Chapter Six
“You answer a question as a smuggler packs a cart,” Beatrice said drily from the doorway.
Renae did not pause in counting the sheets into the press. “I was not aware I had been searched, my lady.”
“You are always being searched. You answer your searchers so handsomely they go off content, persuaded they have seen the whole load.” Beatrice lowered herself into the hard chair as though she had bought it on the way through.
“I am not most searchers. I have buried two husbands and outlived everyone who might once have warned you off me.”
“Then I am at a disadvantage, and counting sheets while I am at it.”
“He sent a tray up to you the other night. No note on it.” She let the words find their mark. “You will not pretend the kitchen failed to mention it.”
“The kitchen mentions nothing so often as the people who imagine it does not, my lady.”
“Prettily said, and it tells me precisely nothing, which is itself the answer.” Beatrice turned her rings, one and then the next.
“I knew a girl once who answered everyone exactly that well. She kept a whole matrimony behind a pleasant face, and the face held to the end, and the matrimony was the death of her by inches behind it. No one at her funeral could think of one true thing to say of her, because she had never let a single one out where it might be caught.”
“That is a grim story to bring a woman at her linen.”
“It is a warning got up as a story, which is the only kind anyone will take from me at my age.” She rose, slow and deliberate.
“I shall not press you, child. I wanted you to know the cart has a watcher beneath it who likes you. Take care which of your figures you trust this afternoon. The ones that grieve you are generally the true ones.”
By four on the hour the figures had grieved her. The plate case in the butler’s pantry stood locked when she came to it and locked when she left, and four pieces the lighter in between, and she sent the boot-boy for Wells before she let herself think past the count.
“When was this case last opened, to your knowledge, Mr. Wells?”
“Couldn’t say to the day, ma’am. It’s brought out for the polishing, monthly, and otherwise it sits and sulks.”
She ran a fingertip over the empty baize where a salver had sat. “Who does the polishing?”
“Whichever footman’s set to it. Finch, mostly, this past while, him being the careful one with his hands.”
“And the key?”
Wells frowned into the open case. “On the footmen’s ring, ma’am, and on yours, and nowhere I know of besides.”
“Four pieces are gone, Mr. Wells. A pair of salvers and two candlesticks. And the lock has not been forced.”
Wells took that in slowly, and his face did the thing an honest man’s does when the figures walk him somewhere he would rather not go. “I’d not like to think it of any of the lads, ma’am.”
“No. Nor would I, which is exactly the difficulty with thinking, that one cannot choose where it sits down.” She closed the book. “Say nothing of this below stairs. A loose word now would do more harm than the loss, and I will not hang a man on a sum I have only begun to add.”
He left. She stood with the closed book and made herself read the sentence under it that she had not said aloud.
The one person besides herself with a key and an unwatched hour was the single servant she had chosen, on no evidence but a kindness at a linen press, to trust without reserve.
She could not make herself believe it. The refusal was the precise thing his kindness had bought.
The first open defiance came from Thomas before the week was out, over a matter too small to be the true one. The smallness of it told her the true one was herself.
“The plate is to be counted weekly now,” she told the hall, “and kept against a single key, and the key is to be mine.”
“We’ve counted it monthly twenty years.” Thomas held up his stretch of wall and did not leave it. “I’ll not be handled a thief on a lady’s whim.”
“It is not a whim. It is four missing pieces and an unforced lock, and the two will not introduce themselves without my help.”
“Then say it plain. Say you think one of us a thief, and let the man answer you to your face.”
“I think a case was opened with a key and not a crowbar.” She kept her voice exactly where it had been. “I have thought any number of things this week I have not said, Thomas, and there lies the whole difference between us this morning.”
“You’d not have lasted a week in a proper house, giving yourself such airs over the spoons.”
She set the inventory book down on the table, unhurried, and let the small flat sound of it be the loudest thing in the room.
“You may dislike my instructions, Thomas. You are not at liberty to disregard them. Choose which of those two difficulties you would prefer to keep, because you may not keep the both of them.”
He held her eyes a moment past wisdom, then dropped them to the floor. She took the floor for the surrender it was and did not make him say the word. A man made to speak his own defeat only comes back for it later, in a sharper hour.
***
“I have a footman who would greatly prefer a different housekeeper,” she told Declan that evening, the books open between them. “And I have four pieces of silver gone out of a locked case, and I should like to know how much rope I am allowed before I learn its measure the hard way.”
His eyes stayed on the column. “You think the two are the same man?”
“I think nothing I can prove, which is why I have named no one, and why I should rather watch than accuse. But I cannot watch a hall that does not mind me.” She turned a page. “What would you do with the footman, if the house were your own?”
“Turn off the next man who mistook a skirt for a want of judgment, I expect, and let the rest learn the lesson off his back.”
“On the spot, with his fortnight and no character, and the hall watching me do it the once, so I need never do it twice.” She met his look. “I am greatly pleased we are agreed. I had drafted the speech already.”
“You are very certain of your methods, for a woman who came up the drive in a hired gig.” He set his quill down. He did that rarely, and never idly.
“I am certain of nothing else, my lord. The gig was all I could afford. The method costs only nerve, and nerve I have never once had to pawn.”
The corner of his mouth moved. “You wish to dismiss my footmen now?”
“Only the ones who mistake my skirts for my judgment, my lord.”
He let it show that the answer pleased him, and the showing was its own warmth, and its own quiet danger.
“Then turn off whom you must. If a man entrusts another with his property, he is bound to give him the means to defend it, otherwise he merely passes off the blame for its eventual loss.
I shall ride into town at dawn to ensure my attorney finalises your codicil without further delay.
I would rather come home to a household that minds you than one still deciding whether it need.”
And so it fell to Renae to represent the household when a carriage was heard coming up the drive at three on the hour, adorned with a crest she half remembered out of a life she had stopped counting as her own. Finch had the door, something she would think of afterward and wish she had not.
Lady Marwood brought the chill of her own consequence into the cold drawing room and took one unhurried look at the housekeeper showing her displeasure at not being greeted by one of the family in their home.
Her features finally settled into an expression of quiet triumph, the very image of a cat enjoying the helplessness of a cornered creature.
“Why? Lady Renae Trelawney.” She pitched the title to carry, to Finch at the door and the maid stopped on the stair. “Or is it not, any longer? One never knows quite what to call them afterward. How very altered your circumstances must be.”
“Circumstances alter, my lady. Mine have made me far more useful than they were, which more than alteration manages for most people is.”
“Useful.” Marwood turned the word as though it had a smell. “How brave of you to wear it aloud. I had the rumour a fortnight since and could not credit it, and so I came the twelve miles to see your circumstances with my own eyes. One owes an old acquaintance that much, surely. To come and look.”
“You have looked, my lady. I am as you find me. There is tea, if the looking has made you thirsty, though I warn you the good cups went to town some while ago, and never wrote.”
“She jests about the plate.” A small laugh, sounded perfectly placed. “You were always quick, Renae. Quick and proud and quite without the fortune to carry either safely. I told your poor mother as much. A girl so sharp wants gilding, I said, or she will cut the very hand that stoops to lift her.”
“My mother had little enough to gild me with, and spent it on books instead, for which I have not once stopped being grateful. A book keeps better company than a settlement, my lady. It does not leave the room when the money does.”
“And yet here you stand, with neither the books nor the settlement, in another woman’s drawing room, in a gown turned at the cuff.
” The glove came off, finger by finger, gathering the room’s held breath as it went.
“Pride is a poor fire, my dear. All light and no heat in it whatever. One cannot warm a single thing at pride, least of all a husband.”
“I am not in want of a husband, my lady. I am in want of wages, which pay more reliably and ask far less of a woman in the small hours.”
“No. I do not suppose a woman in your position can afford to be particular about either.” She smiled, and pitched the next for the door and the stair both.
“I shall say only this, as an old acquaintance, and a kindness. There are gentler routes to a second husband than the servants’ stair, my dear, if a woman is only willing to be a little clever about the climbing of it.
The duke’s heir is unattached, they tell me, and not blind, and a quiet house is a great keeper of secrets.
People do talk. I should so hate for them to talk of you the wrong way, when a little cleverness might have them talking the right one. ”
“I was clever about no end of things in my time, my lady.” The words came steady even as the floor of her tilted under them.
“I was never clever about people who took their pleasure in cruelty. It is the one gap in my education, and I have given up hoping to close it, since the tutors are so very plentiful and so very free with the lessons.”
A flash of what was almost respect crossed Lady Marwood’s face, and then she painted it over with the thing she had worn in. “Do give the family my regards. Tell them what a treasure they keep below their stairs.”
Renae held her face still through the glove and the pause and the soft laugh after it.
The rustle of the others pretending not to have heard did not crack it.
She walked Lady Marwood out to her carriage and stood bare-headed in the cold until the wheels had carried her through the gate and down the lane, and the holding spent every coin of composure she had laid by across a year.
She came back in by the side passage, where the linen was kept, because it stood empty and she needed one minute of empty more than she had needed anything in a month.
Thomas was in it. He had the look of someone who had waited a long while for his hour and just watched it roll up the drive behind a crest.
“Begging your pardon, ma’am.” The begging was nowhere in his face. “Only it does set a person thinking. Perhaps if you’d treated your own servants kinder when you had them, Providence wouldn’t have seen fit to make you one.”
The breath went clean out of her, for it was so exactly the wrong charge.
She had been kind to the edge of folly. She had carried her own dinner across to hungry housemaids in a house where she went to bed hungry herself, and here was her ruin laid at the door of a cruelty she had never once committed.
She had no defense ready. She had never dreamed she would have the need of one.
“On what cause, then.” His chin came up. “Since you’re so fond of a cause for a thing.”
“On the cause that a man may resent his housekeeper to his heart’s content and still do his work.
” She kept her hands to herself, and let no tears come where he might carry the news of them to the hall.
One breath, taken and made level, was the whole of what she allowed herself.
“You would sooner watch this house brought down than watch a woman you dislike set it on its feet. That is not a servant. That is a leak, and I have spent a month on my knees stopping leaks. You will be gone by morning, with your fortnight and without the character. Mr. Wells will see you to the door.”
He went, and the passage was empty again, finally and wholly empty, and the emptiness she had wanted all afternoon turned on her the moment it was hers.
She got as far as the shadowed angle by the old service stair, where no one ever went and no one would now.
Her legs folded her onto the bottom step without troubling to ask leave.
The composure she had carried since three o’clock went out of her all at once, as a long-held breath goes when the body at last insists on the truth of itself.
“I was kind,” she said into her two hands. The words came small and wrecked and absolutely certain. “I was always kind.”
The side door turned on its quiet hinge unheard.
The boots, the lane’s mud still drying on them, halted in the dark of the passage a yard short of the turn in the stair, and those too went unheard.
For the length of one long and undefended moment she had no notion that the man she could least afford to be seen by had come home three hours early and soft-footed, and had stopped there, and had heard her say it.