Chapter Three
The Duke of Marcombe rose before his household, as he did every morning, and came down to a house that was not as he had left it.
The fires were lit in rooms no one would use before noon.
The hall was swept and the great staircase gleamed.
The breakfast things stood laid and warming a full hour before the family kept.
Three days ago, the place had begun to come apart at the seams. Mrs Pike had gone down at last under a weight she had carried too long; the house had run for a day and a night like a clock with its mainspring out; and Lucian had written three close pages of instruction, left them where the upper servants would be sure to find them, and braced himself for a week of things done badly or not done at all.
The house was in order. It was not his order. That was the thing that stopped him on the stairs.
He found a housemaid on her knees at the morning-room grate.
“Who gave the day’s orders?”
She scrambled up so fast she upset the blacking.
“Miss Vane, Your Grace. The lady who came Thursday, for her ladyship. She’s had us all going since five; black the grates, turn out the morning room, count over the linen…
and she has Mrs Pike’s keys, Your Grace, all of them, and I don’t…
that is, I’m sure it’s not my place to…” The girl heard herself and stopped, scarlet to the ears. “Begging your pardon.”
He told her to get on, and went to find Miss Vane.
He went down to the housekeeper’s room himself, which he had not done in years.
She was at the table with the household books open before her and Mrs Pike’s keys laid out in a row, sorted by some logic of her own, writing in a fair, quick hand.
She did not start when his shadow fell across the door.
She finished her line, set the pen in the standish, and rose.
“Your Grace.”
“You have my housekeeper’s keys.”
“I have. She could not keep them and her bed both, and the house could not run without them.” She did not add an apology, which was the first thing he noticed, because people apologised to him; it was one of the duller facts of his life. “I will give them up the hour she wants them back.”
“They tell me you have been giving orders in my house since yesterday.”
Something moved in her face, not quite a flush and not quite temper: the look of a tired woman weighing whether a thing was worth the saying. She decided that it was.
“Someone had to, Your Grace.” Her voice was level, but there was an edge beneath it, fine as a wire drawn tight.
“Your housekeeper is on her back. Your steward is buried to the eyes in the Michaelmas audit. There is a rent dinner inside a fortnight, and a young lady to bring out before the whole county. Yesterday, Lady Amabel rang her bell for the better part of an hour, and not one of forty servants would go up to her, because going up to the family was Mrs Pike’s office, and Mrs Pike had been carried to her bed.
So I went up. And this morning I took the keys, because a great house cannot be run on a sick woman’s habits and a busy man’s good intentions.
” She stopped. He watched her hear her own voice, and rein it in.
“I beg your pardon. I have been awake a long time.”
He was not, as a general rule, contradicted in his own house. He found that he did not mind it nearly so much as he ought.
“You went up to my sister,” he said.
“Someone had to.” She said it more quietly the second time, but she did not look away from him as she said it, and that, the not looking away, was a thing he was even less used to than the contradiction.
He looked at her then, properly. She was perhaps thirty, in a plain grey gown, with the look of a woman who had been useful to a great many people for a very long time and had slept too little doing it.
There was ink dried along the edge of her hand.
She had asked him for nothing in the whole of the exchange: not his thanks, not his leave, not reassurance that she had done rightly in taking what she had taken.
That, more than the keys, was the thing he could not put down.
“You found my instructions,” he said.
“In the margin of the cellar book. I followed them where they still served. Some had been overtaken. There was a standing note about airing the green room for a guest at Michaelmas, but the guest wrote a week since to cry off; there seemed no sense in preparing the room, so I did not.”
He had not known the guest had cried off.
The note had been sitting there for a fortnight, one of a hundred small reminders he set down and expected the house to obey, trusting the margins of his books to hold what he could not be troubled to say aloud to a living face.
It was a strange thing, to have what he had put in a margin handed back to him by a person.
She had crossed to the wall while she spoke—there was a small row of bells here too, below stairs—and laid her hand under one near the end, its wire slack, the bell above it dead and dusty on its spring.
“This one does not answer,” she said. “The nursery bell. The wire has gone. No one rings it now, I daresay, but it ought to be put right.”
“It has been broken a long time,” Lucian said.
“I can see that it has.”
He knew the bell. He had known it was broken since before his father died; the last nurse had complained of it, and nothing had come of the complaint.
He had meant ever since, in the way of the hundred small things a busy man means to do and never does, to have it seen to.
It had never once risen to the top of any list. That a stranger should have found it in a single morning, and minded it, sat oddly with him.
“Have the man come,” he said.
“There is one thing more, while you are here. Mrs Pike’s keys do not open the plate, and I shall want the plate for the rent dinner. There is no doing without it before a baronet.”
He carried, as his father had before him, a ring of keys at his belt that he never used: keys to rooms he did not enter and presses he did not open, kept because a duke kept them, the way he kept a good many things whose use had gone out of them years since.
He took the ring off, turned it over in his palm, and had to try two before he found the one she wanted.
He did not, as a rule, know his own keys.
He gave it to her. Her fingers closed over it without brushing his, and she thanked him with a single nod, as one steward to another, and turned back to her books.
He did not go at once.
“The rent dinner,” he said. “You mean to manage it yourself?”
“Unless you would rather it managed you, Your Grace.” She did not look up from the column she was adding. Then she did look up, briefly. “Forgive me. I did tell you I had been awake a long time.”
“You have told me twice.”
“Then it bears the telling, for I keep proving it.” And there, the smallest thing, gone almost before he had seen it: the corner of her mouth moved, dry and tired and wholly without deference, as if she had caught herself being amused in this grave cold house and was not at all sure she was permitted to be.
He did not say amusing things, nor have them said to him.
His household was grave with him because he was grave with it; gravity went round the house like a second livery.
He could not remember when anyone in his service had last spoken to him as though he were someone who might be answered back, rather than a duke who must be carefully steered.
“See that the dinner does not manage you either,” he said. “You will be of no use to my sister laid flat beside Mrs Pike.”
It was as near to a kindness as he came, in those days, and it came out stiffer than he had meant it, as such things always came out of him. She looked up properly at that, and something in her face closed as quickly as it had opened, the way a hand closes over a coin.
“I am never of any use laid flat,” she said. “I will take care to stay upright. Was there anything further, Your Grace?”
There was not. He had again been dismissed, in his own housekeeper’s room, by a woman he had engaged through his aunt by way of a letter, and he was halfway up the stairs before it came to him that he was not, in point of fact, displeased.
His aunt was down by noon, in the small sitting room she kept off the south front, with the embroidery she never finished and the fire built higher than anyone else in the house could bear.
Lady Seraphina had been widowed before Lucian came into the title, and had stayed on to keep house for a young duke who had not the first notion how.
By slow degrees, she had become the one person at Marcombe who spoke to him as a nephew and not as an institution.
“You have met Miss Vane,” she said, before he had so much as sat down.
“She has my housekeeper’s keys, my sister’s confidence, and the running of my house, and she informed me this morning that a great house cannot be kept on a sick woman’s habits and a busy man’s good intentions.” He sat. “She had been awake since five o’clock when she said it.”
Seraphina’s mouth curved over her work. “And so you came straight up to me to complain of her.”
“I came to ask where you found her.”
“In a letter. From a Mr Silas Vane, of Wrenfield, in Devonshire, recommending his own sister: a gentleman’s daughter who had kept his house since their mother died, and who could, he assured me, turn her hand to anything that wanted running.
” She set a stitch. “I did not credit a word of it. A brother who praises a sister so very warmly to a stranger generally wants her settled comfortably under some roof other than his own.” She looked up.
“I find, this once, that he told the truth and undersold it. She sat on the edge of Amabel’s bed last night and talked the girl to sleep.
Amabel has asked for her twice this morning.
She has not asked for a living soul in above a twelvemonth. ”
“She seems competent,” Lucian said.
“That she is.” Seraphina threaded her needle against the light.
“I cannot manage the dinner, the launch, and a sickroom all at once, Lucian. Not as I am now. It is a mercy she came. You would have managed all three by writing a memorandum to everyone concerned and shutting your study door upon the result.”
“The house was in disorder. I saw it put right.”
“You went down to the housekeeper’s room to see it put right. Yourself.” She did not look up from the needle. “You have not set foot below stairs in this house, to my certain knowledge, since the day your father was carried out of it.”
“The circumstances required it.”
“So I gather.”
She returned to her stitching.
He went back to his study and his correspondence, and answered his letters one after another in his small, even hand, and put the matter of Miss Vane where he put everything that unsettled him to no clear purpose: away, beneath the day’s work, where it need not be looked at.
He was glad of her. It was a plain, practical gladness, the sort a man feels for a good steward, or for a dry summer at haymaking, and he gave it no more thought than that.
Or meant to. He rode out after noon to the home farm with Felton, and twice before they had cleared the avenue he found that his mind had gone back of its own accord to the housekeeper’s room, to a woman with ink on her hand who had not once looked away from him; and twice he called it firmly back to the matter in hand, and did not, on either occasion, stop to ask what it had been doing there.