"She Won't Last a Month Here," the Duke Told His Butler — By Summer She Ran the Whole House
Chapter 12
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Twice he nearly caught her at it. Once he came upon her in the north passage at dusk, a candle in her own hand. He asked her gently what business a companion had so near his office after dark. She was seeing the linen presses fast for the night, she said. It was true; he could not gainsay it. He looked at her a long moment: he did not like her being there. She saw that he did not like it, and she understood why: he had built his whole quiet theft on there being no one in the house who looked, or listened, or wrote things down. A companion the tenants had begun to bring their troubles to was exactly such a person. And troubles brought to the right person add up.So she did her honest work where he could see it, and she kept the ledger where he could not, and she waited.She had learned patience the way other women learn embroidery: she was very good at it. She could wait a man out the way she had waited out the mare—by giving him nothing to fight until the only thing left to do was come to her hand.And while she built it, without meaning to, she and the Duke came to know one another.It began with the library: she had been sent to find a book of the dowager's. The library at Lark Court was a long north room full of 200 years of reading; it was the one room in the house the Duke still used. She found him there in the evenings more and more: not reading, only sitting with a book shut on his knee and the fire low.The first time she came upon him, she made to withdraw.He said, "Stay. Find her book. You do not disturb me."So she found the book and stayed a moment by the shelves, and they talked of nothing: of the weather, of the mare. And after that, by no arrangement, she came most evenings, and he was most evenings there. And the library became a country the two of them shared.He was, she found, exactly what his grandmother had said: not cold—drowning. Under the shut face was a man of dry, careful humor and a great buried tenderness, gone all to grief now, like a garden gone to nettles because no one has the heart to walk in it.He spoke of his sister once. Only once. It was late, and the fire was down to embers, and he said, without looking at Juliet:"She sat in that chair. Where you are. She would read out the foolish parts of the newspaper until I laughed. I did not laugh often; she counted it a personal triumph each time." He turned the shut book over in his hands. "I was in London when she took the fever. My man of business had matters that could not wait. I stayed a week over them. She was dead before I reached the North Road." He said it flatly, the way a man says a thing he has said to himself 10,000 times. "Matters that could not wait. I have never been able to remember one of them."