Chapter 25
Twenty-Five
The house worked. That was the best way to think of it, not as a pile of stone glowering on its hill, but as a living engine with a hundred small cogs that wanted turning at the proper hour.
When Tristan returned his attention to it with his customary ruthless efficiency, he felt the old relief of slipping into a well-made glove.
Numbers did not flinch. Roof slats did not weep.
A broken gate spoke plainly of neglect and could be silenced with oak and iron.
Even the accounts, once ordered, yielded to his will and sat up like good dogs.
The study smelled of wax and old paper. Ledgers lay open in obedient rows, quills stood like soldiers in their stand.
He had the south-tenant arrears at last in hand, the Duxworth dairy lease renegotiated, and a memorandum to Rollins regarding the scandalously lax polishing of the second-floor sconces.
He signed his name and pressed his seal into cooling wax, one decision after another in a rhythm as steady as a metronome. Order and duty, both ingrained deeply in his bones.
The problem is the drift of my attention. It was never a problem before.
The thought occurred to him as he was forced to re-read the same page of a statement of account for the third time. The eye of his mind had been on Christine’s face upon seeing her sister. Upon the memory of her soft, pale skin in the water of the bathhouse.
Those memories slunk into his mind whenever his attention drifted, even if it was for no more than the length of a breath. Christine on the terrace at Birchfield, her hand covering Selina’s, sunlight climbing the curve of her cheek.
She laughed at something her sister said, and it did a quite absurd thing to my chest. It was not even funny, so why did I react with such…such…weakness?
He had carried the sound home with him, and it had been interfering with duty ever since. He shut the ledger with more force than necessary.
Softness is the rot that begins at the root. I owe it to my uncle to be tougher than that.
He rose, crossed to the window, and looked out upon the lawn that sloped to the darker line of the woods. Duskwood’s stones were cool at his back, and the glass on his knuckles was cold. Below, a pair of gardeners bent to their work in a border newly laid with rosemary.
Somewhere to the right, he saw the statuary, mossy and worn, where Louisa and Flora had played. He found himself smiling at the recollection of their joy.
It made the house brighter. And warmer.
When he realized the direction his thoughts were moving in, he turned away from the window with a face that would match thunder. Children would come. One day. For now, he had his quest, his duty. And marriage, true marriage, was not part of his agenda.
This is the slow rot that corrodes resolve. This is what will lead me to let Charles Davidson go, simply to please his sister. Simply to spare Christine the grief.
He permitted himself a long breath and returned to his desk. If he kept his gaze upon what he could repair, the rest would not unman him.
“Your Grace?” Rollins materialized at the door as only Rollins could, with the stealth of a cat and the dignity of a bishop, “Mrs. Fogarty begs to know whether you have any preference regarding the syllabub, lemon, or sack. Miss Waldron recommends both, but the housekeeper fears abundance may be read as vulgarity.”
“Vulgarity,” Tristan murmured, dipping his pen and scrawling his initials on a margin note, “is the chief pleasure of the ton. We shall have both and call it charity toward those who cannot decide. Inform Mrs. Fogarty she has my blessing and my terror.”
A glint that might have been amusement passed through Rollins’s composure. “Very good, Your Grace.”
He would have withdrawn, but Tristan’s ear caught a thread from the corridor beyond.
The unmistakable flare and fall of Blanche Waldron’s laugh, and beneath it Christine’s voice.
That was lower and steadier, the sound of a bell rung with care.
Somehow more feminine and alluring than her friend’s voice.
It stroked him with invisible fingers. He did not consciously cross to the door but merely found that his hand was upon the latch, thinking that the study no longer suited.
Rollins managed not to smile. “They are in the long gallery, Your Grace.”
Tristan followed the sound.
The long gallery was a river of pale light in the afternoon, its windows facing west so the sun spilled along the floorboards and gathered in pools by the window seats. Portraits of Duskwood’s dead lined the walls, watching as though scandal itself were a kind of entertainment.
Near the central window, Christine and Blanche stood over a scatter of papers on a narrow table. Mrs. Fogarty, hands planted upon her hips, loomed like a benevolent fortress. Between them lay lists, sketches of table placements, and a crude map of the hall.
“…and a garland here,” Christine was saying, “and here, to soften the doorway. Mrs. Fogarty, if there is any ivy the gardeners can spare, it will dress the stairs. We shall need lanterns for the lawn as well.”
“We have six, my lady, and a seventh that smokes.” Mrs. Fogarty’s brogue sharpened when excited. “Men can smoke, but not lanterns.”
“We can order more,” Blanche said blithely, “and festoon the trees along the drive. Oh, Christine, we shall make of Duskwood something quite shocking. A place where people smile.”
Christine laughed, and Tristan felt the moment chime within him.
The sound was light and immediate, no longer just a memory.
He stayed in the doorway, unobserved, watching the way sunlight found the small curls at the nape of her neck that had escaped their pins.
She wore blue again. She seemed to be avoiding the fine dresses he had given her in favor of the simplest ones.
That simplicity became something more when she wore it. She elevated it.
“…but we’ll also need the village,” Blanche continued, tapping a pencil against her lower lip, “the innkeeper for barrels of ale, the baker for extra loaves, the fishmonger if there is such a creature this far from the sea…”
“Mr. Reeve is the innkeeper,” Christine said, “and the mayor. Reverend …?”
“Potter,” Mrs. Fogarty said. “Reverend Cleverley died last year. He is the new priest, come to us from London, of all places. I ask you.”
Tristan’s spine drew itself straight without permission.
The study’s chill came back to life in his bones.
Reverend Cleverley with his damp palms, his devotion to leaky roofs and the coin to mend them—his father barely cold and the man had spoken of endowments.
An acrid taste, old and bitter, rose in his mouth. He set his jaw against it.
Potter will be no different. No less avaricious and grasping.
“…Reverend Potter,” Christine went on, sharing a small smile with the housekeeper, “I shall ask him to compile a roster of villagers who might be glad of work. If we pay fair wages for helping with the ball, we make it a celebration for them as well as for…us.”
She hesitated half a second before the last word, and he knew precisely the arithmetic that had flickered through her mind.
A celebration for us. For everyone except us, because we know it is a lie. I will celebrate when Charles crawls out of the hole in which he has been hiding.
He wondered when Christine would celebrate. When she was free of him? Able to join her sister? Something about the notion of her celebrating her departure from Duskwood made him clench his teeth. Blanche’s pencil rapped twice in triumph.
“A county fête with sense at the core. Let us go to the village this afternoon and speak to Mr. Reeve and the vicar. We’ll win them at once.”
“You will do no such thing,” Tristan said, and only then seemed to remember he had intended not to speak.
Three heads turned. Mrs. Fogarty recovered first.
“Your Grace. I did not see you there.”
The bow she gave him was exactly as deep as was necessary and no deeper, a sort of respectful scold.
“We were envious of your talent with lists.”
“Lists,” he said, moving toward them, “do not answer back. That is their chief virtue.”
Blanche’s eyes brightened as if someone had lit another lantern. “Then you shall be pleased with us. We’ve made six.”
Christine said nothing. She only watched him, and he had the unnerving sense that she could see which sentence had scraped his temper.
He laid a hand upon the back of a chair and looked down at their map with the practiced indifference of a general surveying an enthusiastic child’s plan for Trafalgar.
“You will not go to Duxworth,” he said, more evenly, “not this afternoon, not at all.”
“May we ask why?” Christine asked quietly.
“Because there is nothing there you require,” he said, “Duskwood’s kitchen supplies are more than sufficient. If we want more bread, we bake it. If we want ale, we ask Mrs. Fogarty to terrify a brewer until he weeps barley. There are plenty in London.”
“And the village?” Christine asked, very softly.
“Will interpret your courtesy as obligation,” Tristan said, “they will think a courtesy one week is tribute the next. The last time I entertained generosity there, I found myself named miser for not providing a new nave, a schoolhouse roof, and a road that led only to an alehouse.”
Blanche made a low, delighted sound. “What a road.”
“There is such a road,” Mrs. Fogarty confided to her, “it slopes like a drunkard. You roll down it whether you will or no.”
“Then all the more reason to lay it properly,” Christine said, and the way she said it, without reproach but with a clear, practical mercy, made Tristan want to laugh and swear in the same breath. She faced him, arms folded tightly, lips pressed together.