"She Won't Last a Month Here," the Duke Told His Butler — By Summer She Ran the Whole House
Chapter 13
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Juliet did not say, "I am very sorry." She had learned from his grandmother that it was the least useful sentence in the language."She kept the whole house breathing," she said instead. "Your grandmother told me. That is a great deal for one young woman to carry. She must have loved it very much to carry it so well."The Duke looked at her across the embers. "You carry it now," he said. "Do not think I have not seen it. The flue, the table, the tenants' baskets... my grandmother's authority only reaches so far, Miss Eldstone. The rest of it is you." A pause. "Why?"It was the question she could not answer honestly without answering all of it. So she gave him a true thing that was not the whole thing:"Because a house ought not to die of neglect while good people stand in it wringing their hands," she said. "I cannot bear waste, Your Grace. It is my besetting sin. I would tidy a battlefield."Something moved at the corner of his mouth: not quite a smile—the almost."I begin to believe you would," he said.It was the dowager who made the thing official in the way that old women make things official, which is to say, without asking anyone's leave.One afternoon in May, she sent Prue to fetch a small carved box from the cabinet in the south parlor. When Juliet came in for her four hours of reading, the box lay open on the little table. Inside it, on a bed of faded blue velvet, lay a great ring of keys: a dozen of them or more, iron and brass, worn bright to the wards with two centuries of turning. They were the keys of Lark Court: the plate room, the linen presses, the cellars, the storerooms, the still room, the china closet, the muniment chest.Juliet knew what they were the instant she saw them, because a woman raised to run a house knows a housekeeper's keys the way a soldier knows a sword."These were Cecily's," the dowager said. "And her mother's before her, and hers before that. They have hung on the same hook by the still room door since before my grandson's grandfather was born." Her knotted hands did not touch the ring. "When Cecily died, Grimshaw took them off that hook and locked them in his office. He told my grandson it was for safekeeping, and my grandson was too far gone in his grief to see the truth of it: a man who holds all the keys of a house holds the house. I have got them back. Do not ask me how; I am one-and-eighty and I have my methods."She looked up, and the old eyes were very bright.