The Duke's Overlooked Lady (Inconvenient Courtships #2)

Chapter One

“Mr Vane gave me his word, miss. His word as a gentleman.”

Mr Hollis stood in the back passage at Wrenfield with his hat crushed in both hands and his account book held flat against his chest like a writ. He had ridden the eleven miles from Tavistock to say it, and by the set of his jaw he meant to say it twice.

“I know he did,” Elowen said. “And I am ashamed of it on his behalf, because my brother’s word has not been worth the breath that carries it since Easter, and you have known that longer than I have liked to.”

It stopped him where he stood. People came to the door at Wrenfield braced against excuses, and an excuse was a thing a man could argue with. Agreement left him nowhere to put his feet.

“I’d not say that, miss,” he managed. “Not of a gentleman.”

“You needn’t. I have said it for you.” She drew the coins from her own pocket, where she had counted them out an hour since against just this knock. “Eight pounds today, into your hand. The rest at Michaelmas, and my name on the note in place of my brother’s.”

“Your name.”

“Mine pays. His promises.” She put the money into his palm and closed his fingers over it, because he was the sort who would stand counting it twice on the step and shame them both. “There. Now you have ridden eleven miles for something better than a gentleman’s word.”

He looked at the coins, and at her, and some of the starch went out of him. “It’s a hard thing, miss. Coming to a house and finding only the lady to pay a man.”

“Yes,” she said. “It generally is.”

By the time she had walked him to the yard and admired the new mare he could not afford, the morning was half gone, and three more of her brother’s small disasters were waiting for her in the house.

Wrenfield had been a comfortable house once.

There were paler squares on the wall of the long gallery where the good paintings had hung before they were quietly sold, and the second carriage had gone the same way, and half the stable, and three of the maids.

What was left ran on Elowen, and on a handful of servants who stayed less for their late-paid wages than for her, who saw that they were paid at all.

She did the accounts in the morning room, which was where she did her best thinking.

The household ledger was a patient book; she kept it in a small upright hand, and in the margins she kept everything that would not go in the columns: which child had the croup and wanted horehound, whose mother was failing, the price of beeswax at three chandlers so she might always buy of the cheapest. She turned to September, and a sprig of heartsease she had pressed there in June and forgotten slipped loose against the seam, flat and brown, the purple gone out of it.

She smoothed it with her thumb, turned the page down over it, and went on adding the butcher’s column.

Susan brought the tea at eleven. Elowen poured a cup for Cook, who was at war with the fish, and one for Silas, who was not yet up, and set her own at her elbow and let it go cold there, as she did most mornings, because there was always something nearer her hand than her own cup.

Susan did not go away. She stood turning the corner of her apron.

“Begging pardon, miss. Cook wants to know whether we are to use the good cloth tonight, only the laundry is not dry. And Mr Vane’s man says he will want his blue coat, and it is at the tailor’s still, for the mending has not been paid. ”

“The second-best cloth, pressed, and set the epergne in the middle of it so no one looks at the cloth. And tell Mr Vane’s man the blue coat comes home Friday, the grey will do for tonight, and he looks the better in the grey besides.” Susan bobbed and turned. “Susan. Have you eaten?”

The girl stopped, surprised. “Miss?”

“You have been on your feet since five. Go down and eat something before the rush of the dinner. The house will not fall in the quarter hour.”

Susan went with the look of a girl handed a small thing she had not expected to be given.

The harder business of the morning went by the name of Mrs Pengelly, whom Silas had cut dead at the lending library earlier that week.

He had meant nothing by it; Silas meant nothing by anything.

But Mrs Pengelly was old and proud and could make the winter assemblies very cold for a family that could not afford the cold.

So Elowen wrote three warm lines laying the whole misunderstanding at the door of her brother’s wretched eyesight, enclosed a pot of the quince cheese the old woman had once admired, and signed it with her love.

By Friday, Mrs Pengelly would be telling the parish what a devoted creature Miss Vane was, and what a pity it was she had never married.

There was a dinner that night besides: Silas’s doing, as awkward things so often were.

He had invited the new rector a fortnight ago, and Sir John Heale on Sunday, with no memory of the first, so that a quiet four had become a table of seven, with a baronet at the foot of it, on the very evening the fish had come up from the coast already turning.

Elowen went down to the kitchen.

“I give my notice,” said Cook, before she was through the door. “I give it this very hour. Seven to dinner, and a fish that smells of the churchyard, and Mr Vane never a word to me till the butcher’s boy let it out—”

“You will not give your notice,” Elowen said, “because if you do, I shall have to cook the dinner myself, and you have eaten my cooking.”

A pause. Cook’s mouth twitched against her will. “The fish is off.”

“Then we shall not give them the fish. We shall give them the ham, and the partridges meant for tomorrow, and I will make up a sauce in the stillroom sharp enough that Sir John Heale will praise it to the skies and never once suspect he is eating yesterday instead of today.” She was already reaching for her apron.

“Send the boy to the home farm for cream. And, Cook, yesterday’s pastry was the best in the county.

I meant to say so this morning, and the day ran off with me. ”

Cook, mollified and a little teary, sent the boy.

The stillroom was the one room at Wrenfield that was wholly Elowen’s: north-cold, its rafters hung with drying lavender and tansy, its shelves crowded with tinctures in labelled jars.

She made the sauce. Then she stood a moment in the green quiet of it, longer than the sauce required, because it was the only quiet she was likely to be given that day.

She was wiping down the slate when Silas found her, freshly shaved and smelling of his good cologne, a glass of Madeira in either hand.

“There you are. I have hunted the whole house for you.”

He had not, she observed, thought to hunt in the stillroom, where she might be found six mornings in seven. “You have found me now.”

He gave her a glass. She set it on the slate, untasted, beside everything else she had been handed that day, and waited, because Silas with wine at five in the afternoon and that bright, coaxing look about him was Silas with something to ask.

“You are a treasure, El.” He said it as he always said it, warmly, and a little too soon. “I do not know how the house will go on without you for the autumn.”

The word went through her like a draught from an opened door. “Without me?”

“It is the most splendid thing.” He was pacing now, pleased with himself, telling it as a story in which he came off clever.

Lady Seraphina Wycliffe—the Duke of Marcombe’s own aunt, El, the Duke’s aunt—wanted a sensible woman of good family for the season; the great house was in want of a steady hand; there was a young sister to bring out.

Silas had heard the whole of it over Sir John’s port, written back that very night, and recommended his own dear sister.

He had, in point of fact, already accepted.

“You have accepted,” Elowen said.

“For you! There is not a connection in the West Country to touch it. It will be the making of—”

“You have accepted.” She heard her own voice come out harder than she had allowed it to do in years, and could not call it back. “You have lent me out for the autumn, Silas, the way you would lend a man a book, and come to tell me of it with wine in your hand, and call it a gift.”

He stopped. He was not used to her sharp. No one was. “El—”

“Did you think to ask me?” The question escaped before she could hold it. “Once? Between the port at Sir John’s and the letter that same night, did it cross your mind to come home and say, Elowen, here is a thing; should you like it?”

For a moment, he only looked at her, the way a man looks at a chair that has spoken. Then, because his world was a place where his sister’s anger was passing weather that always cleared, he smiled and came to kiss her cheek, fond and careless and warm.

“But you would have said yes. You always say yes. You would no more let a great house run aground for want of you than you would let this one.” He drank his Madeira, and then hers, since she had not touched it.

“You are the best of all women, and I shall tell the county so. Her ladyship looks for you Thursday.”

Thursday was three days off.

That night she gave them their dinner. She gave it from the foot of the table and from the doorway and from the cold passage to the kitchen, in the dozen small places where a dinner is truly made, while at the head of it Silas was charming and easy, and took the credit a host takes for a feast he has not lifted a finger to provide.

“My compliments to your cook, Vane,” said Sir John Heale, who had taken three helpings of the rescued partridge. “That sauce. I have not had its like since I dined with the lord lieutenant.”

“We do tolerably well at Wrenfield,” said Silas, who could not have named the sauce.

“You do a deal better than tolerably.” Sir John turned down the table. “And you keep the house for him, Miss Vane? He is a fortunate fellow. A man wants a good sister the way he wants a good road: never thinks of her at all until he finds himself without one.”

“Then I hope my brother keeps to the turnpike, Sir John,” said Elowen, “and is spared the discovery.”

Sir John laughed until his chair creaked, and the rector’s wife said, not for the first time nor the last, what a comfort Miss Vane must be to dear Mr Vane, and no one at the bright table but Elowen knew that the partridge had been meant for tomorrow’s dinner, or that the cream had come four miles at a gallop in a boy’s hot hands.

She kept the talk turning, steered Sir John off politics before the port, watched the candles burn to their sockets, and was thanked, warmly and generally, for nothing anyone could have named.

She packed afterwards, when the house had finally gone quiet.

It did not take long. A useful woman’s wardrobe runs to the serviceable, and hers was serviceable indeed: grey and brown and one good blue for Sundays, nothing that would give itself airs in a duke’s house.

She folded it into the trunk, and her workbox after it, and the stoppered bottles from the stillroom she could not do without, and last of all the household ledger, because Silas would lose his place in it inside the week.

Then, because there was no one to see, she took the pressed heartsease from the September page and tucked it into the bodice of her travelling dress, over her heart, where it weighed nothing and no one would think to look for it.

She did not let herself wonder what Marcombe would be like.

Wondering was only wanting with its manners on, and she had given up wanting the way one gives up any habit that costs more than it returns.

But she stood a moment at the cold window with the candle in her hand, looking east towards a house she had never seen, had not chosen, and would be sent home from the moment she was no longer wanted in it.

And she caught herself thinking the one thing she had no business thinking: that at Marcombe, at least, no one yet knew to call her a treasure. For a month, a season, however long they kept her, she would be a stranger in a house full of strangers: owing nothing, owed nothing, unwritten.

A stranger, she thought, blowing out the candle, might turn out to be anything at all.