Chapter Two
“Your Grace, regarding the bakery order from Millcombe.”
Mrs. Croft stood in the doorway of his study with her hands folded and her expression arranged into the careful neutrality she wore when she had opinions and was waiting for permission to deploy them.
Thomas had watched her arrive at that face perhaps three hundred times in four years, and it had never once meant that she lacked an answer to her own question.
He looked up from the desk. The morning post sat untouched at his elbow, and the coffee she had brought an hour ago had gone cold beside it, because he had not remembered it was there. He had not remembered much of anything since yesterday afternoon.
“You have come to ask whether I wish to continue with Rennet’s,” he said.
“I have come to confirm it, Your Grace, which is a different errand and a shorter one.” She stepped into the room with the confidence of a woman who regarded entering without invitation as less a breach of protocol than a professional requirement.
“Mrs. Vale reports the marmalade is excellent. Better than the Cheltenham supplier and at half the cost, and the muffins were very fine. The walnut bread she pronounced competent this morning, which from Mrs. Vale is the equivalent of a standing ovation in a full theatre.”
“Then there is little to confirm.”
“There is the matter of how the young woman left us.” Mrs. Croft let that settle, the way she let most things settle, by saying nothing further and allowing the silence to do her work.
“Miss Rennet burned her hand. Not badly, though the mark will take a few days. She left her cloak on the kitchen peg, and she left, if I may speak plainly, in considerable distress. She believed she had lost the order before she was through the door, and I could not reassure her quickly enough to prevent it. Whitlock says she very nearly ran across the courtyard.”
Thomas looked at the burned shawl, folded on the corner of the desk beside a single banana muffin he had not eaten. He had carried both upstairs the previous afternoon and set them there and had not moved them since.
“She apologised to me for the smell,” he said.
“She apologised to me for your boot, the floor, and I believe the tray, though the tray was entirely Bess’s doing for leaving it near the hearth.
” Mrs. Croft’s mouth performed a small, complicated movement.
“She is the only person in my memory to catch fire in this kitchen and treat it chiefly as an inconvenience she had caused other people.”
“She crossed the courtyard afterward as though nothing had happened to her at all,” he said. “Quickly, with the empty basket, the way a person walks when running would cost them more pride than the walking already does. She did not look back once.”
“And you were watching to see whether she would,” Mrs. Croft observed, not unkindly, and then was tactful enough to pretend she had said nothing of the sort.
“Let the quantity be doubled.” he said.
Mrs. Croft’s quill stopped above her little book. “Double it, Your Grace?”
“Mrs. Vale will find a use for what the household cannot eat. Double it.”
“I daresay she will.” She made the note without enquiring why the Duke of Aldermere had developed an appetite for twice as many banana muffins as any reasonable house could consume, which Thomas counted among the chief virtues of employing a woman who had been at her post since before his father had passed on.
“I will tell you honestly, Your Grace, that I am greatly pleased to write it. The kitchen was a different room while she stood in it. Whitlock laughed twice. Mrs. Vale’s shoulders came down from about her ears, where they have lived since Michaelmas.
I have not heard that kitchen make those sounds in a very long while, and I had grown used to its quieter version. ”
“It has been a long while,” Thomas agreed.
“It has been a very long while, Your Grace, and you will forgive me for keeping the count when no one asked me to.” She held his gaze a moment longer than professional curiosity required.
“It does the house no harm to be reminded what it used to sound like, and it does you rather less harm than you appear to believe.”
He did not answer that, because answering it honestly would have required him to say that he had stood in the doorway holding a stranger’s scorched shawl and understood that something had changed and could not be unchanged, and he had not said a sentence of that length aloud, on a matter that touched him, in longer than he cared to count.
“I should like to offer Miss Rennet a position,” he said instead.
The sentence arrived before he had entirely finished building it, which was alarming, because building sentences before speaking them was the whole of his discipline and had been since the afternoon a single careless word had cost more than he had ever imagined a word could cost.
Mrs. Croft set her quill down altogether.
“A position, Your Grace.” She approached the words with the care of a woman who could see several implications arriving at once and wished to manage their entry.
“Forgive me. I want to be certain I understand what is being offered, and to whom, and on what terms, before I commit any of it to a letter that her parents will read more than once.”
“An apprenticeship. Under Mrs. Vale. Full wages, respectable hours, proper supervision.” He paused, aware that he was speaking more in one morning than he had spoken in any single conversation since Christmas, and conscious of her own awareness, and that they were both mutually resolved to pass it over in silence.
“She has skill. Mrs. Vale said the marmalade was excellent.”
“Mrs. Vale said it was competent, Your Grace, and I have just told you what that means in her language, so we are agreed it amounts to the same thing.” A momentary change passed across her countenance but was immediately checked. “May I ask you a question that is not entirely my place to ask?”
“You will ask it regardless.”
“I will, in time, so we may as well save the morning.” She folded her hands again.
“When you say she has skill, and when you double an order no household can finish, and when a burned shawl sits on your desk a full day after the fire that made it, am I writing to her parents about a baker’s daughter, or about something you have not yet found the words for? ”
Thomas was quiet for a moment that lasted slightly longer than he intended.
“You are writing to them about an apprenticeship,” he said. “Mr. and Mrs. William Rennet. Explain the terms. Make it clear the offer is an opportunity and not an obligation, and that the family’s standing at the bakery will not suffer in the smallest degree if they decline.”
“And if I think the answer to my question is the second one?”
“Then you will keep that opinion, as you keep so many, in the book in your apron and not in the letter.”
“As you wish, Your Grace.” She did not look remotely persuaded, which he had expected. “Shall I return the cloak with the letter?”
“Return it with the letter.”
She made the note, and then she did not leave, which was unusual, because Mrs. Croft left rooms with the same economy she did everything else.
She stood holding her little book, and her gaze drifted to the shawl, and her voice when it came was gentler than her housekeeping voice and older than her years of service.
“You have not offered anyone a place in this house on your own word since Master Henry’s demise,” she said. “I mean no impertinence by saying it. I only think someone ought to say it aloud, so that you are not the only one in the room who has noticed.”
The name landed in the quiet and sat there. Thomas let it.
“You were here,” he said. It was not quite a question.
“I was here. I dressed the hall in black and I put away his coats, and I have been careful ever since not to say his name on a morning when it might do you an injury.” She hesitated, a thing she rarely permitted herself. “Is this such a morning?”
“It is not, and you may say his name without fearing what it will do to me today.” He turned the blackened edge of the shawl between his fingers. “Say the rest of it, since you have plainly been carrying it as long as I have.”
“It was a horse, in the end,” Mrs. Croft said slowly, watching him as a person watches a step they are not sure will hold their weight. “A foolish quarrel about a horse, the sort of thing that should never cost a family anything at all, and I have never understood how it cost this one so much.”
“It was not the horse.”
“No, Your Grace. I did not think it was.”
“I called him a coward.” He said it without inflection, the way a man reads aloud a figure from a ledger.
“Over something trivial that I can no longer even reconstruct. Henry, who rode faster than I ever did and laughed louder and forgave more easily than any man I have known. I called him a coward because I was angry, and he looked at me as though he were revising his understanding of the world to make room for it, and he was on a horse and out of the yard within the hour.”
Mrs. Croft had gone very still.
“The lane by Merton’s farm,” she said quietly. “We were told the horse threw him.”
“I found him on the verge.” Thomas’s voice did not rise and did not break, and its very composure was the most distressing circumstance in the room.
“His leg at an angle that did not belong to anatomy, and his breathing already gone shallow. He said my name, and only my name, Mrs. Croft. There was no forgiveness in it that I could hear, and I have spent four years wishing there had been blame in it instead, so that I might at least have been answered. He said it once, and I held him and said everything I should have said in the yard, and none of it reached him, because there was no longer anyone there to reach. I was talking to myself in a field.”