"She Won't Last a Month Here," the Duke Told His Butler — By Summer She Ran the Whole House
Chapter 17
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"It is quite true, cousin. I made inquiries for the household's protection, you understand. She is exactly what this gentleman says: a gentleman's daughter with £4,000 of her own, playing at being a poor companion. One does ask oneself why. What a woman conceals £4,000 to scrub linen for? What else she might be concealing? Whose accounts, for instance, she has been so very busy copying?" The letter trembled delicately in her hand. "I only think of your safety, cousin. And your grandmother's."Every face in the forecourt turned to Juliet.She looked at the Duke. He was looking at her the way he had looked at her that first wet evening: as at a bill he had not expected. Closed. Withdrawing.She saw it happen: she saw him decide that she had lied to him—the one person in a year who had looked at him without fear. A woman with a hidden fortune, a hidden name, a hidden reason for copying his accounts, exactly as his cousin said. She saw the library door shut behind his eyes.And she found, standing among the fallen roses, that she was not afraid anymore.It is a strange thing to have dreaded a moment for three years and to arrive in it and find the dread all gone. She had spent her whole life being invisible in order to be safe, and here was safety ending in a forecourt in front of everyone, and the sky had not fallen. There was only the truth left, and the truth, at least, was simple."Every word this gentleman has said is true," she said. Her voice carried, clear and level, across the gravel. "I am Juliet Eldstone. My father left me £4,000 in trust and named this gentleman, his nephew, my trustee. I ran from his house last autumn because he wished me to marry his son so that my money would stay his. He has spent a great deal of it; the account he keeps as my trustee will show it to any honest man who asks to see it. I came here under my own name, which is Eldstone, and told the Dowager Duchess I was an orphan without prospects, which is true, for money you cannot touch until you are five-and-twenty is no prospect at all. I concealed the fortune. I did not conceal it to deceive this house; I concealed it to survive."She turned from Probin to the Duke. She was aware of nothing but the Duke."I have copied your accounts, Your Grace. Your cousin is quite right: I have copied them for three months. I have them in my room, fair and complete: the true rents against the posted rents; the tradesmen's own tallies against the settled figures; the tenants' marks against the sums they were squeezed for. I have the roof over your own east wing that you paid £40 to mend last autumn, and that let the rain onto my head not a week past. I have Widow Sefton's cottage roof charged to her two years since and never mended at all. I did not bring them to you because I was a coward, and because I had a fortune of my own to hide, and I told myself your house was not my affair." Her voice did not shake. "I was wrong on every count but the last: it is not my affair. I made it my affair. And you are being robbed, sir, root and branch, by a man standing in your own doorway. And I can prove it in an afternoon."