"She Won't Last a Month Here," the Duke Told His Butler — By Summer She Ran the Whole House
Chapter 2
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The men behind her had gone silent. On the steps, the man in black had not moved.The mare took one step toward her. Then another. She lowered her ruined head and lipped at the bit in Juliet's open hand. Juliet slid her other hand up the wet jaw, slow as sunrise, and stood there stroking the great trembling neck. The animal's breathing came down, out of terror and into something that was only tiredness."There," Juliet murmured. "There. You are not going to die today. Nobody sensible is going to shoot a mare worth 200 guineas because she was afraid of a rope."She looked up then. The man on the steps was looking at her. He was younger than the black coat had made him—30, perhaps. Ash-brown hair wet at the temples, and eyes of so deep a blue they read as black across the forecourt. A handsome face, and a closed one. He looked at her the way a man looks at a bill he did not expect."Take the mare in," he said to the grooms, without moving his eyes from Juliet. "Dry her. Poultice the shoulder." A pause. "Do not shoot anything today."The men came and took the mare, gentle now that she was gentle, and led her away.Juliet stood alone in the rain with her father's snaffle in her fist, and mud to her knees."You are the woman my grandmother sent for," the man said. It was not a question."I am, Your Grace. Juliet Eldstone." She curtsied, which was absurd in that mud, and did it anyway. "The Dowager Duchess engaged me as her companion.""You are late.""The Marrow Bridge is down. I walked the last of it."He looked at her wet skirts, her ruined bonnet in the gravel, the blood of his mare drying on her wrist. Whatever he saw did not soften him."Dorset will show you your room," he said, and turned and went into the house.Juliet picked up her bonnet. She did not see the butler come out. Dorset was a spare, gray, upright man of 60, and he had watched the whole business from the shelter of the doorway, and he was still watching her now with an expression she could not read.He came down two steps toward his master, who had paused inside the open door."Your Grace," Dorset said quietly, "shall I have Mrs. Tolley send up a cold supper for the young lady?"The Duke of Northwell looked back once across the forecourt at the small, drenched figure retrieving her hat."She won't last a month here," he told his butler, and went in.Dorset said nothing, but he thought, standing in the rain-loud doorway, that in 40 years of service he had never once seen the gray mare come to a stranger's hand. He filed the thought away where he kept such things. He went down the wet steps to carry the young lady's trunk himself.Juliet Eldstone had come to Lark Court to disappear.