"She Won't Last a Month Here," the Duke Told His Butler — By Summer She Ran the Whole House
Chapter 3
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She had told the Dowager Duchess only part of the truth in the careful letters that had won her the place: she had said that she was a gentleman's daughter, orphaned, without fortune, obliged to make her own way. All of that was true. She had not said the rest: she had not said that there was, in fact, a fortune; that it was hers; that it sat in the strongbox of a cousin she would have crossed a county to avoid.Her father had died when she was 19, and he had left her £4,000 and a piece of foolishness: the money was held in trust until she married or turned five-and-twenty, whichever came first. And the trustee he had named, meaning to be kind, meaning to give her a guardian, was his nephew, Silas Probin.Mr. Probin had a son. Mr. Probin had a plan. If Juliet married the son, the £4,000 stayed in the Probin hands, where Mr. Probin had already quietly spent a good deal of it.Juliet had refused Clement Probin in the drawing room in October, and had left the house in November with 15 shillings and a snaffle bit. She had answered an advertisement under a false direction. She had signed her letters J. Eldstone and prayed the name meant nothing to anyone in that far green county.Five-and-twenty was three years off: she had only to remain hidden and unmarried until then, and the money became her own, and no man on earth could touch it. Three years. She could be invisible for three years; she had been invisible most of her life already.She had not counted on Lark Court.The house was dying, and it took Juliet less than a week to see how.It was a beautiful house—that was the pity of it. It stood long and low and honey-colored above a valley of its own: a house that had, as the old phrase went, grown out of the land rather than been set down on it. There were 200 years of good sense in its bones, and it was going to the bad the way a strong man goes to the bad—slowly, and from the inside, and with no one saying the word aloud.The silver was tarnishing in the drawers; the linen was not being turned; half the great rooms stood shut and sheeted, and the shut rooms had a smell of damp that meant a roof somewhere had been leaking for a year and no one had climbed to look. In the kitchen, the range smoked because the flue had not been swept. The cook, Mrs. Tolley, wept over a joint of beef that had come in green from the butcher, and could not send it back because, she said, wiping her red hands on her apron:"Because Mr. Grimshaw settled with the butcher, and Mr. Grimshaw would not be told his business by a cook.""And who," Juliet asked, "is Mr. Grimshaw?"