Chapter Twelve
“You burnt Miss Winthrop.”
Edmund had faced creditors, grieving tenants, angry magistrates, his own aunt in full moral possession of a room, and once, briefly, a horse determined to kill him by means of a stone fence.
None had accused him with the clean brutality of his six-year-old daughter standing in the breakfast room doorway with her fists clenched and her chin raised.
Mary wore a blue morning dress, one ribbon untied, and the expression of a wronged monarch preparing to declare war.
Declan stood slightly behind her, quieter but no less severe. He did not glare. He rarely wasted expression when stillness would do. Yet his face had the closed, watchful quality Edmund had come to fear in him, because it meant his son had retreated somewhere words might not reach.
Edmund set down the letter he had not been reading. “No, Mary. I did not burn Miss Winthrop.”
“She is burnt.”
“Yes.”
“You were there.”
“Yes.”
“Then you let it happen.”
He rose slowly. It was important not to answer a frightened child as if she were an insolent adult, though the distinction was harder to manage when guilt had already made a ruin of his temper.
“A tea tray tipped,” he said. “It was an accident. I sent for Mrs Holroyd immediately. Mr Meredith has seen Miss Winthrop, and she will recover.”
Declan spoke then. “Why was she in the library after dinner?”
That question was worse because it was not childish. It was precisely the question the county would ask, dressed in silk and concern.
“She brought me a report about your lessons,” Edmund said. “A footman came in with tea, and the tray slipped. Mrs Holroyd was called at once.”
Mary looked confused and furious. “I do not care about trays. I care that she is hurt.”
“So do I.”
“Then why have you not gone to see her?”
Edmund’s hand tightened on the back of the chair.
Because going to her chamber would injure what remained of her reputation.
Because a duke could not stride into a governess’s sickroom after the household had already seen her half-dressed behind a screen in his library.
Because he had learnt, too late, that his nearness was not neutral.
None of that could be given to Mary in full.
“Because Miss Winthrop must rest,” he said, “and because Mrs Holroyd and Lady Maria are attending her. I have sent for the physician and for medicine.”
“Medicine is not the same as coming,” Mary said.
No. It was not.
Declan looked at him steadily. “Will she leave now?”
Edmund had no answer.
Mary saw it and made a small sound of outrage. “You always make people leave.”
“Mary.”
“You do. They go away, and then everyone says it could not be helped. If Miss Winthrop goes away too, it will be your fault.”
Edmund could have corrected the details.
Nurse Pratt had stolen laudanum from the stillroom.
The second governess had written to a friend in Bath that Mary was a savage creature and Declan half-witted with grief.
The tutor had not been dismissed because Declan would not speak, but because he had called the boy defective in hearing of a footman.
There were reasons. There were always reasons.
But reasons did not change the pattern his daughter had learnt.
People came. People left. Edmund remained behind the door.
“I have made mistakes,” he said, each word difficult because children were merciless witnesses to sincerity. “I do not intend Miss Winthrop to suffer for them.”
Mary sniffed. “That is not a promise.”
“No. It is not.”
“Then promise.”
Declan’s gaze sharpened.
Edmund looked from one child to the other.
Their anger had stripped them bare. Mary was not merely furious that Miss Winthrop had been injured.
Declan was not merely suspicious of explanations.
They cared for her. In less than a month, Petalia Winthrop had become part of the fragile architecture by which they trusted the day to proceed.
“I cannot promise she will stay,” he said quietly. “That is not mine to promise.”
Mary’s eyes filled again. “Because she will not want to.”
“Because Miss Winthrop must be allowed to choose what is best for herself.”
Declan looked down. “And if what is best is away from us?”
Edmund had no defence against that.
“Then we will have to bear it,” he said.
Mary turned and ran from the room.
Declan remained. For a moment, Edmund thought he would follow her without speaking. Instead, his son looked back at him from the doorway.
“She was not afraid of us,” Declan said. “Not even when Mary tried to bite her.”
Then he left.
The words remained long after his footsteps faded.
Edmund stood in the room with the untouched coffee cooling on the table and the morning light showing every scratch in the old wood.
He spent the next hour in the estate room, where numbers and ledgers behaved with a decency people lacked.
Or they would have, had he been able to read them.
His mind remained upstairs, with Petalia in a loose gown, skin burnt because she had remained in his library at his invitation; with Mary accusing him; with Declan asking the question society would sharpen into a weapon.
By noon, restraint had become a physical ache.
He had sent the physician. He had sent the salve. He had ordered linen, cooling cloths, broths, teas, and whatever else Mrs Holroyd named in his hearing. He had not gone to her because not going was the correct thing. Propriety demanded absence. Honour demanded restraint.
Unfortunately, guilt cared nothing for etiquette.
He left the estate room and took the servants’ passage by instinct, intending to find Pritchard and ask whether the London parcel had been dispatched. He stopped before turning the corner near the stillroom.
Voices carried through the half-open door.
“I am not saying she planned the scald,” said one maid, her voice low and thrilled by its own caution. “Only that no governess forgets the hour with a gentleman unless she likes where forgetting leads.”
Another voice answered, nervous but eager. “Annie said the gown was off.”
The words reached Edmund before he reached the stillroom door.
“Annie says she saw the Duke’s coat round the screen,” Lucy was saying, her voice lowered in that particular manner which made secrecy louder than speech. “Well, there are ways to rise in a house, are there not? Burn or no burn, she may have managed better than all of us.”
The world went very still.
For one moment, Edmund did not move. He stood in the narrow passage outside the stillroom, one hand resting against the cold stone wall, and felt something in him harden past anger into a colder, older thing.
Had they whispered about him, he might have walked on.
Servants whispered about masters; the entire machinery of domestic life depended upon pretending otherwise.
Had they called him beast, brute, hermit, mad duke, scarred devil, or any of the other names county imagination had fastened to him since the accident, he might have let it pass.
But they had taken Petalia’s name and made a ladder of it.
He pushed the door open.
Not loudly. Not with a crash. A crash would have given them warning, drama, a moment to prepare frightened innocence. He opened it with controlled force, and the two maids inside turned as if judgment itself had entered wearing riding boots and a badly tied scarf.
Lucy froze first. She was a housemaid of three years’ service, sharp-featured and generally competent, though Edmund now understood competence and decency were not always acquainted.
Beside her stood Bess from the laundry, younger, round-eyed, and pale with the immediate terror of someone who had enjoyed wickedness only until it acquired a witness.
Edmund stepped inside and shut the door behind him.
He saw himself reflected faintly in the polished copper pan near the shelf, too tall for the cramped stillroom, broad-shouldered in a black coat, beard untrimmed, hair disordered from a sleepless hand, scarf tied high but not high enough to soften the visible slash of scarring along his jaw.
His face had frightened servants before.
He had once hated that, because fear turned every room into proof that he had become exactly what the county whispered.
Today, he used it.
“Repeat what you said,” he said.
Lucy went white so quickly that the freckles across her nose stood out. “Your Grace.”
“I did not ask for my title. I asked for your words.” He moved no farther into the room, but the space seemed to shrink around him all the same. “You had sufficient courage to speak when you thought the matter safely below stairs. Find the same courage now, and repeat it to me.”
Bess began to cry without sound. Lucy dropped into a curtsy so low it nearly became a collapse.
“I meant no harm, Your Grace. It was only talk. We were only saying what others had said before us.”
“That is an answer a coward gives when malice has been caught in daylight. Try again.”
Lucy’s lips trembled. “I did not mean it as it sounded.”
“It sounded as though Miss Winthrop engineered injury, humiliation, and possible ruin because she wished to improve her station. Did you mean something kinder by the sentence? If so, I invite you to educate me.”
Lucy stared at the floor. “No, Your Grace.”
“No,” he repeated quietly. “You did not.”
Bess pressed both hands to her apron. “Your Grace, I did not say it first. I only listened.”
His gaze shifted to her. “And listening, in your opinion, carries no weight?”
The girl swallowed. “I ought to have stopped it.”
“You ought to have left the room before your silence made you company to cruelty. You ought to have remembered that Miss Winthrop was injured in this house, in pain, and dependent upon the decency of those around her. You ought to have had enough imagination to know that a woman without rank may be destroyed by what people call only talk.”
Neither girl answered.
Edmund’s voice lowered further. He had learnt long ago that anger shouted when it wanted to spend itself. The anger that meant to remain did not need volume.