"Good. I am not going to put you in a gig, Charlotte." She noticed the name and decided not to notice it.
"I don't want a gig," she said. "I want a position. A place, wages, a thing I do in exchange for money, written down that any person in England could look at and see was ordinary." She was breathing hard. "You have no housekeeper's accounts worth the name, and eleven people running a house built for forty, and a flour bill that has been wrong for three years. Take me on. Not as a guest, and not as a charity, and not as anything a man in Marsden could put a word to. Pay me what you'd pay anybody, and let me earn it."
"It would not stop him talking."
"Nothing stops him talking, but it changes what I am when he does." Charlotte's chin came up. "A girl who was 'kept' at Ravensworth is finished. A woman who is *employed* at Ravensworth is a woman with a place, and a wage, and a character. And he has to explain why he sent her here in a gig with no way home. And, Your Grace, he cannot explain that. Not to anybody. That is the one thing in this entire business he cannot say out loud."
The fire had burned right down. Neither of them had put anything on it.
"You want to answer him," the Duke said slowly, "by being visibly, boringly, unarguably respectable."
"I want to answer him," said Charlotte Neave, "with a wage book."
***
Downstairs at half past ten, Mrs. Ives was still up. She had been up every night that week on the principle that a house with a strange young woman in it, and a master behaving strangely, was a house that wanted somebody awake in it. She had heard the raised voices through two doors and had not been able to make out one word of it.
At a quarter to eleven, the Duke of Ravensworth came down into the kitchen passage, which he had done perhaps four times since his father died.
"Mrs. Ives, what do we pay a housekeeper?"
"We have not got a housekeeper, Your Grace. We have got me doing it at £31 a year, which is what I was paid as head housemaid in '19."
There was a pause. "Ah," said the Duke.
"Yes," said Mrs. Ives.
"Then I shall want the figure for two," he said. "And I shall want yours put right first. And I would be obliged if you'd tell me tomorrow what it ought to have been for six years, because I intend to be ashamed of it properly and not by halves."
Mrs. Ives put down her mending. "She's stopping, then."
"She has taken a position," said the Duke of Ravensworth. "At a wage to be agreed. Which I am told is the only respectable thing that has happened in this house in a fortnight. Good night, Mrs. Ives." He went.
Mrs. Ives sat for a while in the empty kitchen with a slow smile getting the better of her. "Well," she said to the range.
***
The road opened on the seventeenth, and Charlotte's first act as housekeeper of Ravensworth was to write to her mother. She wrote it eleven times. The version she sent was four lines long and said that she had accepted a position at Ravensworth at £40 a year, that she was well and warm and had a room of her own, that the wage would be paid quarterly, and that she would send what she could for the boys.
She did not mention the letter. She did not mention the gig. She addressed it to Mrs. Hurst, and she wrote *By hand of the Ravensworth carrier* on the outside, because a letter that goes by an estate carrier is a letter somebody will ask about.
There was no answer for nine days. When it came, it was in Gerald Hurst's writing, and it was a masterpiece.
*My dear Charlotte,* it began.
*Your mother has been very unwell since your departure, and I have not thought it right to distress her with the particulars. I am sure you did what seemed best to you at the time. I confess I do not perfectly understand how a young woman sent on an errand of a morning comes to be in domestic service by the evening. And I have been asked the question in Marsden times and have not known what to answer. I have said only that you have always been headstrong, and that I trust the Duke of Ravensworth is a man of honor. I remain, as ever, your affectionate stepfather.*
Charlotte read it standing in the passage outside the stillroom. Then she went and found the Duke in the estate office and put it in front of him without a word. He read it twice.
"He is not going to accuse me of anything," he said at last.
"No. He is going to say he trusts me. In public. At length. To as many people as possible, in a tone of voice."
"Yes." Charlotte's hands were quite steady, which surprised her. "And that he doesn't perfectly understand it. He'll say that a great deal. He'll say it sadly. And there is nothing in this letter that anybody could ever call a lie, and if it were read out in a court, he would come out of it looking like a bewildered, wounded, patient man."
"Charlotte," said the Duke of Ravensworth, "how did you survive seven years of this?"
"By being biddable," said Charlotte. "It works very well. That's the trouble with it."
What Hurst did in Marsden over the next two months was almost admirable. He did not slander her. He did something better. He grieved quietly in shops. He was seen to be tired. He mentioned to the right people that his wife's health had suffered. When asked directly about Charlotte, he said that she had gone to Ravensworth and had chosen to remain, and that he had not felt it his place to prevent her, and that she had always known her own mind. Then he changed the subject in a way that made it clear he was being brave.