Chapter One #3
“She is not to be sent away,” he said. He had not come past the threshold, and his eyes had gone to the dark beneath the pianoforte, where the pale gaze now tracked him in Elizabeth’s place. “She stays the fortnight, if Iris will have her.”
“Gavin, the woman is plainly—”
“The terms are good ones. Anstruther has them set down fair.” He brought his look back to Elizabeth, full and level, and the weight of the graveside came with it. “I would be glad of your service in this house, Mrs Mercer. It has not been an easy house to keep.”
There it stood, the very thing she had come north to earn, held out before she had done a single hour’s work to deserve the having of it. She set her feet square on the cold floor.
“And what are the terms, Your Grace, that I should not be told them before I am thanked for accepting them?”
“Forty pounds a year. A room of your own, with the fire kept lit through the night. A half day on Sundays, and the use of the library on the days the family does not require it.”
“That is a generous wage for a fortnight’s trial.”
“It is the wage for the post,” said Gavin evenly.
“Posts of this kind do not pay forty pounds and keep a night fire, Your Grace. Not for a governess with no people and a dead man’s debts behind her.
They pay eighteen and a tallow candle, and they teach her to be grateful for the candle.
” Elizabeth did not move so much as a step towards the offer.
“A woman who has weighed sugar against the length of a winter learns to read a price the way you read a map. So I will ask plainly. What does forty pounds and a night fire want of me that eighteen and a candle would not?”
A muscle shifted at the corner of his jaw and was still again before she could put a name to what had moved it.
Mrs Anstruther’s ledger slid open against her chest, and she caught it without looking down.
Lady Matilda sat back into her chair more slowly than she had risen, and the way she watched Elizabeth had changed, as if a name she had meant to cross off a list had risen and walked to the top of it instead.
“It wants nothing of you the work does not,” Gavin said. “There is a character besides the wage. When you leave this house, whatever the reason for your leaving, you go with one in my own hand that will open any respectable door in England to you.”
“Whatever the reason?”
“Whatever the reason.”
It was a great deal too much. She had stood in too many camps to take generosity laid on with a trowel for anything but the face of an account whose reverse she had not yet been shown.
“Why?” she said.
He did not answer her. The quiet stretched, and went on stretching, until the silence became the whole of his reply. She had no figure to set against it yet, only the shape of a debt she had not been allowed to see.
A small, warm hand slid into hers.
Iris had come out from under the piano without a sound, the way a child learns to move about a house where noise is counted a fault.
She pressed close to Elizabeth’s side, her thin fingers wound through the mend in the glove, and kept her eyes on the carpet, giving no one in the room her face.
She had made her choice without a word, and whatever it cost her, she was not going to let any of them watch her pay it.
The breath went out of Lady Matilda all at once. “The fortnight, then,” she said, and the edge had gone from her voice somewhere down on the floor with the rest of them. “We shall see how the fortnight goes.”
“I have not yet said that I will take it,” Elizabeth said.
“You have a child fastened to your hand, Mrs Mercer, a duke who will not be moved, and nowhere else in England that will so much as dine you.” Lady Matilda’s mouth did something that, in a warmer woman, might have grown into a smile. “I think you will take it.”
“I think I will.” Elizabeth looked down at the small fingers laced through her glove, and then at the man in the doorway who had not crossed it.
“On the understanding that I asked the terms before I was thanked. I will not be commanded into gratitude, Your Grace. Not even for forty pounds and a night fire. Gratitude given on command is the one debt a poor woman can never afford, because it never once comes off the books.”
“Then it is not commanded,” Gavin said. “Only asked of you.”
“Asked, I can manage,” she said, and something in her eased.
He inclined his head and went back through the servants’ door, and the going was a degree too quick for a duke at his ease.
She could not have said, by the time the latch caught, whether what he left in the air behind him was the relief of a man reprieved or the caution of a man who had just stepped around something on the floor.
Elizabeth stood in the over-warm room with a silent child’s fingers locked through the seam of her glove, and three winters of campaign told her plainly enough what manner of place she had walked into.
Ravensmere wore carpets and good fires and called itself a house.
She had crossed enough hard ground to know a field of battle when she was standing in the middle of one, whatever it had been furnished to resemble.