Chapter Two #3
“The first letter enquired after my health, and I took it for idleness too. The second observed the expense of maintaining Aldermere alone and suggested, very gently, that I might consider the burden of carrying it without anyone beside me.” He turned the drawer’s key once between his fingers and did not open it.
“This third speaks of matrimony outright. A man does not move from my health to my matrimony in three letters unless something has changed in his own affairs.”
“His patience, perhaps,” she offered.
“His patience, or his creditors, or both together. I incline toward both.” He let the key rest. “The progression is the whole of the message, Mrs. Croft. A subtler man would have buried it. Hubert has never been a subtle man, and men who are not subtle leave a trail behind them whether they mean to or not.”
Mrs. Croft absorbed this with the expression of a woman recalculating a household she had thought she understood. “Then you fear him.”
“I do not fear him. The title is secure whatever he desires, and he is fully aware of it.” He set his hand flat on the ledger above the drawer.
“What I understand is that a man who has borrowed against a future that is not his does not wait quietly when that future begins to shift under him. He acts. His actions are shaped by desperation, and desperate men have a gift for making things unpleasant for everyone who stands near them.”
“And a matrimony would shift it,” she said slowly.
“A matrimony would shift it. A child would end it.” Thomas looked at the burned shawl, and then at the muffin, and then away from both.
“Until yesterday I had not considered either prospect with any seriousness, because considering them meant imagining a life that held another person in it, and I have not been able to imagine that life without hearing my own voice saying a thing I could not take back.”
Mrs. Croft was quiet for a long moment, and when she spoke her voice had lost its briskness entirely.
“And yesterday a young woman set her shawl alight in your kitchen and apologised to your boot,” she said, “and you found you could imagine it after all.”
He did not answer, and she did not require him to.
“I shall write both letters, Your Grace,” she said, “and I shall say nothing of either to anyone, and I shall be glad of the first and watchful of the second. That is the most a housekeeper can offer, but I find I mean all of it.”
When she had gone he opened the bottom drawer and placed the shawl inside and closed it.
Then he opened it again, because putting it away had felt too much like losing her, and he was not yet prepared to lose a woman he had not yet found the words to keep.
The banana muffin sat untouched beside the cold coffee, the last material proof that she had stood in this house, and he left it where it was and went down to tell Mrs. Vale she was getting an apprentice.
She received the news with her hands in pastry and her expression unaltered, the stillness of a woman calculating how much additional labour another body in her kitchen would cost her and whether anyone’s marmalade was worth the disruption.
“The Rennet girl,” Mrs. Vale said.
“Miss Rennet, and yes. She is to come to you as an apprentice, on full wages and your own standards, by seven each morning.”
“She reached for a hot tray without a cloth and set herself on fire, Your Grace, which is not the conduct of a woman I should ordinarily welcome within reach of my ovens.”
“She also made the marmalade you were good enough to call competent, which I am reliably informed is the highest praise your kitchen has issued since Michaelmas.”
Mrs. Vale looked at him for a long moment, her hands going still in the dough, and Thomas had the distinct and uncomfortable sense that she was reading in his face a thing he had not meant to leave there for reading.
Very little surprised Mrs. Vale anymore.
Eleven years at Aldermere, three cooks, two housekeepers, and the burying of his brother had seen the surprise out of her.
“I will have her here at seven, then,” she said at last, “and she will keep my standards and not her mother’s, however good the woman’s marmalade, and she will learn that a tray near a hearth is the cook’s business and not a delivery girl’s.
Those are my terms, and I do not negotiate them with dukes. ”
“Your terms are accepted in full, Mrs. Vale, and I would not dream of negotiating with the only person in this house who frightens me.”
“And should she set anything else alight, Your Grace, I will expect a person other than myself to put her out.” She returned her hands to the pastry without waiting to see how the remark was received. “I have a kitchen to run, and I cannot be forever extinguishing the help.”
Thomas inclined his head and left before his face could betray him, because Mrs. Vale’s last remark had been delivered in a voice entirely devoid of expression and aimed without the smallest mercy, and unless he was very much mistaken, the cook of Aldermere Hall had just made him the object of her mirth.
The mischief of it was that the wit was excellent, and for four years, he had lost all conception of how a man was expected to command his features when something turned out to be genuinely humorous.