"She Won't Last a Month Here," the Duke Told His Butler — By Summer She Ran the Whole House
Chapter 7
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The butcher was paid nine shillings a week—he said so himself, and showed her his own tally stick to prove it. But when the quarter's kitchen reckoning was posted up on the servants' board, as Mr. Grimshaw posted it for form's sake, the butcher's line read 14.Five shillings a week on one tradesman.Juliet stood in the cold passage and looked at the posted sheet for a long time. She did not touch it. She went away and said nothing to anyone.She was very good at saying nothing; she had had years of practice. She was good at it because she had learned it young: a house where one voice is loud teaches the other voices to go quiet. Her father had not been cruel; he had only been grieved after her mother died. And grief in a big man fills every room, and a girl learns to move through a grieved house without knocking anything over.She had carried the accounts of that house from the age of 14. She had carried them well. And she had learned, doing it, a thing she never afterward forgot: a ledger is the one honest room in the world. There a woman's word is as good as any man's; a column adds up or it does not; no amount of shouting will make a false sum true. She had loved the accounts for that: they did not care that she was small or plain or a girl; they only cared that she was right.She was right about the butcher's five shillings. She knew she was right. That was the trouble with being right: it sat in you like a swallowed stone and would not be forgotten, however sensibly you told yourself to forget it.The Duke of Northwell noticed her the way one notices a change in weather: without wanting to, and all at once.He did not go to the kitchen or the still room—he was a duke; those were another country. But he could not help observing that the flue no longer smoked at breakfast. That the coffee was hot. That the great cold dining table at which he ate alone in silence every night—17 feet of mahogany with one place laid at the end of it—had one evening been shortened.He came down to dinner, and the extra leaves were gone: the table was a modest six feet; his single place was laid at it, and it no longer looked like a man eating at the end of a coffin."Who did this?" he said to Dorset."Miss Eldstone thought Your Grace might dine more comfortably, sir. She said a man ought not to have to shout the length of a barn to ask for the salt." A pause. "Shall I have it put back?"The Duke looked at the small, warm table. "No," he said.