Chapter Two
Rowan brought his horse down to a walk at the turn of the Loxton drive. A house tells the truth about itself to whoever comes up its avenue slowly, and he wanted the truth of this one before he reached the door.
“You are reading the avenue again,” Rede said, drawing up beside him. “You have not stopped since the gate. Go on, then. What has it confessed?”
“The limes were last cut by a man who has since been let go and never replaced.” Rowan nodded at the ragged line of them.
“That near field was drained once, and nothing has been done to it since. And the house at the end of the avenue wants my money a good deal more than its master admitted over the fish last night.”
“Then you have your answer, and we may turn the horses and be at Harding in time for dinner. A failing house, and a daughter who insults dukes over their own fish? I have known you cry off for a tenth of that.”
“You have seen me do it.”
Rede watched him. “And yet you have not turned the horse.”
“I have not.” He let the horse pick its way past a gate that hung an inch out of true on its lower hinge.
“I disliked a great deal of what she did last night, Rede. Sleeping on it, I find I dislike the woman I was sold by letter a good deal more, now that I have seen what the letter was built to cover.”
“Her own father calls her difficult.”
“Her father told me the estate was sound.” A single chimney of the many the house owned put up one thread of smoke, and the rest of the place stood shut and cold behind it.
“He wrote to me that she was spoiled. A spoiled woman does not sell her mother’s stones to keep other people’s roofs on.
She complains that her milliner is slow.
I have been lied to about the furniture of this house, and I have come to count it myself. ”
Rede gave it up. He had lost the argument at the gate and had gone on since out of loyalty to his own side. “And if the furniture bites?”
“Then I shall have been bitten by something true. Nothing else in that house has offered me as much.”
“You mean to walk in believing her the injured party,” Rede said. “On the strength of one dinner and a row of untended limes.”
“I mean to walk in believing nothing. That is a different article altogether, and her father has never once managed it.” Rowan gathered the reins.
“He gave me a daughter in his letters.” Rowan’s mouth had gone flat.
“Vain, ungovernable, a trial to a patient man. Then I sat at his table and watched that trial reverse a rent her own steward had doubled, pay a debt out of her own jewels, and correct a lie in a voice a man had to lean in to hear.” He shook his head once.
“One of those women is real, Rede. The other was written to make me grateful for taking her off his hands.”
“And if they should prove the same woman?”
“Then I shall have married the most useful person in three counties and paid her father for the privilege of ceasing to waste her. I have spent worse mornings.”
At the steps a boy came out too fast for the reins and glanced up once at the shuttered windows before he took them, checking whether he was watched.
“That is the second this morning,” Rowan said, half to himself.
“You had better tell me what it is you are counting.”
“Servants of this house who look up before they act. Each one of them is waiting to learn which master will be displeased, and hedging until he knows.”
“You find that sinister,” Rede said. “Half the great houses in England keep a nervous staff.”
“That is not the part I am watching.” Rowan followed the boy leading the horse off, still looking back over his shoulder.
“A staff nervous of the master studies the floor. This lot study the upper floor, and a man does that when he has not yet worked out whom he ought to be afraid of. Every soul in the yard is at it.”
The morning-room they were shown into had been beautiful fifteen years ago, and had been kept since by somebody who knew the difference between what could be mended and what could only be turned to face the wall.
The good chairs stood with their worn arms toward the plaster.
A brighter square above the mantel marked where a picture had hung until lately, sold, he supposed, for the same reason the limes had gone.
An old servant brought wine they had not asked for, set it down with great care, and stayed at Rowan’s elbow a moment past the errand.
“You will be Beddoes.”
“Your Grace.” Nothing whatever moved in the old man’s face.
“You have served the family a long while.”
“I have served this house a long while, Your Grace.” The correction was small enough to walk past. “There is a difference, if Your Grace will forgive me the saying. The family comes and goes.”
“And who keeps the house, when the family goes?”
Beddoes did not answer at once. “There is always someone left standing in it, Your Grace. It would not be my place to say who.” He gathered the tray under his arm and took himself out.
***
Sir Alistair arrived late. A man who keeps a duke waiting in a shabby room wants the duke attending to the man and not to the room, and Rowan had counted on the delay from the gate.
“Your Grace, you honour us twice in two days, and I shall be insufferable about it in the neighbourhood. I give you fair warning of that now.” All his warmth, and both his hands.
“My daughter will attend us directly. She has been at the household books since six. I indulge her in it, and I am not ashamed of the indulgence. A restless temper must have its exercise, and the books are a good deal cheaper than a horse.”
“By your own telling, you indulge her a great deal and credit her with nothing,” Rowan said. “I have been wondering which of the two is the true one.”
The warmth in Sir Alistair’s face slipped, but quickly returned, and he laughed, and the laugh turned a duke’s rudeness into a jest between friends.
“You have caught the family complaint already, Your Grace, and within two days. She will be gratified to hear it. My daughter believes herself uncredited under this roof from morning until night, on no evidence whatsoever, and she will believe it a great deal more warmly now that she has a duke agreeing with her.”
“Then let us see what the evidence says when it comes into the room.”
The door opened, and the woman who had ruined dinner came in holding a folded paper. She had already envisioned how the conversation would unfold, and she loathed every aspect of it, yet she carried both truths with her into the room.
“Miss Loxton.”
“Your Grace.” She did not sit. “My father tells me you have come to make me an offer. I would take it kindly if you made it plainly, and spared us the half-hour of weather that usually comes fastened to such things.” She did not move from the doorway.
“I have a roof at the south lodge that will not wait on ceremony, and I find I have rather less patience than the roof.”
Sir Alistair began to say that His Grace had ridden a very long way, but she did not let him finish the sentence.
“His Grace has ridden over this morning to say a thing he might have written, so he wishes to watch my face while it is said. He may have the face because he has come the distance for it. What he may not have is the half-hour.” She turned to Rowan.
“Say it, Your Grace. What are you offering, and what do you set against it?”
Rede discovered a fascination with the middle distance. Sir Alistair drew breath to smooth the room, and Rowan lifted his hand from the arm of his chair.
“Plainly, then,” Rowan said. “Your father’s estate is mortgaged past what this year’s rents can carry, and past next year’s besides.
” He watched her face while he said it. Nothing arrived there that he had not already supposed.
She obviously had the figures before he gave them, more exactly than the man who signs for them had ever held them.
“Without a settlement it falls to his creditors inside eighteen months, and the families your sister nods to in church fall with it. I propose to clear the debt entire.”
“That is the pleasant half. You may go on to the rest of it.”
“I propose to settle a sum on your sister that no creditor and no husband of hers can reach.” He did not hurry the next part.
“And I propose to make you Duchess of Calder, with the ordering of a house that has wanted proper ordering since my mother died, and an income of your own, yours in law, answerable to no one, myself least of all.”
She was very still now, in a way he could not read and wished he could.
“And set against it?” she asked.
“I gain a wife who is called clever and appears to be the only soul at Loxton who knows where its money goes.” He did not soften its shape, out of a private conviction that she would trust the plain thing sooner than the sugared one.
“I am not a sentimental man, Miss Loxton, and this is an honest bargain rather than a warm one. Marriages raised on warmer ground fall within the year. I have watched it happen twice. Ours would at least stand on something true.”
“Why me?” she asked. “You could clear a failing estate for any of a dozen sweeter-tempered women with fathers who lie less. Say the true reason since you are so fond of the plain thing.”
“The true reason is that I have run my own houses eleven years and I am tired of being robbed by the men I pay to keep them.” He held her eyes.
“I sat at your father’s table and watched whom the servants obeyed when they believed no one was watching them.
It was not your father.” He said it without heat.
“I do not want a decorative wife. I want to stop paying stewards to empty my barns, and you are the only person I have met in a twelvemonth I am certain would catch them at it.”
“That is not a compliment a woman is often offered.”
“It is the only sort I have. I am no good at the other kind.”
She turned the folded paper once in her fingers and set it, unopened, on the small table at her side.
“And the terms?” she asked.