Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
“And through here, Your Grace, is the long drawing room, though we’ve not opened it since the old Duke’s day. The blue parlor’s warmer of a morning, if you’d sooner take your tea there.”
Mrs. Fletcher moved down the corridor at the stately, unhurried pace.
She was a straight-backed woman who had on a cap and a ring of keys at her waist that chimed with every step, and she had greeted her new mistress that morning with a curtsy so deep and so correct that Diana had not the smallest notion how to answer it.
Diana followed her, and nodded, and understood perhaps one word in three.
There were so many rooms. Drawing rooms and parlors and a morning room and a music room and a chamber whose only apparent purpose was the keeping of china, and behind each door there seemed to stand another servant, a girl blacking a grate, a footman polishing a rail, a whole silent army going about a hundred tasks she could not have named on pain of death, every one of them dipping and bowing as she passed.
At Fernside there had been a cook, and Betsy, and a girl for the rough work, and Diana had known the running of the whole house as she knew her own two hands.
Here she was a stranger in a foreign country, and did not speak the language.
How am I to be mistress of this? The thought sat cold in her stomach.
These people have done their work since before I was born, and done it well, and want nothing on earth from me but to keep out of their way.
Who would heed a word I said? Who would so much as look up from his labor if I stood in the middle of the room and confessed I did not know what any of it was for?
“Mrs. Fletcher.” She stopped, and the housekeeper stopped with her. “Tell me honestly. Is there anything the house wants? Anything not being done, or not done as it ought?”
The old woman weighed the question with a seriousness that was itself a kind of courtesy.
“The house runs smooth enough, Your Grace, I’ll not pretend otherwise.
But—” she hesitated “—the accounts are all kept by His Grace himself, with Mr. Ainsley the steward. Have been these years, there being no lady to see to them. It’s a deal of work for a gentleman with so much else upon his shoulders.
A mistress might take the household books off his hands, were she so inclined.
It’s her natural province, when all’s said. ”
The household accounts were indeed a mistress’s province; she knew that much.
But she did not know whether this particular master wished this particular mistress to have them, not while the whole of their marriage still hung upon five nights and a bargain neither of them had yet won or lost. To take up the books was to plant herself here, to play the wife in earnest, and she was by no means certain he would thank her for it.
I shall ask him, she decided. When next I see him. It is his to grant or refuse.
“Is there a room standing empty?” she asked instead. “A good one, but not, not grand. My sister may come to us before long. I should like a room made ready for her.”
“Empty rooms we’ve a dozen, Your Grace.” Mrs. Fletcher’s severe face softened by a degree. “I’ll have the finest of them turned out for the young lady directly, the east chamber, with the garden view, and new hangings if there’s time to—”
“Something modest will do very well,” Diana said it gently. “She is only eight. She would be frightened of anything too fine. A small room, and warm, and near to mine, if that can be managed.”
“Near to yours it shall be.” The housekeeper inclined her head, and something almost like approval crossed her features.
“And might I make so bold, Your Grace. You’re not to stint yourself while you’re about it.
His Grace left word the house is yours to order as you please.
You’ve only to send to the modiste for whatever gowns you’d like, and to name your own woman for a lady’s maid, and to change any room in the place that don’t suit you.
You mustn’t feel a guest here. This is your home now. ”
It is not, Diana thought, and was careful to let none of it reach her face. Or it may not be, come five nights’ time. “You are very kind,” was all she said. “I shall think on it.”
They walked on. And because it was easier to ask of the dead than to dwell on the living, Diana said, as though idly, “Have you been long in the family’s service, Mrs. Fletcher?”
“All my life, Your Grace, near enough. I came a girl of fourteen, in the old Duchess’s time.”
“The Duke’s mother.”
“The very same. God rest her.” The housekeeper’s voice dropped into the particular hush the old keep for old griefs.
“A cold, correct sort of lady, though I’ll speak no ill, bred to her duty, as they all were, and she felt the want of a second son most keenly.
There was never but one child, you see. His Grace as he is now.
She was never strong after his birth, and when the second would not come—”
She gave a small shake of the head. “She was taken when the young master was but six years old. He scarcely knew her, poor lamb. It was the old Duke who raised him after.”
“And the old Duke?”
“Gone these seven years.” Mrs. Fletcher’s keys chimed as she turned down another passage.
“A hard man, if you’ll forgive the saying, hard on himself first, and hardest of all on the boy.
Duty, duty, morning and night; the name, the title, what was owed the line.
He’d have the young master at his figures when other children were at their games.
And then one morning at his own desk he was struck down all at once, an apoplexy, the physician named it, and never spoke another word, and was in his grave inside the month. ”
She stopped, and looked back at Diana with a directness that took her aback.
“So you’ll understand, Your Grace, why His Grace sets such store by an heir.
He’s the last of them. The whole of it comes down to him and stops, unless there’s a child to come after.
” She did not finish the thought aloud. She did not need to.
“Well. It’s not my place to say. Only that it would gladden a great many hearts in this house to hear a child’s feet upon these floors again. ”
Diana said something suitable, and they walked on, but she heard little of what the old woman told her after.
The last of them. So that was the sum of it.
Not a cold man’s whim, nor mere pride, but a thing bred into him bone-deep from the age of six; the name must not end in him.
And she, whom fate had made his wife, was the one soul in all the world standing between the Duke of Rosewood and the single thing his whole life had been built to require.
Then he must have it, she told herself, with a fresh and desperate resolve.
He must have his heir, only not from me.
She would find him a woman, some discreet and willing creature who did not fear what Diana feared, and she would raise the child as her own and keep her sister safe, and everyone should have precisely what they needed, and no one need die of it.
It was a sound plan. It was a kind one. She clung to it all through the long, bewildering afternoon, as though it were a rope let down into a well.
That evening she sat on the edge of the great bed, and this time she had seen to it that she was covered.
The maids had wished to dress her as they had the night before, the thin white lawn, the bare shoulders, the roses, and Diana had refused every one and put on instead a nightgown of stout fabric buttoned to the throat, with a wrapper over it, and her hair in a plain braid down her back.
If the Duke of Rosewood meant to spend his five nights unpicking her resolve, she would not be the one to hand him the needle.
A knock came at the door, and her whole body startled at the sound of it.
She had not seen him once in the entire course of the day.
He had gone out early, to his friend, one of the girls had said, the Duke of Kingsell, with whom His Grace was forever at some rough sport or other, and had not returned till dusk, and had sent her no word at all.
And Diana, sitting alone in her fine strange room through all those empty hours, had been aware of his absence in a way that unsettled her a great deal more than his presence ever had.
Why should it signify to me, she thought, whether I lay eyes on the man or no? It does not. It cannot. And yet she had listened for his step the whole afternoon, and despised herself for the listening.
A second knock, and then the door opened a crack, and it was only a maid after all.
“Beg pardon, Your Grace. His Grace asks, if you would attend him in the study.”
The study. Not the bedchamber. Diana swallowed, rose, smoothed the wrapper down, and found she had half turned toward the glass to see how she looked before she caught herself and stopped.
What are you about? She let her hand fall. Since when do you care how you appear for him? Leave it.
She left it, and followed the maid.
The study lay at the end of a corridor she had not been shown, behind a heavy door of dark wood. The maid bowed and withdrew, and Diana stood a moment gathering herself, and knocked.
“Come.”
She had expected a study. She found a library, a great high room walled floor to ceiling in books, more than she had known were printed in all the world, ladders on brass rails to reach the topmost shelves.
But it was not arranged as a library ought to be, all cold formality and chairs set at attention.
There was a deep, worn settee drawn up close before a good fire, and an armchair beside it, and a thick rug, and a lamp turned low, and the whole of it had the warm, slightly disordered look of a room a man actually lived in.
It was, she thought, the first honest room she had seen in all his proper, chilly house.
And there, in the midst of it, sat the Duke.