CHAPTER SIX
“Open Wrenfield,” Theodore said, turning a letter over on the desk without reading a word of it. “I want it aired, staffed, and provisioned by Thursday, and the stables put right before anyone troubles himself over the silver.”
Pearce wrote without lifting his head. “For how long shall I instruct them to prepare, Your Grace?”
“The winter,” Theodore replied, watching the edge of the paper catch under his thumb. “Longer, perhaps.”
Pearce’s quill paused only long enough to mark the answer properly. “And a mount for the duchess? You mentioned last month that Her Grace rides.”
“A mare,” Theodore said, and this time he looked up. “Quiet mouth, good temper, well up to a lady’s weight, and not a slug. Write to Hibbert and tell him I will know the difference.”
“That phrase usually produces honesty in horsemen, Your Grace.”
“It had better produce it quickly.”
Pearce made the note, then paused with the quill still in his hand as another consideration occurred to him. “Shall I give instructions for the usual rooms, Your Grace, or would you prefer the west suite prepared as well?”
“Not merely the rooms.” Theodore set the letter down at last and rested his fingers against the desk, though the movement did not quiet the line of thought running beneath it.
“She is to find the place in order when she arrives. The gardens, the home farm, the stables, the house itself. I do not want anything neglected simply because it has stood empty. All of it is to be put right.”
Pearce glanced up from the page. “And has Her Grace been told of the journey?”
“I will tell her at breakfast.”
“Very well, Your Grace.” Pearce added another note in the margin. “Then I shall have the letters sent within the hour, so there is time enough for everything to be ready before Thursday.”
“See that it is done.”
“Yes, Your Grace.” Pearce blotted the page carefully, then looked once more at his master before closing the ledger. “Will there be anything else?”
“Not yet.”
Pearce bowed and withdrew, taking the quiet scratch of his quill and the knowledge of Wrenfield with him.
Ellen came down at the usual hour, composed, pale, and already wearing the countenance of a lady firmly prepared to marvel at nothing. Theodore let her take her tea first. She poured with neat hands, set the pot back without a tremor, and glanced at him only when courtesy required it.
“We leave for the country on Thursday,” he said, when her cup had been filled and she had taken her first careful sip. “A house of mine in Hertfordshire. It is called Wrenfield.”
Her hand remained steady around the cup. “For how long am I to be kept there?”
The word kept told him the whole of her reasoning without requiring her to lay out a single accusation.
He had walked her through the worst rout in London, the town had said its piece, and now, the morning after, he was carrying her off to a place where no one would be troubled to look at her.
She had arrived at that conclusion overnight.
It was reasonable. It was also wrong. A sentence across the breakfast cloth would not unmake it.
Theodore picked up his knife, though there was nothing on his plate he intended to eat. “You make it sound like a sentence.”
“You have not given me the length of it,” Ellen said, lowering her cup into the saucer without sound. “That is generally how sentences are described.”
“As long as it suits us.”
“Us,” she repeated, and there was no challenge in the word, only a small, polished care that made it worse than challenge would have been.
“You will find it quiet,” he said.
“Quiet.” Her gaze moved briefly toward the window before returning to the table. “Yes. I imagine it will be very quiet.”
“That does not recommend it?”
A small pause followed. It was not hesitation so much as the stillness of a person long accustomed to setting aside what she wanted before anyone could refuse it.
“I have not yet decided whether I am permitted preferences.”
Theodore’s fingers stilled on the knife. “You are.”
“How generous,” she said, with such perfect softness that it barely counted as insolence. “Then I shall prefer to know what is expected of me once we arrive.”
“Nothing beyond what you choose to do.”
“That is not an expectation. That is an absence.”
“It may be an improvement upon London.”
Her lashes lowered. “London has at least been candid in its dislike.”
The words were lightly spoken, but something in them struck harder than accusation would have done. There was no bitterness in it and no self-pity, only a tired acceptance that she had been disliked and had expected little else.
He looked at her then, properly.
She sat exactly as she always did, composed and neat and impossible to fault.
Yet there was a sadness about her that morning, quiet enough that another man might have missed it.
It showed itself only in the carefulness of her voice, in the way she held herself as though taking up less room than she was entitled to occupy.
The mere thought of it filled him with a fierce resentment.
What vexed him further was the acute consciousness that he had placed it there himself.
The temptation to offer a reply suggested itself, but his better judgment stifled it at once.
What was he meant to say? That he was not ashamed of her?
That he had spent half the night arranging a house because he could not bear the thought of her remaining there, merely to be sacrificed to the sport of the scandal-mongers?
Every version sounded inadequate before it reached his tongue.
He consequently did what he had always done when confronted by a circumstance beyond his power to mend. He held his peace.
She had already drawn the line of the morning and placed him on the far side of it.
“You will have the day to see to your trunks,” he said.
“I shall be ready.”
“I do not doubt it.”
She rose after finishing her tea, setting the napkin down with the same care she gave everything, and inclined her head. “Then I shall go and prove you correct.”
He watched her leave the room, her back straight and her steps measured.
She was always ready: ready to endure embarrassment, to adapt, to accept whatever was placed before her without complaint.
There was something bleak in that much competence, and he despised the part he had played in teaching it to her.
By the time the door closed behind her, he was irritated with her for looking unhappy and with himself for noticing it, and most of all because he wanted, absurdly, to be the one who took that look from her face and had no notion where to begin.
Lady Augusta had been listening from the second chair, her cup untouched and her eyes on the threshold Ellen had just passed through.
“She believes you are ashamed of her,” Augusta said.
Theodore turned toward her. “I am not.”
“I did not say you were.” Augusta set down her cup and pushed back her chair with deliberate calm. “I said she believes it, and she will go on thinking it, because you have arranged matters so the kindness looks exactly like the cruelty.”
His expression did not change. “That is not what I intended.”
“My dear Theodore, intention is a poor umbrella once a woman is already wet.” She rose, smoothing her skirts with one brisk pass of her hand. “You cannot tell the difference from inside your own silence.”
“I am taking her out of London.”
“Yes, and if you were anyone else I might call it mercy. Since you are yourself, you have contrived to make mercy resemble banishment.”
“She was hurt last night.”
“Of course she was hurt last night. She was paraded before wolves and expected to admire the chandelier.” Augusta picked up her gloves from the table. “I will come to Wrenfield in a fortnight.”
Theodore’s brows moved. “Will you?”
“Yes. She will stand in need of a companion who is bound to her by genuine regard, rather than one in your employ, and I am the only woman this family has ever produced who was any use. Do not argue.”
” “I had no intention of doing so.”
“No,” Augusta said, drawing on one glove with unnecessary force. “You never do. It would cost you a word.”
When the room was empty, Theodore remained at the table long enough for the coffee to go cold, then rose and went to his desk.
He wrote one letter himself, to a man in town whose trade was knowing things. The instructions were brief. Lieutenant Charles Vance was to be watched quietly. His movements, his company, and his debts were to be noted without noise.
Theodore sanded the letter, folded it, and sealed it with more pressure than the wax required.
He was carrying his wife into the one parish in England that held both the man who had used her and the man who had waited nine years to use him.
He sealed the letter without deciding which of the two the order was truly about.
***
They broke the journey at an inn on the second night, in a private parlor where the table was small enough to give them nowhere to look except the fire or each other.
Ellen chose the fire. Theodore allowed the soup to pass in silence, and then the better part of the fowl after it, until she surprised him by speaking.
“There were grey horses in a field outside the last village,” she said, turning the stem of her glass between her fingers. “Welsh ponies, by the bone of them, run on with something heavier. Whoever bred them knew what he was doing.”
Theodore set down his fork. “You watched them the whole length of the paddock.”
Her fingers tightened on the glass stem, and color came into her face that the fire did not entirely explain. “Did I?”
“You did.”
“I used to ride,” she said, still looking toward the hearth. “Before. My father kept hunters, and he put me up before I was old enough to be told it was unsuitable. By the time anyone thought to tell me, I was better than the men doing the telling.”
“That must have displeased them.”
“It did,” she replied, and the faintest ghost of amusement touched her mouth. “I liked it better for that.”
He almost smiled. He caught the impulse before it could become visible.
She lowered her gaze to the table. “There has been nothing to ride for two years. One does not keep hunters on credit. They were the first thing to go.”
“There are horses at Wrenfield.”
“I am sure His Grace’s stable wants for nothing.”
“I did not say my stable.”
Ellen looked up.
He left the words where they were, because that was as near as he could come, on an inn chair across a small table, to telling her a thing he had arranged and did not wish to spoil by announcing.
She studied him for a moment as though she had heard a note beneath the sentence and could not place the instrument.
“For whom, then?” she asked softly.
The servant came in before he could decide whether to answer.
Theodore leaned back as the cloth was lifted, and the moment closed with the quiet efficiency of cleared plates and lowered eyes. By the time the servant withdrew, they were a duke and his silent wife again, seated across from one another with the fire between them doing all the work of warmth.
The shadows of the late afternoon were fast deepening as they advanced up the long avenue of beeches toward Wrenfield.
It was no cottage. Grey stone rose in three storeys beneath a pediment, with a row of tall windows holding the last of the light. The stable block ran off as long as the house, the lawns were scythed close, and two dozen of the household stood drawn up on the steps to meet their mistress.
Theodore watched the misreading of the morning meet the evidence of the drive and find nowhere left to stand.
Ellen turned and looked at him directly, which she had not done in he could not say how long.
“Cottage,” she said.
The word was quiet, but it was freely given, the first such thing she had offered him since the ring. It moved something in him he did not stop to name, and he let none of it reach his face.
“My mother named it,” he said, reaching for the carriage door before the footman could fully open it. “She thought the great house too grand to be happy in, and called this one the cottage to spite it. After her, it would have been disloyal to call it anything else.”
Ellen looked back at the house, then at him. “Your mother must have had a decided sense of humor.”
“She had a decided sense of many things.”
He stepped down first and offered his hand. “Mind the step. The gravel is loose at the edge.”
She placed her hand in his and descended carefully.
Her fingers were warmer than they had been at the altar, and the foolish fact lodged somewhere in him before he could dismiss it.
The housekeeper came forward at once, all curtsies and welcome, and Ellen was ushered off to rooms better aired and more comfortable than anything Pillard House had offered her.
Theodore did not follow.
He did not tell her that the roses on her dressing table would be there every day of her life by his order. Telling asked for an answer, and he was not ready to be answered. That failing was beginning to look to him like the whole shape of his character.
He found her again near dusk at the garden door, coming in with rain on her shawl and color high in her face from the cold. He had not gone looking for her. He had, he told himself, merely been crossing the passage.
“You will take a chill,” he said, stopping beside the door as she unwound the damp shawl from her shoulders.
“I wanted to see the front of it,” Ellen replied, glancing back toward the dim garden beyond the glass. “From outside.”
“In the rain?”
“It was only a little rain.”
“Rain is rarely improved by being minimised.”
She drew the shawl loose and gathered it over one arm. “It is a great deal of house to call a cottage.”
“And?” he asked.
She looked past him toward the staircase, then back to him, still holding the wet shawl half gathered against her gown. “And I have not decided what I think of it.”
“No,” he said, more gently than he had intended. “You would not, on the first evening. It would be unlike you to settle a thing before you had counted it twice and checked your own sum.”
She went still.
The shawl remained half off her shoulders, the rain darkening the fabric where her hand held it. She looked at him as though he had set down on the table a fact about herself she had not known anyone in the house had troubled to learn.
For a moment, she did not answer.
He could have said more. He knew it, and he said nothing.
At last, Ellen lowered the shawl fully from her shoulders. “Good night, Your Grace.”
The words were formal. The voice was not one he had heard from her before.
Theodore inclined his head and stepped aside from the foot of the stairs. “Good night, Duchess.”