Charlotte stared at him. "£800 is a great deal of money to you."
"£800," said the Duke of Ravensworth, "is the entire indoor wage bill for this house for a year and a half."
"Then he's picked wrong."
"He has picked exactly right," he said grimly. "And that is what has been keeping me awake. He has heard 'Duke' and he has heard 'solitary' and he has assumed the rest. And when I write and tell him there is no £800, he will not believe me. Nobody believes a duke has no money. It is the one thing the title makes impossible to say. And he will assume I am refusing, and then he will do the other thing."
"Go about Marsden."
"Go about Marsden."
Charlotte buttered a piece of toast she did not want. "Your Grace," she said, "why did you not put me in the gig at the lodge gates and send me straight back? You could have. You'd have had the letter and no witness and no trouble at all."
"Because the gig had gone."
"You have eleven horses, Fenn told me."
The Duke of Ravensworth looked at his plate for a moment. "Because you were standing on my mat with your hands the wrong color," he said. "And I have spent four years being told that the sensible thing and the decent thing are usually different. And I have done the sensible one every single time. And I have got very tired of the taste of it."
Charlotte put the toast down. "That's not an answer that helps you," she said.
"No," he agreed. "It's just the true one."
***
She began to be useful on the third day because she could not do otherwise. It started with a jug. She was in the corridor by the stillroom, and a housemaid called Peg came past with a cracked jug held together with a wire. Charlotte, who had run a household of five on very little for seven years, said, "That'll go in a week. Have you no others?"
Peg said there were none in the house that held above a pint. Charlotte said, "There are eleven in the second pantry behind the flour bins. I saw them yesterday." Peg went and looked, and there were.
By the fourth day, she had done the linen cupboard. By the fifth, she had found that the kitchen was buying flour by the stone from a shop in Ravensworth village at nearly twice what a mill four miles off would sell it for by the sack. Because nobody had ordered a cart in three years, and it had simply become the way it was done.
She brought that one to him because she could not help it.
"Your Grace, I don't mean to interfere."
"Miss Neave, if you have found me money, I will kiss your hands in front of the staff."
"It's £11 a year." She had it written on the back of an envelope. "And there's another six in the candles if you'd have them dipped here instead of bought. And Mrs. Ives says the washhouse copper wants a new bottom, and it'll cost £4 and save the laundry bill entire, which is £19. So, it's £36 a year, near enough. And none of it wants a penny spent but the four."
The Duke of Ravensworth looked at the envelope for a long moment. "You did this in three days."
"I did it while I was thinking about something else," said Charlotte, "which is how I do most things."
That was the fifth evening, and it was the evening he told her what he had decided, and she came very close to throwing something at him.
"I've written to my solicitor," he said. "There's a settlement. It's not large, but it would put you somewhere respectable—a house in York with a companion. £120 a year, entirely your own, and untouchable by anybody. Your stepfather could not reach a penny of it."
Charlotte set down her sewing. "No."
"Miss Neave—"
"You've just told me you owe £31,000." Her voice was perfectly level. "So where does £120 a year come from? It comes from the nine years becoming ten or eleven. It comes off the roof, or off Mrs. Ives's wages, or off the eleven people who have kept their mouths shut about me for a week without being asked to." She stood up. "You'd pay £800 you haven't got in installments to a man who never had any right to ask, and you'd call it a settlement instead of a purchase, and it would still be the exact same transaction he proposed on Tuesday. The only difference is who it's paid to."
The Duke of Ravensworth opened his mouth and shut it again.
"I have been bought once this week," Charlotte said. "I'll not be bought kindly. It's worse."
There was a very long silence.
"That," said the Duke, "is the most comprehensively I have been taken apart in about eleven years, and I find I have nothing to say to any of it."