By March, the version circulating in Marsden was that Gerald Hurst's stepdaughter had thrown herself at a duke, been taken on as a servant to keep her near him, and broken her mother's heart doing it.
It was better than an accusation. An accusation can be answered.
Charlotte heard it in pieces from the carrier, from Peg's sister who was in service at the rectory, from a fishmonger's boy who did not know who she was. Each piece arrived a fortnight old and slightly worse than the last. And she did the only thing she could think of, which was to be so relentlessly, visibly, tediously respectable that the story had nowhere to grow.
She was housekeeper of Ravensworth, and she made certain that everybody in three parishes knew it. She ordered from the Ravensworth tradesmen in her own name and paid on the nail. She went to church in the village every Sunday and sat with Mrs. Ives six rows back, in gray. She had the wage book written up fresh with every entry in her own hand, and she did not care who saw it. When the mill at Kettleby sent the flour, she signed the receipt *C. Neave, Housekeeper*, and made the carter wait while she checked the weight, and the carter told everybody about it for a month, which was exactly what she had wanted.
By April, the Ravensworth household bill was down £38 on the year, and the copper in the washhouse had a new bottom, and the laundry came home.
By May, she had found £411. That one was not economy. That one was a mistake in the estate's favor. Four years old in a timber sale at Stainforth. The buyer had taken eleven acres and paid for eight, and nobody had walked the ground afterwards because there had been nobody to walk it. Charlotte found it because she found the tally sticks in a drawer and could not stop herself counting them.
The Duke of Ravensworth read her note about it standing up in the estate office, and then sat down rather suddenly on the edge of the desk.
"£411. £411 and some shillings, and the man still in business at Ripon, and Mr. Coyle says it's recoverable. That is fourteen months," he said. "You have just taken fourteen months off the end of this."
He looked up at her, and Charlotte, who had spent four months being extremely careful about a great many things, found that she was standing rather closer to the desk than she had intended. Neither of them said anything for a moment.
"I ought to see to the linen," Charlotte said.
"Yes," said the Duke.
Neither of them moved.
"This is going to become a difficulty," he said.
"It is already a difficulty, Your Grace."
"Yes." He rubbed his face. "Charlotte, Miss Neave, I want to say one thing and then I will not say it again unless you raise it, because I employ you and that makes everything I say heavier than it ought to be."
"Say it then."
"If you were not in my employ, I would have asked you in February." He said it plainly to the desk. "I am not asking. That is precisely the point. There is a version of this where I ask and you are not free to refuse me, and I would rather want something for nine years than have it that way. So, it sits there. And we both know it sits there. And you will tell me if it becomes intolerable, and I will find you a better place at a higher wage with a character that would get you into a bishop's house."
Charlotte stood in the estate office and discovered that her eyes had gone hot. "That's the second time," she said.
"The second time what?"
"That you've handed me the choice when you didn't have to." She wiped her eye with the back of her wrist crossly. "The tea was the first. You did it before you'd read the letter, and you didn't know then whether I was a beggar or a fraud or a whatever he meant me to be. You just gave it me and turned your chair to the fire. Anybody would have, Your Grace," said Charlotte. "I am twenty-two years old, and until the eleventh of January, nobody ever had."
***
The blow came in June, and it came from the direction she had stopped watching. A letter from her mother, the real thing this time, in her mother's own cramped hand, smuggled out by the rectory servant and eleven days old by the time it reached Ravensworth.
*Charlotte.*
*He has taken the boys to his sister at Doncaster and says they will do better away from the disturbance. He says I may go and see them when I am stronger. I am not unwell, Charlotte. I have not been unwell since February. He tells everyone I am. I am not to go into the town alone now. He read your letter about the wages and he laughed and said forty pound. He says a girl who can earn forty pound can find £800 if she is asked properly, and that you will find you are still my daughter and they are still your brothers. He is coming to Ravensworth. I do not know when. Burn this.*
Charlotte did not burn it. She sat with it for a long time in the housekeeper's room, and then she got up and went and found the Duke of Ravensworth in the long gallery in front of the four bright rectangles where the pictures had been.
"He's coming here," she said.
"When?"
"She doesn't know. And he's taken the boys." Her voice cracked on it, and she waited until it was steady. "Six and four, to his sister at Doncaster. So, my mother has nothing left in that house to hold on to. And so, I have something he can take away from me twice."
The Duke turned round. "What does he want?"
"The same £800. But not from you anymore." Charlotte was very white. "He's worked out what I am here. He's worked out I've a wage and a place and your ear. And that I'd give every penny I ever earn and go on my knees besides if he stood in front of me and said I could see my brothers again. He doesn't need to sell me to you now. He can sell them to me forever. £11 this year, and £20 the next, and it never, ever stops."
"Then he does not get through my gate."