"She Won't Last a Month Here," the Duke Told His Butler — By Summer She Ran the Whole House
Chapter 14
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"They are yours now. Not the still room hooks—yours. On your person. On a chatelaine at your waist, where the whole house can see them and know who turns them."Juliet stood very still. "Your Grace... I am a companion. The county will—""The county," said Petronella, "may go hang. I did not survive four monarchs and two bad marriages to be told what the county will say by a girl who gentled an unbroken mare in the rain." She closed the box with a small, dry click. "You have been running this house since April with no more authority than my say-so and your own two hands. It is time the house wore its truth on the outside. Take the keys, Juliet. And when the day comes that someone tries to take them off you—for someone will—you hold on."Juliet took the keys. They were heavier than she had expected.She wore them at her waist from that afternoon: a small iron music went before her down every passage of Lark Court. The maids heard her coming; the tradesmen at the door heard her coming; and the sound of it, week by week, became the sound of the house itself remembering how to be a house.She wore them the evening she next sat with the Duke in the library. He looked at them a long moment, hanging bright against her gray stuff gown. Something crossed his face that she could not read: grief, perhaps, or the memory of another woman who had worn them, or the first faint stirring of a thing he had no name for yet."My grandmother gave you those," he said. It was not a question."She did, Your Grace. I told her the county would talk.""Let it." He weighed the shut book in his hands. "Cecily used to say a house could not be run by a man's signature. It wanted a woman's keys and a woman's eye, she said, or it went to the bad from the inside while the master signed his name to the ruin of it." He was quiet a moment. "I did not understand her. I understand her now. I have been signing my name to a great deal this year that I did not trouble to read."Juliet's heart went still. It was the nearest he had yet come to the thing she had built in her locked drawer, figure by figure, all that spring."Then, perhaps," she said carefully, "Your Grace ought to begin reading again."He looked at her across the low fire, and for a moment she thought he would ask her outright what she knew. But he was not ready, and neither, in truth, was she. The moment passed, the fire settled, and they sat on in the shared country of the library, each holding a piece of the same truth, neither yet willing to lay it on the table between them.Lucretia came in June.