The Duke and the Lady's Secret (The Lantern House Ladies #1)

Chapter One The House Where Women Went Quietly

Miss Marianne Vale had always found comfort in accounts, for figures, unlike people, did not require coaxing into honesty.

They might be hidden badly, disguised clumsily, miscopied by a careless clerk, or arranged upon a page with the intention of deceiving anyone too hurried or too polite to look twice; but if one had patience enough, and a tolerable eye for the habits of falsehood, numbers would confess.

A lie in conversation might blush and retreat behind charm.

A lie in society might be dressed in silk, titled by courtesy, and escorted to dinner by three gentlemen who knew very well what it was and chose to call it honour.

But a lie in a ledger had a different character.

It had weight. It had position. It sat where it had been put and waited, with a peculiar sort of arrogance, for someone to notice that it did not belong.

Marianne noticed.

She noticed most things, though very few people noticed her noticing. It was one of the quiet arrangements upon which her life had been built.

On that chill March morning, while the sky beyond the upper windows of Lantern House was only beginning to pale from black to pewter, she sat at a small mahogany desk beneath the narrow study window and compared Mr Griggs’s coal account with the household book from the previous quarter.

The house was still half asleep around her.

Somewhere below stairs a scuttle struck stone with a muted clatter, and from the rear passage came the whispering tread of a maid who was trying not to wake the ladies in the front rooms. Beyond the glass, London had begun its daily argument with itself: distant wheels over damp cobbles, the cry of a milk seller turning into the square, the faint creak of harness, the occasional impatient knock of a gentleman’s cane upon a carriage step.

Within Lantern House, all was order, or as near to order as grief, scandal, reduced circumstances, bad nerves, unpaid annuities, and injured pride could be persuaded to come.

Marianne’s desk was arranged with the precision of a woman who could not command very much in the world and therefore commanded what she could.

On the left lay the current household accounts, tied with blue ribbon.

On the right were receipts awaiting entry.

A brass ruler, two sharpened pencils, one penknife, a sand shaker, three labelled keys, and a folded list of linens sat exactly where she had placed them the evening before.

Beside the inkstand was a neat pile of correspondence requiring Miss Helena Vane’s attention, though Marianne had already sorted it by urgency, temper, and likelihood of containing bad news.

The coal bill was bad news of the more ordinary sort, but bad news nonetheless.

She tapped one finger against the number written in Mr Griggs’s blunt hand.

Fourteen tons delivered since Christmas.

It was not impossible. Lantern House was tall, old, ill-fitted in parts, and inhabited by women who had been made cold in too many ways before coming to it; Lady Theodosia Vane, in life, had always said that a woman who had lost husband, fortune, home, reputation, or peace of mind ought not also be expected to lose the warmth from her feet.

The fires were kept generously as a rule. Yet the amount was wrong.

Not wildly wrong. That would have been vulgar.

It was wrong by just enough to pass where a larger theft might have failed.

Marianne turned back three pages in the household book, then six, then reached for the small slate on which she made her first calculations.

Coal delivered to the front cellar. Coal delivered to the kitchen stores.

Coal paid for after the frost in January.

Coal promised but delayed during the fog.

She subtracted what had been carried up to the third floor for Mrs Lennox, who insisted she could not sleep unless the grate was kept glowing until midnight, and added the extra ordered for the laundry when the boiler flue had smoked and required two days’ repair.

Even allowing for all of that, Mr Griggs had charged Lantern House for a quantity that had not crossed its threshold.

Marianne marked the figure with a small, exact cross.

It was not the first time a tradesman had supposed a house of women would be grateful enough for service to be inattentive to arithmetic.

She turned the page and made a note in her tidy hand: Mr Griggs to be informed that thirteen tons, four hundredweight and no more, will be settled. Should he dispute the matter, request dated chits from driver.

She had just sanded the ink when the door opened without the formality of a knock.

“Miss Vale, you are already at work.”

Mrs Finch, the housekeeper, stood upon the threshold with a shawl pinned over her black gown and the expression of a woman who had entered intending to scold and found the offence more advanced than expected.

Mrs Finch had been with Lady Theodosia for twenty-three years and possessed, in consequence, a moral authority that neither reduced income nor changing fashions had managed to diminish.

Her cap was severe, her keys considerable, and her opinions on late suppers, weak tea, damp boots, and young women who refused broth were not to be opposed lightly.

Marianne looked up from the accounts. “Good morning, Mrs Finch.”

“It is not yet seven.”

“No.”

“And you were at that desk when I locked the lower passage last night.”

“I was at a different desk then.”

Mrs Finch’s mouth tightened in a way that suggested she was not prepared to admire the distinction. “That is not an improvement.”

Marianne closed Mr Griggs’s bill and placed it beneath the ruler. “I slept.”

“How long?”

“Enough to remember that Mr Griggs has overcharged us by twelve shillings and eightpence.”

“Mr Griggs is a thief in a brown coat,” Mrs Finch said, with satisfaction. “I have said so these five years.”

“He is a thief in a brown coat who has become overconfident.”

“That is worse.”

“It is usually more useful. Overconfidence leaves marks.”

Mrs Finch came farther into the room and set down the tray she carried. It held a cup of tea, a heel of bread spread with butter, and one boiled egg in a little china cup painted with violets. She had made the offering look accidental, which was her preferred manner of affection.

Marianne regarded it.

Mrs Finch regarded Marianne.

“I have eaten,” Marianne said.

“Not in my kitchen, you have not.”

“I had a biscuit.”

“When?”

Marianne paused, for she respected Mrs Finch too much to lie badly. “Yesterday.”

Mrs Finch gave a short nod, as though the case had been proved before an unimpeachable court. “Then you may have this.”

Marianne was spared answering by the sound of a bell below.

Not the front bell, with its deep, dignified note, but the smaller one connected to the side entrance.

It rang once, hesitated, and rang again in a manner Marianne had come to know.

Not a delivery. Not a caller. Someone uncertain whether they had the right to enter.

Mrs Finch heard it too. Some softness passed across her face and was gone. “That will be the young person from Chelsea.”

“The one Mrs Alderley wrote about?”

“If her aunt allowed her to come. And if the coachman did not turn coward and take her back again.”

Marianne set down her pen. “I will come.”

“You will drink your tea.”

“The tea will forgive me.”

“Tea is more forgiving than I am.”

But Mrs Finch was already lifting the tray again, for all her scolding, and Marianne followed her down the narrow back stair rather than the broader front one.

The back stair turned tightly between walls hung with plain engravings and old framed prayers whose gilt had rubbed thin at the corners.

Lantern House had a handsome front, a respectable hall, a drawing room capable of receiving even those ladies who wished to be charitable without being contaminated by usefulness, and a dining room where the silver was old enough to hide how little of it remained.

Yet much of the house’s true life took place in passages, side rooms, half-landings, and locked cupboards: the geography of survival.

From the street, Lantern House appeared almost dull.

It was tall, narrow, and elegant in a manner fifteen years behind the fashion, its brick darkened by soot and weather, its fanlight clean, its brass knocker polished each morning to a shine that suggested nothing inside had ever been troubled.

It stood on the edge of a quiet Mayfair square where the trees were still bare, their black branches scratching delicately at the colourless sky.

There was nothing about it to alarm a passer-by.

A lady of stern morals might call there with a basket of old gowns.

A solicitor might deliver papers concerning annuities.

A clergyman’s widow might take a room for a month and remain for three years.

A family carriage might draw up in the dusk, a veiled woman might be handed down by a brother who looked neither left nor right, and the world would not trouble itself to inquire why she did not come out again for several weeks.

That was Lantern House’s great virtue.

Respectability was its first lock.

Silence was its second.

Mrs Finch went ahead to the side entrance, where Bess, the youngest maid, stood with her hand still on the bolt and her eyes very round.

On the threshold, half within and half without, stood a girl of perhaps nineteen.

She wore a travelling cloak of good cloth that had been brushed carefully but could not hide its age.

One glove was split across the thumb. Her bonnet had once been expensive; now its ribbon had been turned to conceal a stain.

She had the stiff, stunned look of someone who had kept herself upright through pride alone and was not certain whether kindness would make her collapse.

Behind her, a hackney coach waited in the lane. The driver had already begun to complain about standing.