Charlotte did not take it. "There is a figure," she said, "isn't there?"
"There is a figure," said the Duke of Ravensworth. "It is written as the sum required to settle his difficulties, and it appears in the same sentence as the phrase 'your continued kindness to Charlotte.' £800."
Charlotte sat in a chair in a house she had never seen, in a borrowed shawl with a cup of tea going cold at her elbow, and discovered that she was not surprised. That was the thing that undid her, not the letter. She had known Gerald Hurst for seven years, and some part of her had been waiting for this exact afternoon since she was nineteen, and had not let itself say so.
"And the gig," she said.
"Yes, that was the cleverest part, and it is why I did not open the letter in the hall." He sat down again heavily. "You have no way home tonight. The road over Marsden Moor will be shut by now, and it will be shut tomorrow. So, you are in my house alone overnight with no chaperone and no carriage, and by Friday that will be known in Marsden because he will make sure it is known. He'd ruin me."
"He has already ruined you," said the Duke. "That is the whole design. If I keep you, he has his £800. If I send you back, you have been alone at Ravensworth in the snow, and he can go about Marsden being a wounded father and asking what compensation is due to a family so used, and I would very likely pay it to stop him saying it. And he knows that, too." He rubbed his face. "It costs him nothing either way. He put you in that gig knowing that."
Charlotte Neave looked at the fire for a while. "May I have the letter now?" she said.
She read it four times. The first time, she got as far as *of an age to be settled* and had to put it down. The fourth time, she read it the way you read a bill—from the top, in order, taking each line as it came. And when she had finished, she folded it along its own creases and set it on the table beside the cold tea.
It was worse than he had said, because he had summarized it kindly, and Gerald Hurst had not written it kindly. He had written it warmly. That was the horror of it. Two full paragraphs about her nature, her usefulness, her quiet manner, the way she had raised his sons—written the way a man writes about a horse he is sorry to part with.
"He calls me biddable," Charlotte said. "Yes, I have been biddable." She was looking at the fire. "For seven years, I thought I was being sensible. I thought if I was quiet enough and useful enough, it would come out right in the end and I'd get... I don't know what I thought I'd get." Her mouth twisted. "£800, apparently."
"Miss Neave—"
"Don't be kind just now, Your Grace, or I shall come apart, and I have not finished thinking."
The Duke of Ravensworth shut his mouth.
Charlotte sat for a while with her hands in her lap. "He was owed money by a man in Doncaster," she said at last. "That was four years ago. He got it back inside a fortnight and I never knew how. And the man's wife stopped coming to church. And there was a girl called Susan Yates who worked in the counting house and left very suddenly in the spring of '23. And my mother said she'd gone to an aunt." She looked up. "I have spent this last ten minutes going back over seven years and finding that I knew not this, but the shape of it. I knew the shape of it and I told myself I was being uncharitable. That is not the same as consenting to it."
"No," Charlotte agreed. "It's just very poor arithmetic."
Mrs. Ives came at eight o'clock to say the blue bedroom was made up, and stood in the doorway with an expression that suggested she had a great deal to say and had decided against all of it.
"Mrs. Ives!" The Duke stood. "Miss Neave is my guest and will be for some days. The road is shut. I want that understood downstairs in those words and no others."
"It is understood already, Your Grace." Mrs. Ives did not move. "May I say something? You will anyway. Fenn told me the gig turned at the lodge." The housekeeper looked at Charlotte with a directness that was not unkind. "I have been in service thirty-four years, and I have seen a girl put down at a gate twice before, and both times the same thing was meant by it. So, I'll say this once, and then I'll leave it. Whatever's in that letter, miss, nobody in this house will say a word about tonight outside it. Not to a soul. Not for money. There's eleven of us, and I'll answer for the lot."
Then she went, and Charlotte sat looking at the door. "They'll talk in Marsden," she said.
"They will. But it matters a good deal who talks first and what they say." The Duke was rubbing the back of his neck. "Miss Neave, may I ask you something practical? Is there anybody in Marsden who would take you in? A relation, a friend of your father's, anybody at all who is not under your stepfather's roof?"
Charlotte thought about it properly, which took some time, and the answer got worse the longer she thought. "There's Mrs. Bewick, who was my mother's friend before, but her husband deals with Gerald over the wine, and he'd not have it." She counted them off. "My father's brother is in Halifax and hasn't written since the funeral. The rector's wife is fond of me, and is frightened of everything. And that's the whole of it. Seven years, and that's the whole of it."
"He'll have seen to that as well," said the Duke, "if he's any good. And he seems to be."
"Yes," said Charlotte. "He's very good."
***
The snow went on for three days, and the road over Marsden Moor stayed shut for six.
Charlotte spent the first day in a state she could not name. Not frightened, exactly, because nothing in that house was frightening, but braced—in the way a person is braced who has learned that kindness generally arrives with an account attached. She kept waiting for the terms.
On the second morning, she came down early and found the house cold in a way that surprised her. Only two rooms had fires. The great hall had none. She walked because nobody stopped her. She found nine rooms with sheets over the furniture, and a long gallery with four bright rectangles on the wall where pictures had been and were not.
At breakfast she said, "You've sold the paintings."
The Duke put down his cup. "I have sold the paintings, the London house, my grandmother's diamonds, eleven hundred acres at Stainforth, and a quantity of things I did not know we owned," he said.
"Yes. Why?"
"Because my father was a generous, warm, entirely charming man who could not add." He said it without heat, which she thought was the most impressive thing she had seen him do. "He died four years ago owing £91,000. I have got it down to £31,000. I expect to be clear in about nine years, provided nothing burns down."