She Fed the Workhouse Children in Secret for Three Winters, Then an Earl Chose Her Over Every Lad...
Chapter 6
Theme:
Font Size:
24px
He was carrying two cups of tea, which he set on the table without comment. And then he sat down across from her and looked at the figures she had spread outβnot at the estate figures, but at her own private arithmetic, which she had been doing in the margin of a scrap of paper, and which she had not, until this moment, realized was visible to him. She covered it with her hand too late.He looked at her. "Is that the February number?" he said.She said nothing."I have been counting the winter," he said, "since October. What the bread costs, what the coal costs, what the parish cuts every year around December and never restores. I have been watching the gap, Mrs. Trent." He paused. "I have been watching you try to fill it alone.""My lordβ""I have been paying for the apothecary at Stonemill since November," he said, "through the parish office, anonymously, because I had no wish to make a performance of it." He watched her face. "I did not know when I started that someone was already paying for the coal."The silence in the library was very complete."How long?" she said at last."Three years," he said, "since my sister."She looked at him. He had never mentioned a sister."She was sent to a workhouse in the north," he said. "My father's doing. She had disgraced the family in his judgment, which meant she had loved the wrong person and refused to pretend she hadn't. She died there. She was twenty-two." His voice was entirely level, in the way of a man who has had a long time to build the level, and who knows what is underneath it. "I had been away. I came home too late. I have been attempting since then to make it mean something, the failing." He looked down at his hands. "It never quite does, but the trying is better than not trying."Cecilia set down her pen. She had spent three winters building herself against the kind of feeling that was moving through her now, because feeling things too clearly for a man who existed in a different stratum of the world than she did was a form of waste she could not afford. She had been sensible about it; she had been carefully, deliberately sensible.She said, "The boy at Stonemill, Pip... the apothecary said he would not come again without payment. Seven shillings.""I'll send it tonight," he said."You cannot keep doing that," she said, "sending money through the parish. Beedle is grateful, but he is not a careful man with records, and eventually someone will ask questions."