"Is that a rule for stains only?"
She glanced at him then, quick, and something in her face said she had heard the question underneath the question, and chosen deliberately not to answer it. "I wouldn't know, sir. I only do wash."
He liked her better for the refusal than he would have liked an answer.
It was in that same week that Mercy came to him in the yard, solemn as a magistrate, and informed him that her mother had told her never to take anything from a gentleman she didn't know.
"And did that rule apply to grooms? Because a groom wasn't quite a gentleman, was he?"
"I couldn't say," he told her, crouching so he was closer to her height, which was not a thing dukes did with laundry children as a rule, and which he did without thinking about it at all. "What is it you'd like to take?"
"Nothing," she eyed him. "I only wanted to know the rule."
"Then the rule stands. Don't take anything from anyone, gentleman or groom, until you know why they're giving it."
She considered this with the gravity children bring to advice they intend to keep. "That's what Mother says about the horse."
"Is it?"
"She says Bramble never asked to be saved. Mother just did it because nobody was looking and it needed doing." Mercy said this the way children repeat their mother's sentences whole, without knowing yet which of the words in them are the ones that matter. "Is that why you kept her off the list? Because nobody was looking?"
He did not answer for a moment. A rook went over the stable roof and called once, and the sound of it hung in the cold a long while after the bird had gone.
"Something like that," he said.
He had not told the child, and had not told the mother that he had watched. He found, crouched there in the frozen yard with a six-year-old regarding him as if he were an easy sum she had already solved, that the not telling had begun to cost him more than he had expected it to.
He carried one more secret that winter that no one at Wren Hall knew to look for.
There had been a woman once, before his father died: a viscount's daughter with a low, sweet laugh and a way of going soft and tearful in company that had nearly persuaded him she was gentle. He had broken it off three weeks before the wedding—the week he found her boxing a scullery girl's ears over a scorched collar and calling her stupid and worthless in a voice she never once suspected he could hear.
He had not told anyone why. He had let the county believe he was fickle and cold, and had carried the shape of that mistake into every room since: wary of any woman who wept prettily and asked for nothing in front of him while he watched, and gave everything the moment his back was turned.
Agnes Hale had never once wept in front of him. She had never asked him for anything at all. It unsettled him more than tears would have.
He began, without telling Mrs. Byrne, without telling the steward, without telling a soul, to see that a little extra coal found its way to the laundry loft where a widow and her daughter slept. And that the loft door, which had hung crooked and let the draft in for two winters running, was quietly rehung one afternoon while Agnes was at the well.
He asked each time that his name be left out of it. Mrs. Byrne obliged him, though she watched him do it with an expression that said plainly she thought a man ought to know by now what he was building, even if he wasn't yet ready to say it aloud.
Twelfth Night came hard on the frost, and Wren Hall filled with guests for it the way it always had before the old duke died. Holly hung thick through the long gallery, the smell of orange peel and cloves and beeswax candles thick enough to taste.
Lady Prudence Calder, the young duke's aunt by his father's first marriage, had run the house's entertainment since Simon's boyhood and saw no reason a stable hand's absence from the front of the house should slow her down. She had invited Miss Ophelia Marsh and her mother for the week—a rich, pleasant, biddable young woman whose father's mills would clear every debt Wren Hall carried—and she meant, before the twelve days were out, to have the match as good as settled.
She did not know her nephew was 200 yards away mucking out a stall in a borrowed coat. She would not have believed it if told.
It was Mercy who set the trouble in motion, though no one ever blamed a six-year-old for it. Miss Marsh's hem tore on a nail in the gallery stair—a long, ugly rip through good silk—and in the scramble to find someone quick with a needle before the dancing, a footman fetched Agnes from the laundry, because everyone below stairs knew whose hands were fastest and whose stitches never showed.
She knelt in the good front hall to do it because there was no time to take the gown elsewhere—pins in her mouth, red knuckles working fast and neat and sure. And Lady Prudence came down the stair in the middle of it, and stopped, and looked, and did not like what she saw.
"That is the laundress." Lady Prudence said it to the room at large, not to Agnes, the way a woman remarks on weather. "Kneeling on my good floor with her hands all over Miss Marsh's silk."