Chapter Six
She had walked the whole ground floor of Calder House before the servants were properly up, counting doors and windows and the plate left out overnight, when the housekeeper found her in the cold morning-room with a candle and a face that had clearly been warned about her.
“Your Grace should have rung. I would have brought a lamp, and a girl to attend you.”
“I have been lighting my own candles for some years. I did not wish to begin my tenancy by dragging a child out of a warm bed to watch me count the windows.” Theodora set the candle down.
“You are Mrs Denholm, and you have kept this house for eleven years. I found the under-butler awake a few minutes ago, and I asked some questions. The late Duchess trusted you with both the keys and the still-room. I would rather have that from you directly than from a boy who repeats it.”
The housekeeper’s careful face allowed itself one flicker of reassessment.
“Nine years housekeeper, Your Grace. The boy counts from when I came into the house, and I came two years before that, in the still-room. I have had the keys the nine years. Since Her Grace died there has been no one to hand them to.”
“And now you have one, and you are wondering whether it is worse than no one at all.” She let that stand.
“You need not answer it in front of me.” Theodora looked at the ring of keys at the woman’s waist. “Keep them. I will tell you plainly, since we are beginning, that I do not intend to take the running of this house.”
It landed wrong. She had expected nothing else, and she watched Denholm take it up as an insult, wearing the clothes of humility.
“His Grace gave me to understand,” the housekeeper said carefully, “that the Duchess would wish the household in her own hands. He was most particular. He had the books brought down and made ready for you. They are on the desk in the small library this hour, Your Grace, three years of them, and the tradesmen’s bills, and the wage-book, all set out. ”
“Then His Grace has been generous with what is not his to give, and you may put the books back where they live.” Theodora heard her own voice come out flat and hard, and could not gentle it, because the alternative to hardness this morning was a truth she had signed her name against. “I will not touch the household books. The meals, the coal and the linen will be ordered as they always were, by you. Nobody under this roof is to be hired or turned off by me. You will go on as you have gone on, and you will bring your questions to His Grace, and I will thank you not to bring them to me.”
“But Your Grace has just spent an hour counting the windows.”
“It settles me, Mrs Denholm, and it commits me to nothing. Do not read a duchess into it.”
Denholm did not move to go. “Then may I ask Your Grace a plain question, since you prize them? If you will not have the keys and will not order the house, what am I to tell the servants you are? They have been asking me, and I have had nothing to give them.”
“They may have this much. I am the Duchess of Calder, and that is a title and a set of rooms and nothing they need fear. Say that I keep early hours and my own counsel, that I will not trouble an honest soul, and that the dishonest had better be quicker than I am, for no one has managed it yet.” Theodora took up her candle.
“That is a good deal more than most mistresses tell a housekeeper in the first week. Spend it as you please.”
Denholm stood a long moment putting the pieces side by side and failing to make them lie flat.
Here was a mistress who rose before the maids, totted the plate, and had gone at the under-butler for the history of the keys before breakfast, and who then, having proved in an hour that she was the most competent person to enter the house in a decade, refused the house flat.
It did not fit. Theodora let it not fit because she could not help her that far.
***
Gowns came next, because the duke, it seemed, had thought of everything.
They arrived mid-morning, carried in by two maids and a woman from town, who held pins between her teeth.
They brought with them bolts of fabric: grey dove and a striking blue, the very shades that matched the rooms she had been assigned.
The woman with the pins said His Grace had ordered the duchess fitted for a dozen day-dresses and four for evening, and that she was to have whatever she chose besides.
“I choose nothing,” Theodora said. “Take them down again.”
The maids stopped. The woman with the pins took them out of her mouth. “Your Grace does not care for the colours? They may be changed to anything at all. His Grace said the choosing was to be the Duchess’s own in every particular.”
“The colours are perfectly good. I decline them entirely. There is a difference, and it has taken up my entire morning.” She stood and put her back to the blue, worse than the rest of it, because a careful hand had matched the shade to her walls, and matching a woman to her walls is a thing one does to a chair.
“You will tell His Grace, with my compliments, that his wife is not a room he is furnishing, and that I have gowns enough to be decent in and no intention of being dressed to a scheme by a man who met me this month and has not yet had one plain hour of my company. Good morning.”
She refused the invitations the same way, when Denholm brought them on a salver at noon, a small stack of cream cards from houses that had not troubled to know Miss Loxton and were suddenly avid for the Duchess of Calder.
“I answer none of them.”
“Your Grace, some of these are from families His Grace has known his whole life. The Marsdens. The dowager at Ferrers. It will be marked, if the Duchess is not seen.”
“They may make what note of it they please. I have spent my life being commanded to appear pleasant in rooms that despised me on the way in and forgot me on the way out. My father at least owned the debt I was paying when he sent me into them. A card is not a debt.” She pushed the salver an inch back toward the housekeeper.
“If His Grace requires me displayed, he may say so to my face, and we will quarrel about it in the open, and I will lose, because he holds the cards and I hold the walls he matched to me. But he will have to ask. I have signed away a great deal. I have not signed away making him ask.”
***
It was the duke himself who came to her in the small library that afternoon, where she sat with the unopened household books at her elbow and would not so much as square their edges.
He did not sit down, and his voice stayed exactly where his voice always was, and the thing had plainly reached him at last.
“You have sent back the gowns, refused every card in the county, and put my housekeeper into a state I have not seen her reach in years,” he said. “She believes she has offended you, but she has not. I have. Explain it to me, because I am running short of theories that do you any credit.”
“There is nothing to explain, Your Grace. You offered, and I declined.” She hesitated. “I am allowed to say no to a gown.”
“Refuse a hundred of them, and welcome. What I have put before you is a great house to run, an income you answer to no one for, and your own way in every particular of it, and you have taken the lot for a set of chains.” His jaw did the small controlled work she had seen before.
“You oppose me even when I give you precisely the thing you claim to want. I have never met its equal, and I have sat in Parliament.”
“Men frequently call a longer chain freedom, Your Grace.” She met his eyes.
“You give me the running of the house, and it is yours to give and yours to take back the first morning I run it in a way that displeases you. You give me an income, and it is yours to have written and yours to have unwritten.” She held his eyes.
“Every article handed to me this week came with a hand still on the other end of it. I decline the rope. My objection is not to the walking. I will not be made grateful to the man who measured the length.”
Something moved through his face that she could not read, and would not have trusted if she could, and he took his time before he answered.
“The books stay on the desk. You will not touch them, even though you asked for the steward’s books.
They stay where you can reach them, because I am a patient man on this one subject and no other, and I can afford to leave a door open longer than you can afford to keep walking past it. ”
“You are very sure of yourself, Your Grace.”
“Very little in this world is sure to me. The corn is being stolen from three of my houses, and I cannot prove which of my stewards is to blame. My wife totted my plate at five this morning for the pleasure of the sum.” He was at the door.
“I can afford to wait for those two facts to be introduced to one another.”
He left before she could answer. Removing himself the instant a sentence landed was becoming a habit. She sat alone with the books she would not open, and hated, obscurely, that he had guessed the one thing about her that was true: that a shut door she could bear but an open one she could not.
***
The matter of Hollis the corn-chandler came four days later, and it came, as such things always came to her, sideways, through a servant’s face.
She was crossing the back passage when she saw the kitchen-maid, Bett, crying quietly into the flour, and stopped, because a house told her its truth in its faces, and this face was telling her a thing the wage-book never would.