Chapter Twenty-Four
“Your mother has rearranged my still-room, terrorised my cook into better pastry, and told Beatrice to her face that lace is honest work and spying is not, and the two of them have been thick as housebreakers ever since. I am informing you formally, Duchess. The household has fallen. I am a guest in my own house.”
“You have never once been a guest in your life.” Giselle did not look up from the library table, where three weeks of war debris was at last becoming an archive again under her hands, boxes ranked, papers breathing.
“And you adore her. I watched you walk her through the orangery yesterday for an hour. You came back looking like a boy who had been told he did well at his letters.”
“She said I would do.” Royce closed the library door behind him, turned the key, and the small sound of it carried across the quiet room.
“Her exact words. I have been knighted with less ceremony. That woman survived twenty years of Veyr with a lace pillow and a falsified grave, and she looked me over the way she would look over a deed of sale, and said that I would do, and I find it is the only review of my character I have ever cared to frame.”
“She said rather more than that to me.” Giselle set down the docket she was holding.
“She said you watched her the whole evening at the cottage and never once stood between her and what she wanted to say to Veyr. She said most men cannot help standing in front of a woman, even the good ones, especially the good ones, and that you stood beside instead, and that I should keep you. I told her the keeping was already notarised.”
“She also informed me, in the orangery, that she read every page of my reputation before she let you keep me, as she put it, and that the scandal sheets were lazier than Veyr’s files but more entertaining.
” He shook his head slowly. “Then she asked whether Foxhollow had a damp problem, because she intends to visit her safe-house, hers, you understand, by inheritance of marriage, every autumn, and a courier called Norris had better expect her.”
“She has adopted your bolt-hole.”
“Adopted is too gentle, but one does not negotiate with a woman who weighted her own coffin.”
“And the rest of the accounts?” He came across the room slowly, past the ladder, trailing one finger along the shelf the way a man touches a fence he once bled on. “Tell me where the war has filed itself this week. I have been at the Chancellor’s office all morning, and I am tired of men’s voices.”
“Then attend, for the last time, because after today I am closing the file.” She ticked them off against her fingers, the cataloguer’s litany.
“Veyr is attainted, confined, and awaiting a trial that every newspaper in England has already conducted. Vale’s bargain holds; he testifies in the spring, and he sent me, if you can believe it, a professional courtesy, a list of every document he ever cut for Veyr, so that the victims can be found and the estates unwound.
Brunt talked for two days. Sotheby is struck off and turned king’s evidence, which surprises no one.
My mother’s name is cleared in the record by the same commission minute that cleared mine.
Croft saw to it personally; I think he has half fallen in love with her.
And Amabel has discovered that a woman whose power was borrowed from Veyr has been called on by precisely no one for three weeks.
Beatrice sent her a card.” She paused for the relish of it. “Flat. By footman.”
“And Beatrice herself? You spoke with her this morning. I saw the carriage.”
“I told her the account between us is closed. Not forgotten, not forgiven exactly, those are the wrong headings. Settled. She armed me, she sold me, she spent herself getting me back, and the three entries balance, and I am keeping her, because a woman who has been owned her whole life ought to end it belonging somewhere instead.” Giselle’s voice gentled.
“And I told her that when the trial is over, she and I are going to find her daughter together, just to look, just to know, and what happens after that is her daughter’s choice and not Veyr’s.
She wept on my carpet for ten entire minutes and then apologised for the carpet.
I have entered it as the finest morning’s work of my career. ”
“The cruellest stationery in England.” He had reached the table now and stood across from her, the lamplight between them.
“And the lady archivist? Where has she filed herself, now that the war is over and the catalogue is hers and no one is hunting her anywhere on earth? It is the one entry you have not read to me.”
“The lady archivist is still cataloguing that one.” She looked up at him at last, and the look had lamplight and mischief and twenty years of arrived-home in it. “She has a half-written entry that says something about a man who locked the library door just now and thinks she did not hear it.”
“She hears everything. It is the most alarming thing about her. I keep a list.”
“Read me an item.”
“Item the latest. A woman restored to her name has spent three weeks restoring everyone else’s.
Her mother’s record. Beatrice’s ledger. Vale’s victims. The Harwood widow’s heirs, whom she traced personally through forty years of parish registers because, and I quote her, somebody owed that woman an apology with interest.” He took the pen out of her hand and set it down.
“She has filed every soul in this war but herself.”
“Item.” He came around the table without hurry.
“Three weeks of magistrates, mothers, chancellors, and house guests, and I have not had my wife to myself in any room of this house since Foxhollow. Tonight, the guests are at the dower house. The staff are abed. The door is locked because I locked it. And there is a debt outstanding in this library that I have every intention of collecting with interest.”
“A debt.” She rose from the chair into the small space he had left her, which was not an accident, hers or his. “Itemise it, Your Grace. I am a stickler for documentation.”
“At Foxhollow I made you a promise. Our own house, the doors locked because we locked them, the whole night, nothing rationed.” His hands settled at her waist, and his voice dropped into the register that had been undoing her since a carriage in the dark.
“And one clause more, which you have not yet collected. I told you that when it happened in our own house, you would not have to be quiet.” He bent and set his mouth to her ear.
“The staff are abed, Duchess. The walls are stone. Collect the clause.”
“In the library.” Her breath had gone uneven, and her hands were at his lapels already, and she was laughing, all three at once, which was the whole of their marriage in one sentence.
“Among the boxes. Where any housemaid could have heard us the first time you stood too close to me over a forged deed.”
“Precisely there. I have wanted you in this room since the afternoon you told me I had misfiled treason. You stood at that table in a grey dress with ink on your finger, and you took my library apart, and I stood there like a green boy and let you, and I have never once entered this room since without thinking of it.” He kissed the corner of her jaw, under her ear, and her head went back to give him the road.
“Tonight I file the wanting. Permanently.”
“Then do it properly.” She slipped out of his hands, crossed to the table, took up a paper at random, and stood exactly where she had stood the first afternoon, chin up, ink-fingered, wicked.
“Re-enactment, Your Grace, for the completeness of the record. I am the new archivist. You are the alarming duke who has just come in without knocking. I have found something dreadful in your shelves.” She held up the paper.
“You have misfiled a duchess, Your Grace. Filed under the archivist for these three weeks. The error is grave.”
“Show me the misfiling.” He came to her slowly around the table, the old prowl with all the armour off it. “I shall want to inspect it closely. Repeatedly. With my hands.”
“That is a wildly irregular procedure.”
“It is the only procedure this library now recognises. New regime. The old administrator was a locked man. I have it on excellent authority he is gone.”
He lifted her onto the table’s clear corner as easily as a folio, stepped between her knees, and kissed her with the lamp at her back, and the paper she had been brandishing drifted to the floor unmourned.
His mouth was warm and familiar now in a way it had not been even three weeks ago, the taste of him the taste of her own married life, and the familiarity deepened the wanting rather than dulling it, the way a well-known passage in a beloved text grows richer with every reading rather than thinner.
She kissed him back with both hands in his hair and her knees tightening at his hips, and somewhere in the kissing the game shifted and the wanting came up underneath it like a tide.
“Mind the dockets,” she managed.
“The dockets have seen worse. They are two hundred years old and French.” His mouth went down her throat while his hands worked the laces at her back with infuriating competence, loosening the bodice by feel alone while his lips followed the line of her collarbone to the hollow at the base of her throat, the place he had watched across a hundred catalogue entries and two hundred cups of tea.
“Tell me to stop, and I will reshelve you, Duchess, good as new, not a fold out of place.”
“If you reshelve me, I will have you bound.” She pulled him closer with both heels, laughing into his mouth. “Proceed with the inspection. Thoroughly. I have three weeks of irregularities, and you have all night.”