For a long moment, Beatrix Callowell said nothing at all, which he had learned was the surest sign he had struck true. For when she was certain of herself, she never lacked for words.
"That," she said at last, unsteadily, "was unfair. And accurate. I dislike it very much when you are both at once." She picked up her sewing again, though her hands were not quite steady. "Very well, Your Grace. You want a trial, you shall have one. Autumn is coming, and every year my aunt removes to the coast, and I am left alone here to close the great house: the shutters, the accounts, the tenants, the whole tedious machinery of it. Six weeks of dust and ledgers and no society whatsoever. If you are the man you claim to be, and not merely a bored duke chasing a locked door, then come and help me close the house. Not as a duke—as a pair of hands. No footman of yours, no carriage in the drive to impress anyone, no witnesses to flatter you. Six weeks of ledgers and leaking roofs and my company, and nothing else. If at the end of it you still want me—the real me, the ink-stained, argumentative, unadorned me in an empty house with no one watching—then you may ask me again, and I will give you an honest answer." She looked up. "Most men would run. I am rather counting on it."
Lucian Marable, Duke of Vernham, who had never in his life carried his own bags, said, "When do we begin?"
There was a fortnight between the setting of the trial and the leaving of Lady Ashcombe for the coast. And in that fortnight, the Duke of Vernham did a thing he had not done since he was a very young man: he found himself nervous.
It was absurd, and he knew it was absurd, and knowing did not help in the least. He had faced down cabinet ministers and creditors and the masked matchmaking mothers of three counties without a flicker. And now the prospect of six weeks alone in a cold house adding up columns of figures under the sardonic eye of a clergyman's niece filled him with a low, persistent, wholly unfamiliar dread.
Because he understood, in a way he could not have explained to anyone, that the trial she had set him was not really about ledgers. It was about whether there was anything in him worth six weeks of a clever woman's undivided attention once the title and the 12,000 a year had been set aside at the door. He had spent his life being wanted for those things; he had never once been tested on what remained when they were gone, and he was very much afraid that the answer was not enough.
He called on her three more times before the fortnight was out, ostensibly to arrange the practical business of the house closing, in truth because he could not keep away.
"You have come to inspect the ledgers before the battle," Beatrix said on the first of these visits, showing him into the steward's room with a candle. "Very prudent. A general surveys the ground. I warn you, the ground is dull. My aunt's steward died two years ago and was never replaced on grounds of economy. So, the accounts are kept by me in my hand, and they are perfectly correct and perfectly tedious, and you will spend 6 weeks discovering that a great house is mostly a machine for spending money slightly faster than it comes in."
"You keep the accounts yourself?"
"Someone must. My aunt cannot see the figures and would not understand them if she could. She is a great lady of the old sort who believes that money simply appears like weather. So, I keep them, and I keep the house running on rather less than it costs, which is a conjuring trick I perform daily and no one notices." She said it without self-pity, setting the candle down among the ledgers. "Does it shock you, Your Grace—a gentlewoman who does sums?"
"It does not shock me," Lucian said, and found that with her he thought of himself by his Christian name and not his title, for she had a way of stripping a man down to it. "It humbles me. I have never in my life kept my own accounts. I have men for it. I sign what they put before me, and I have not the faintest idea whether the figures are honest."
"They are probably not," Beatrix said cheerfully. "Men who sign what is put before them are the natural prey of men who put things before them to sign. It is one of the many reasons I never wish to be rich. Poverty at least obliges one to know exactly where every farthing goes." She opened a ledger and turned it toward him. "Here. This is a rent roll. Tell me what you see."
He looked at it. It was a column of names and sums, and it meant nothing to him at all. And he was on the point of saying something clever and evasive when he saw her watching him and understood that the cleverness would fail the test before the test had even begun.
"I see," he said slowly, "that I do not know how to read it. That is the honest answer. I have owned land since I was 19, and I have never once understood what a rent roll actually is. Teach me."
Something changed in Beatrix Callowell's face—a softening, quickly mastered, but he saw it. She had expected him to bluff. She had set a trap for a man's vanity, and he had walked past it and asked to be taught. And it was the first small crack in her long, careful certainty that he was only a bored duke chasing a locked door.
"Very well," she said. "Sit down. A rent roll is a list of the people who live on the land and what they owe, and if you read it properly, how they are faring. This name here, the Hobbs family, has paid late three quarters running, a little more late each time. That is not idleness. The Hobbses are the most industrious tenants my aunt has. It is trouble: illness, most likely, or a failed crop, or a death. A steward who signs what is put before him sees a bad tenant to be turned out. A person who reads sees a family in difficulty who ought to be helped through it, because a family helped through a bad year will pay you loyally for 20 good ones after." She looked at him. "That is what a rent roll is, Your Grace. It is not a column of figures. It is a hundred lives, and the figures are only the shadows they cast on paper. Most of your kind never learn to see past the shadows. I am curious whether you can."
Lucian looked at the name of a family he had never met and never would, and felt something turn over in him that had been asleep his whole life.
"Show me the others," he said. "Show me all of them. I want to learn to see."
He stayed two hours past any propriety, bent over the ledgers in the candlelight while she taught him to read the lives behind the figures. And when he finally rose to go, stiff and ink-stained and strangely exhilarated, Beatrix walked him to the door and said, with the first genuine uncertainty he had ever heard from her: "You are not at all what I expected, Your Grace. It is very inconvenient of you. I had my whole opinion of you arranged, and it was a comfortable opinion, and you keep declining to fit it."
"Good," said Lucian. "I have spent 15 years fitting everyone's opinion of me. It will do me good to disappoint one."
He drove home through the dark with the smell of ink and tallow on his hands, and for the first time in longer than he could remember, he was looking forward to something. Not to winning her—he had stopped somewhere in those two hours thinking of it as winning—but simply to the six weeks themselves, to being for six weeks a man learning to read a rent roll under the eye of a woman who saw a hundred lives where he had only ever seen a signature.