A Forged Bargain with the Duke

Chapter One

“Here she is at last. You have kept a duke waiting, my dear, and I am assured by everybody who knows about such things that a duke is precisely the article one does not keep waiting.”

Her father spoke from the head of the table without troubling to rise, and the two gentlemen at his right kept their chairs as well. The evening had been arranged in every particular some hours before she reached the door.

“I have kept a dinner waiting,” she said, and gave the footman her wet shawl.

“She means no rudeness by it, Your Grace. None in the world.” Her father set the apology down so that it did the work of an accusation. “My elder daughter has a great love of an entrance, and I have never had the heart to cure her of it. We are all friends here. You will forgive her, I know.”

“I have a great love of dry stockings, Papa, and have been denied it since noon. I was in the east cottages.” She took her chair before the footman could pretend to hold it for her. “There was a matter of three families and a quantity of rent that had been asked of them twice.”

“And could you not have left it to Pymm, my dear? That is what the fellow is for.”

“I could have left it to Pymm, but he was the one who asked it twice.”

Rowan Merrick, Duke of Calder, set down his glass at last and looked at her. He had not done it once before that moment. She marked the moment and the hour and filed both away, since attention cost nothing to give and was seldom given to her.

“Which figure was asked twice?” he asked.

“Your Grace must not let us drag you into the domestic weather of Loxton. It is very dull, and it rains a good deal.” Her father laughed, and the table laughed with him.

“My steward manages the rents, I manage my steward, and between us the tenants are kept as comfortable as tenants will ever own to being.”

“I asked the figure of the person who was in the cottages,” Rowan said.

The candles nearest her father guttered as a servant passed behind him, and in the dip of the light she watched Sir Alistair decide not to be troubled. He had a great gift for that.

“Eleven shillings the quarter, on each of three cottages,” she said.

“The Michaelmas rent was mistakenly listed again in the spring column, making each family appear to owe the autumn rent twice, as if covering two seasons. I managed to get to Pymm to correct this mistake in his own handwriting by four o’clock. ”

“And you waited while he wrote it?”

“I waited until the families had seen it written. A promise unwitnessed is only a delay in kinder clothes.”

The duke did not hurry her. “Who found the doubled figure?”

“Does it signify, Your Grace?”

“It signifies,” the duke said. “I should like the name of whoever saw it. Anybody can be told a thing.”

“My daughter has a head for small sums.” Sir Alistair smiled down the length of the cloth at her, all fondness.

“One of her few ornaments, Your Grace, and I confess I encourage it. Some fathers pay for a drawing-master. I have let mine loose on the rent-book. She is occupied, nobody is the worse for it, and I have the pleasure of a daughter with an accomplishment. You will forgive a father his pride in the wrong article.”

“The tenants had a good deal of good out of it this afternoon,” Theodora said.

“They had the good I have always done them, my dear, and a little more besides.” Her father set his glass down with a care that carried its own warning.

“Your Grace will understand me. I am not to be lectured at my own table on the welfare of families I have carried through two bad winters. The evictions that were threatened last year did not happen, and I am the reason they did not.”

She might have let it go. She had let a great deal else go across the years, each small surrender paid out of the same purse, but the purse had run short long ago.

“The evictions did not happen,” she said, “because I sold my mother’s garnets in November and paid the arrears into the very hands that would otherwise have signed the notices.”

Her sister’s spoon stopped against the rim of her bowl.

“You were in town from first to last, Papa,” Theodora continued. “You have never once asked how the families kept their roofs, and I never told you, because you would have found a use for the answer. There it is now, at your own table. Still warm, as you like things.”

The quiet that followed was not one her father had arranged.

Mr Rede, seated beyond the duke and silent until then, gave his attention to the middle distance and kept it there.

Sir Alistair could turn most things, but for the length of a breath he could not turn this; in that breath, she watched the guest rather than her father, since the guest was the only regard in the room that she had not already spent.

Then her father laughed, warm, wide and perfectly pitched, and the evening resumed its shape.

“You see how it is with us, Your Grace, and I make you no apology for it, since you would have found it out by Thursday in any case: the ornament, and the temper fastened to the back of it. Now you will understand why I took such pains in my letters to prepare you. She is clever, but nobody has ever called her easy.”

“They have not,” Rowan said. “Your letters were full of the temper. They said nothing at all about the rents.”

He was still looking at her, and she wished, with a suddenness that annoyed her, that he would stop.

“You disapprove of me, Miss Loxton,” he said. “You have decided the shape of the evening, and you are waiting only for the proof to arrive.”

“I have decided nothing, Your Grace. I have observed a great deal. The two are often mistaken for one another, chiefly by people who would rather I did neither.”

“Then observe aloud. I have come a long way to be looked at. I may as well learn what is being seen.”

“Very well.” She set her hands flat on the cloth. “You did not rise when I entered.”

“I have been told since that this was a failure of manners.”

“It was the opposite. You did not know whether I was a daughter, a governess or the woman who trims the lamps, and you were sensible enough to wait for the information before you spent a courtesy on it.” She met his eyes for that.

“A great many men rise for the gown and sit down again for the person inside it. You waited to see which you had and I found it almost restful.”

Mr Rede made a sound into his wine that he converted, a little too late, into a cough.

“You have insulted my host, my sex, and the general practice of standing up,” Rowan said. “Is a compliment coming, or have I imagined it?”

“You asked the figure of the person who had it. You noticed which of us at this table was telling the truth about eleven shillings, and you asked her, and not the man who owns the roof she stood under.” She let that stand a moment.

“That is not a compliment. It is the first sensible thing done in this room since the soup, and I do not let a sensible thing pass without remark. They come too seldom to be wasted.”

“You dispute your father in company, then,” the duke said, and something crossed his face that he plainly disliked. “In front of his guests.”

“Only when he lies publicly. I try to preserve symmetry.”

Sir Alistair rose, and he rose beautifully, lifting his glass so that the standing became a toast and the toast became the reason he had stood at all.

“The health of our guest,” he said, “and of the acquaintance between two old houses. I have wanted a friend at that end of the county these ten years, and I mean to be shameless about having got one.”

The table drank and Theodora drank with them. A raised glass had its uses on the evenings when she did not wish to be asked to speak, and she had put it to those uses for years.

The duke did not sit again at once.

“While we are frank, Sir Alistair,” he said, “tell me about the condition of the estate I am asked to marry into. Plainly. I have your steward’s figures by post, and they read too smoothly for a place that has weathered two hard winters.”

“The estate is sound, Your Grace.” Her father took his chair again, unhurried, and the question seemed to please him.

“A little stretched at the edges. Every honest acreage in England is stretched at the edges after a poor season, and any man who tells you otherwise is selling you something. There is nothing here that a sensible settlement would not set comfortably to rights.”

“And you would call the figures your steward sent me honest?”

“I would call them my steward’s.”

“That is a careful distinction,” the duke said.

“It is the only sort I permit myself before the sweet, and after the sweet I permit myself none at all.” Sir Alistair smiled. “Theodora, my dear, you are frowning at your spoon. Say the thing you are frowning about, before it curdles the cream.”

“The figures are not dishonest,” she said.

“They are incomplete. A clever man arranges incompleteness to pass for honesty, and in a poor light the two wear the same coat.” Her voice stayed level.

“Pymm’s return shows the rents as they were set.

It does not show the three cottages that have paid nothing since the spring, because I agreed they would pay nothing until the roofs were sound, and I did not write the arrangement anywhere a steward’s hand could find it and call it arrears. ”

“You keep a second reckoning, then,” the duke said.

“I keep the true one. The first is for gentlemen who prefer their houses to read smoothly by post.”

Mr Rede set down his glass. “Calder, old fellow, I am beginning to understand the letters.”

“You have the wrong warning, Rede.” The duke had not looked away from her. “I was told the daughter was difficult. Nobody troubled to tell me the daughter keeps the accounts.”

“I do not keep them, Your Grace. I write them out.” Colour came up in her face, and she disliked it. “This table had spent twenty years mistaking the one for the other. If they were the same thing I should still have my garnets.”