She Fed the Workhouse Children in Secret for Three Winters, Then an Earl Chose Her Over Every Lad...
Chapter 7
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"Then we will find a better arrangement.""Such as?"He looked at her steadily. "Such as not doing this alone. Either of us."She understood what he was offering. She understood it precisely and completely, and she understood that it was not only about the workhouse, and she understood that accepting it would mean becoming visible in ways she had deliberately avoided being visible for three years. And she understood that he was a man who had sat across a library table from her for three weeks and listened to her the way no one had listened to her in a very long time. And she understood that the particular quality of his attention was not something she was going to be sensible about for very much longer regardless."Seven shillings," she said, "tonight. The February shortfall is eleven pounds, four."He did not blink. "I'll have it at Beedle's by Monday.""That is a great deal of money, my lord.""I am aware of that.""You do not know me well enough.""I know you better," he said quietly, "than I have known most people I have known for years. I know how you think. I know how you work. I know that you have been giving up your own coal so the children have more of theirs, because the account you keep for yourself is in a different hand than the one you keep for them, and your own numbers are tighter than they should be for a woman working as hard as you are." He paused. "I know that you named a child Pip because someone had written it on a scrap of paper, and you thought it suited him. And when I mentioned the name to Beedle, he said you were the one who had given it, and the boy would not answer to anything else."She had not known he had spoken to Beedle. She had not known any of that had been observed."Mrs. Trent," said the Earl of Dunross, "I am not a romantic man. I was a dutiful son, and I was a bad brother, and I have spent four years trying to be a decent person with something of a head start on the debt. I am not going to say anything tonight that I will need to unsay in the morning, but I am going to ask if I might call on you properly, at an hour that does not involve a dark lane and a basket of breadβwhich is a perfectly fine hour, but not, I think, the ideal setting for what I mean to say eventually."The fire settled in the grate. The library was very quiet."You may call," Cecilia said. "Tuesday is best. I am at Mather's on Monday and Thursday."Something crossed his face that she had not seen there before. It was not quite relief; it was closer to the look of a man who has been carrying something a long way and has just been told he can set it down for a moment.