"She Won't Last a Month Here," the Duke Told His Butler — By Summer She Ran the Whole House
Chapter 16
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Lucretia wrote letters: among the wreck of her connections, she had a cousin married to an attorney in the north. She set that cousin to asking, in the mild way of country attorneys: had anyone heard of a Miss Juliet Eldstone? A gentleman's orphan of about two-and-twenty who had left her people the previous autumn?It took six weeks. But the answer came, as such answers do, in the middle of everything else.It came on the very morning the household was thrown into an uproar of a different kind. For on that morning, a traveling chaise came up the Lark Court drive; out of it, red-faced and righteous, stepped Mr. Silas Probin.Grimshaw had not summoned him; Lucretia had not summoned him. He had traced her himself at last, the slow, patient way: a servant's letter home to Marrow, a word in a coaching inn. He had come to fetch his runaway ward and her £4,000 back to the son who was owed them.Juliet was in the forecourt with a basket of cut roses when the chaise stopped. She saw the door open; she saw the fat, familiar hand on the frame, the plum-colored coat, the face that had loomed over her in the October drawing room.The basket fell. The roses went everywhere across the gravel."There you are," said Silas Probin with enormous satisfaction. "There you are, you ungrateful, undutiful girl! Do you know what you have cost me in post-horses? Get your box! You are going home to be married as your dear father wished, and there is an end of it!"And that was the moment, of all the moments, that the Duke of Northwell came down his own front steps. He had heard the chaise; he came out because a strange carriage in his forecourt was still faintly his business. He came down the steps into the middle of it: his cousin Lucretia was arriving from the garden with a letter in her hand and triumph in her face; his agent Grimshaw appeared soft-footed in the doorway; a fat stranger in plum bellowed at his grandmother's companion; and the companion herself stood white and still among a ruin of scattered roses."What," said the Duke, in the voice that had once ordered a mare shot, "is the meaning of this?"It all came out at once. And it came out badly, as such things do.Silas Probin was delighted to find a Duke to appeal to: he laid the whole of it before him in his own colors. This young woman was his ward, his late uncle's daughter, an heiress of £4,000 held in his own honest keeping. She was promised to his son. She had run from her duty like a thief in the night; she had hidden herself in service under a false character. His Grace, all unknowing, had been harboring a deceitful, fortune-hiding, unnatural girl who had lied her way under his roof.And Lucretia, stepping forward with her letter, confirmed every word in her sweet, hard voice: