"She Won't Last a Month Here," the Duke Told His Butler — By Summer She Ran the Whole House
Chapter 23
Theme:
Font Size:
24px
The whole gallery had gone still: 50 candles, the roses browning, two years of shut rooms open to the summer night.Juliet looked up at him. She thought of the wet forecourt, the mare, the snaffle, the three years she had meant to spend invisible and safe. Safe was a small word; she had been safe her whole life. She had never once, until this spring, been seen."Bartholomew," she said. She had never used his name; the gallery heard her use it; he heard her use it. And something crossed his face that was worth more than the whole £4,000 and the house and the honey-colored land it grew from. "That is a yes," she said. "In case the Duke requires it read aloud. I have grown very tired of holding my tongue. Yes, I will marry you as yourself, choosing it." She could not help it: the almost smile was on her own mouth now. "On one condition, Your Grace.""Name it.""Widow Sefton's roof is mended before the harvest—properly, by the man who is actually paid to mend it."The Duke of Northwell laughed. It was not a thing the county had heard in two years; it carried the length of the bright gallery. The Dowager Duchess, from her chair by the door, set down her glass. She permitted herself, at 81, to look for one moment entirely satisfied.By high summer, Juliet Eldstone ran the whole house, and there was no one left to call it anything but what it was: the roof over the east wing was mended by the Marrow man, who was paid the £40 it truly cost and not a shilling more; the rents came in fair and went into a single honest book kept in Juliet's own hand—the true rents and the true repairs, no worn brown twin standing beside it in the dark. What Grimshaw had squeezed out of the tenants over three years was reckoned up to the last shilling; it was given back, cottage by cottage. Where the man himself could not restore it—for there was little enough found on him—the Duke restored it out of his own pocket; he counted it cheaply bought. Grimshaw answered to the Marrow Bench and then to the Assizes; his defeat gave Juliet no pleasure at all, only the sober satisfaction of a thing set right.Lucretia lived in the little dower house at the park's edge. She was not softened all at once—a woman does not unlearn 15 years of fear in a season. But she came up to the house at Juliet's asking. She found, being clever, that she was better at ordering a still room than at watching for other people's false steps; she took over the still room entirely. The two women reached, if not friendship, then the particular respect of people who both know how tiring it is to be poor among one's equals.