"She Won't Last a Month Here," the Duke Told His Butler — By Summer She Ran the Whole House
Chapter 8
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He met her three days later in the long gallery by accident, which was the only way he met anyone that year. She had a basket of mended linen on her hip and a smudge of beeswax on her wrist, and she stood aside for him against the wall, eyes down as a servant should.He went past her. Then he stopped."You are the woman with the mare," he said."Yes, Your Grace.""My grandmother has set you to the linen.""Among other things, sir."He looked at her then—properly looked for the first time since the forecourt, now that she was dry and it was daylight. She was small and quiet and brown-haired: no beauty, the kind of woman a ballroom would look straight through. Except that when she raised her eyes to answer him, they were level and gray-clear and entirely without fear.And he had not been looked at like that by anyone in a year. His servants looked at the floor; his grandmother looked through him. This woman looked at him as though he were simply a man who had asked her a question, and she had the answer, and she was deciding how much of it he could bear. It unsettled him; he was not used to being seen."The mare is sound," he said abruptly. "The shoulder healed.""I am glad, sir.""You were right. She was worth more than a fright." He seemed to want to say something else, and to have no idea how. "That is all," he said, and went on down the gallery, and did not know why his own house felt for a moment less like a tomb.Juliet stood with the basket on her hip and watched him go. She thought: There is a good man in there, drowning.And then she thought about the butcher's five shillings, the roof over the east wing, the £4,000 in Silas Probin's strongbox. She told herself firmly that none of it was her affair. She was here to be invisible for three years; she was not here to save a duke.She very nearly believed it.The month passed. Juliet did not leave.Nobody remarked on it in words, but the house remarked on it in a hundred small ways: the maids, Prue and the two younger girls, brought their troubles to her now instead of weeping into the coal scuttle; Mrs. Tolley cooked like a woman released from prison; Amos, the head groom, was a taciturn Yorkshireman of 50—he touched his hat to Juliet as he would to a mistress. She had saved the gray; she came out on frosty mornings and knew a splint from a windgall. Even Dorset, who trusted no one under 60 on principle, had begun to bring the household questions to her that he had used to carry uselessly to a grieving master's shut door.She had, without a title and without wishing it, begun to run the house. And the more of the house she could see, the worse the accounts looked.It was not only the butcher; it was everything.