He swung again, harder this time. The blade caught.
For the next two hours, Arthur Pendleton waged a bitter, violent war against the dead tree. He did not know how to chop wood; he was a duke. Before the collapse of his life, a dozen men would have ensured a roaring fire in every room he graced before he even woke. Now he was just a man with a piece of iron, fighting to keep a promise he didn't fully understand why he'd made.
Blisters formed on his palms within the first twenty minutes. By the hour mark, they had popped, leaving raw, weeping skin pressed against the rough grain of the axe handle. He ignored the sting. There was something profoundly grounding about the pain: it drowned out the noise in his head. Every swing, every splintering crack of wood was a second he wasn't thinking about the empty halls of Harrow Gate, the mounting debts, or the suffocating guilt that usually paralyzed him.
He chopped until his shoulders burned with a fierce lactic fire. He chopped until he was sweating through his shirt despite the freezing temperature.
Inside the house, Beatrice was fighting her own war. The west wing bedroom was, as Arthur had promised, dry, but it had not been touched in perhaps a decade. Dust lay thick on the floorboards, looking like a blanket of gray snow. The heavy velvet curtains were stiff with age, the mattress on the massive mahogany bed smelling of old lavender and stale air.
Beatrice tied a rag over her nose and mouth and set to work. She hauled buckets of freezing water up two flights of stairs, her hips aching from the heavy lifting, her boots slipping on the worn wooden treads. She stripped the bed. She threw the heavy, dusty rugs out the window, letting them crash into the courtyard below where she would beat them clean later. She got down on her hands and knees and scrubbed the floorboards with a stiff brush and a sliver of lye soap she had found in the scullery.
The lye ate at the skin of her hands; the icy water numbed her fingers until they were stiff claws. She didn't stop. She moved with a desperate, frantic rhythm: if she stopped, she would realize how cold she was; if she stopped, she would remember that she was entirely dependent on a volatile, broken man in a dying estate.
By mid-afternoon, the room was clean. The wood floors gleamed dully, the mattress was turned, and the curtains were beaten free of dust and tied back to let in the pale, watery sunlight. Beatrice sat back on her heels, wiping her brow with the back of a raw, red hand. She took a deep breath. It smelled like soap and cold air; it smelled clean.
A heavy, dragging footstep sounded in the hallway. Beatrice turned.
Arthur stood in the doorway. He looked terrible: his shirt was clinging to him with sweat, his hair was plastered to his forehead, and his breathing was ragged, shallow, and harsh in the quiet room. In his arms, he held a massive pile of split oak. It was roughly chopped, the cuts uneven and jagged, but it was dry.
He walked past her without a word. He crossed to the grand stone fireplace, dropped the wood onto the hearth with a deafening clatter, and stepped back. He swayed just slightly, his boots scuffing the clean floorboards.
Beatrice stood up. She looked at the wood. Then she looked at his hands. He had tried to wipe the blood off on his trousers, but it was still seeping from his torn palms, staining the white linen of his cuffs. His knuckles were bruised, the skin shredded.
Arthur caught her looking. He immediately curled his hands into fists, hiding the damage, a flash of defensive pride hardening his features. He lifted his chin, his jaw setting into a rigid line. "The chimney is clear," he said roughly. "I checked it from the roof. It will draw."