in practice as distinct from theory.
She understood them now. She was fine with them. She had agreed to them herself.
She was fine.
William descended first and turned to hand her down. She took his hand and stepped out onto the drive of Blackmoor House. She looked up at it with the pleasant expression she had decided on. Then the doors opened.
They were assembled in the entrance hall, all of them.
Every member of the household staff, arranged with the quiet precision of people who had been given notice and had taken it seriously, from the housekeeper at the front with the ring of keys at her waist to the scullery maids at the very back, trying not to look as though they were staring, which they were.
William moved beside her with the ease of a man in his own house, which of course he was, and she reminded herself to breathe.
“Mrs. Eldridge,” he said to the housekeeper, a composed, upright woman of about fifty with a pleasant face and the particular bearing of someone who had run a large household for a long time. “May I present the Duchess of Blackmoor?”
Mrs. Eldridge curtseyed with practiced grace and a warm smile. “Your Grace.” She looked at Cecily with an expression that was professional, correct, and underneath the professionalism, simply curious. “Welcome to Blackmoor House. I hope the journey was comfortable.”
“Very, thank you,” Cecily replied. “It is a pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Eldridge. I hope we will have the opportunity to speak properly very soon. I would very much like to understand how the house runs before I presume to have opinions about it.”
Something shifted in Mrs. Eldridge’s expression, a slight easing, a fractional adjustment that suggested Cecily had said the right thing without having calculated it.
“Of course, Your Grace.” She nodded her head once. “Whenever suits you.”
The introductions continued. Mr. Prentiss, the butler, who was thin and precise and bowed with a gravity that suggested he took the function of butlering very seriously, indeed. The head footman. The cook, Mrs. Beam, who was round and red in the face.
Cecily smiled at her and made a mental note to ask about the kitchen garden at the first available opportunity, because the fastest way to Mrs. Beam’s good opinion was going to be genuine interest and not the imposition of preferences.
William spoke briefly to Mr. Prentiss about arrangements for the afternoon—there were letters requiring attention, an estate matter that had apparently not resolved itself during his absence in London.
He said it quietly and efficiently, the business of the house resuming around the wedding with a speed that Cecily found both practical and, in some unexamined way, slightly lonely.
This is how it works. This is what you agreed to. The house moves on. You are a working part of it. That is fine.
The staff dispersed. Mrs. Eldridge offered to show Cecily to her rooms.
“In a moment,” Cecily said. “I understand there are…” She looked at William.
“My sisters are in the drawing room,” he offered. “They know you are coming. They have known since this morning.”
“How did they take the news?”
A slight pause. “With considerable enthusiasm and many questions I declined to answer.”
Cecily almost smiled. “Which questions?”
“Whether you were kind. Whether you liked to ride. Whether you would let them call you by your given name.” He looked at her with an expression that was attempting to be neutral and not entirely succeeding.
“And whether you would be staying permanently or whether this was, in Letitia’s words, another of William’s arrangements that won’t last the season. ”
Her lips curled into a smile. “How old is she?”
“Fourteen. Unfortunately.”
“I will go to them,” Cecily said. “Before going to my rooms. If that is all right.”
He looked at her for a moment. “Yes,” he said. “It is.”
She heard them before she reached the drawing room.
They were not arguing. It was the particular concentrated energy of two people having a disagreement in loud whispers, which meant they had been told not to be overheard and were failing at it.
“…you cannot ask her that straightaway, Letitia.”
“Why not? It’s a reasonable question.”
“It is not a reasonable opening question. It is the sort of thing you work toward after you’ve established whether a person is–”
“Isadora, if we spend the first hour asking her about the weather, she’ll think we’re–”
Cecily opened the door.
The whispers stopped.
Two faces turned toward her simultaneously, and the contrast between them was so immediate and so complete that she almost laughed.
The elder, Isadora, was sitting very upright in the chair nearest the window, a closed book in her lap that she had clearly been pretending to read, with the expression of someone who had been caught mid-sentence and was deciding how to recover her dignity.
She was sixteen, with William’s dark hair and a stillness about her that suggested she observed more than she disclosed—serious eyes, a composed mouth, the look of someone who had learned very early to think before speaking.
The younger, Letitia, had no such composure.
She was fourteen and made no attempt to conceal it.
She had been sitting on the edge of the sofa in a way that suggested she had a philosophical objection to sitting still, and she was now looking at Cecily with such a bright, unguarded, wholly undisguised curiosity that Cecily found it entirely endearing.
“Hello,” Cecily greeted.
A beat.
“Hello,” Isadora returned, with careful politeness.
“You’re smaller than I thought,” Letitia said.
“Letitia–” Isadora chided.
“That isn’t an insult. I only meant–”
“I know what you meant,” Cecily said. She moved into the room and sat on the sofa opposite them, not in the formal upright manner of a new duchess conducting an introduction, but simply sat with easy naturalness.
“I thought the same thing about the house. I had built it up in my head, and then the carriage rolled through the gates, and I thought, Oh, it’s a house. ”
Letitia stared at her. Then she laughed—a genuine, surprised laugh. “William would be furious if he heard you say that.”
“Probably,” Cecily agreed. “But I said it to you and not to him, so we are all safe.”
Something shifted in Isadora’s expression.
“I am Isadora,” she offered. “William has not told us very much, only that you were—that there had been a misunderstanding in Brighton, and that he had done the honorable thing.” She said it carefully, precisely, the way she had clearly been trained to speak about complicated things. “He said you were a good person.”
Cecily felt something move in her chest that she hadn’t expected. “Did he?”
“He said it once and then refused to elaborate,” Letitia explained, “which is exactly how William says everything important, so we knew it was genuine.”
Letitia grinned at her. “Did you know who he was? When you found him?”
“I had no idea. I thought he was simply a man in difficulty who needed help.”
“And when you found out he was a duke?”
“I thought,” Cecily replied, with complete honesty, “that I had made a very thorough mess of things.”
Letitia let out another laugh.
“I am sorry,” Isadora said, after a moment. The laughter had died down, and she was serious again. “I am sorry that this happened to you.”
Cecily looked at her. “Thank you.”
“William felt terrible about it.” Isadora said it simply, as a statement of fact. “He didn’t say so. He never says so. But I could tell.”
“How could you tell?”
“He reorganized the library.”
Cecily blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
“When William is bothered by something he can’t resolve, he organizes things.
Last spring, when there was a problem with the tenants’ cottages, he reorganized the estate accounts.
When the solicitor sent that confusing letter about the trust, he alphabetized the correspondence files.
” A slight pause. “The day after we got back from Brighton, he reorganized the entire library by publication date.”
Cecily held Isadora’s gaze for a moment. She thought of William in the drawing room—the composed certainty of him, the green eyes that gave away very little, the studied ease of a man who had decided how he was going to handle every room before he entered it.
She thought of a library arranged by publication date.
“I didn’t know that,” she murmured.
“Most people don’t.” Isadora shrugged. “He prefers it that way.”
A brief silence settled over the three of them. It was Letitia who broke it, because Letitia, Cecily was already certain, was constitutionally incapable of leaving a silence alone for more than thirty seconds.
“Can I ask you something?”
“You may,” Cecily said. “I reserve the right to answer or not.”
Letitia grinned at her, like she had just decided she liked her and saw no reason to be subtle about it. “Are you going to stay?”
The room went still.
Isadora looked at her hands, which told Cecily everything—she had wanted to ask the same question and had decided against it, and was now waiting with the careful stillness of someone who had learned not to want things too visibly for the answer regardless.
Cecily looked at Letitia. At the directness of the question, and the thing underneath it that was not as careless as it appeared—the particular watchfulness of a girl who had lived in a house with uncertain arrangements before and had learned to ask about them early rather than late.
“I intend to,” she answered steadily. “For as long as I am able, I intend to stay.”
Letitia held her gaze for a moment. Then the grin returned, smaller and more real. “Good. William is significantly less frightening when there is someone who answers him back.”
“I don’t find him frightening,” Cecily declared with triumph.
“No,” Isadora muttered, looking up with a small smile as if she recognized something she had been waiting to see. “I didn’t think you did.”