"She Won't Last a Month Here," the Duke Told His Butler — By Summer She Ran the Whole House
Chapter 10
Theme:
Font Size:
24px
"You keep a great many accounts these days for a companion.""Her Grace keeps me busy.""Her Grace," said Grimshaw, still smiling, "is one-and-eighty. She will not always be here to keep you busy." He came a step closer, soft-footed for a heavy man. "A word of counsel, Miss Eldstone, from one servant to another: this is a large house with a great deal of dark in it. A young woman with no friends and no family—for you have none, have you?—does well to be quiet. To keep to the linen. To ask no questions whose answers cannot help her." The smile did not move. "Companions come and go here. They do not last. I should hate to see you go before your time."Juliet set down the slate and looked at him: level and gray and unafraid. And she saw it, under the smile, for one half-second: he was afraid of her.That was the thing: he had come in smiling to frighten her, and it was his own fear that had brought him. Because a clever woman with a slate had been standing too near his open door."I keep excellent accounts, Mr. Grimshaw," she said pleasantly. "It is the one thing I do that no one has ever wished me to stop. Good evening."She walked out past him with her slate. Her hands did not shake until she was on the stairs.She did not go to the Duke. She thought about it for three days and three nights; she did not go.Her reasons were good ones. One of them was cowardice: to go to the Duke was to be seen; to be seen was to be asked her history, her people, her name. And behind her name stood Silas Probin, and £4,000, and a marriage she had run across a county to escape. A companion who made an enemy of the steward would be turned off with a bad character; a companion turned off with a bad character would be traced; and once traced, once named, she was Miss Juliet Eldstone, the runaway heiress again, hunted home to be married to Clement Probin for her money.Better to hold her tongue. Better to keep her head down for three years and let a rich Duke's house rob itself. It was not her house; it was not her fight.She told herself all of that.And then, on the fourth morning, she went out to the tenant cottages at Marrow End: the dowager wanted a basket of jelly carried to an old woman there. The old woman was Widow Sefton, 70 years old. Her cottage roof was a colander; her rent had gone up at Lady Day, though nothing on God's earth had been done to earn it.