"No."
She looked at him for another moment. The room was very quiet. Outside, a rook called once.
"Then I will hear your actual name," she said, "before we discuss the inn or anything else."
His name was Edmund Vane. He was the seventh Duke of Cresthollow, and he had the look of a man who had just had a door open that he had spent some time trying.
She sat down. She asked him plainly what he wanted with a failing inn in Harwell Cross that was not worth the price he had offered.
He was quiet for a moment. Then he said that the inn was not what he wanted precisely; that he had come to Thornfield to find her, and that the inn had seemed a reasonable way to arrange a meeting. That the purchase was genuine and the price was genuine, and that Aldous Dallow could have the money the moment he wished. But that he had wanted to speak to her first.
She asked him why.
He looked at her with the eyes that had been trained on her in the taproom, steady and a little worn. He said, "Because I want to offer you a position on my estate managing the household accounts."
She said, "I already have a position."
"You have a position that will not survive another winter."
She looked at her hands. They were the hands of someone who had mended and carried and sorted and kept, and they showed it, and she had made peace with that a long time ago.
She said, "What does your housekeeper say to that?"
He said that Mrs. Peel had suggested it.
She had not been expecting that. She looked up.
He did not explain. He only said that if she wished to speak to Mrs. Peel before making any decision, he would arrange it, and that there was no urgency, and that her 'no' would be as safe with him as her 'yes.'
She said she would speak to Mrs. Peel.
Mrs. Peel was a small, dry woman of approximately 60 with the look of someone who had outlasted a great deal. She received Cecily in a sitting room that smelled of beeswax and dried lavender and very old stone. She offered tea. She poured it before Cecily answered.
She said about the Duke that he was a private man who meant what he said, which was not as common as it should be. She said that he had been engaged once, some years back, to a woman of very good family who had wept beautifully in public and been unkind to the kitchen maid when no one of rank was watching, and that the engagement had ended before the church could be involved.
She said that he had been watchful since then, careful about what people did when they thought themselves unobserved.
Cecily held her cup. The fire made a small sound. She did not ask why Mrs. Peel was telling her this. She was not sure she needed to.
The winter came. She came with it.
Cresthollow was not what she had expected, which was foolish, because she had not known what to expect. It was large and cold and had more fireplaces than she had seen in her life, and a set of household books that had not been kept properly in two years.
She set about them. She found the errors. She corrected them. She did not make a speech about it.
The Duke was almost never present. When he was, he was brief. He asked questions about the accounts that showed he understood them, which she had not assumed. He listened to the answers. He did not argue with her conclusions. He said once that she read columns of figures the way most people read letters, which was not a compliment or a criticism, but something she had been thinking about for 3 days before she realized it was simply an observation.
The staff were, on the whole, competent. The underfootman was not, but he was young and willing, and she had seen worse. The scullery girl had a brother who was sick and she covered it badly, and Cecily did not mention it and quietly rearranged the rota so that the girl could leave early on Wednesdays.
Sam Fenwick came before Christmas. She did not expect him either. He came with his father, who was walking now and coughing less, and had about him the look of a man who had been given something impossible and not yet decided what to do with it.
The Duke was away from the house that morning, and it was Cecily who met them at the door and brought them in from the cold and gave Sam something to eat.
His father said the estate had sent for them: a letter, a carriage, lodgings arranged in the village, work offered in the stable.
She said she was glad.
He said, "Do you know who arranged it?"
She said she had an idea.
He said the letter had said the gentleman asked not to be named.
She nodded. She looked out the window at the gray sky over the gray park and thought about a man who spent money and attached no name to it, and she did not know what to do with that information yet, so she set it aside.
The Christmas party at Cresthollow was the sort of party that happened because the county expected it, and because to stop it would have required an act of will the Duke had not yet summoned.
His cousin Beatrice Vane attended. She had been attending since before Edmund had the title, which meant she had been attending for 9 years, and she moved through the house as if it still required her opinion.
She formed her opinion of Cecily within approximately 4 minutes of meeting her. She delivered it in the long gallery on the second day, in front of the housekeeper and two of the upper maids, and the young woman who played the pianoforte, which Cecily thought was either a miscalculation or a deliberate choice.
She said, in a voice that was smooth and very carrying, that it was charming of Edmund to make use of every available resource, and that she could see the accounts had been addressed, and that one really did get useful work out of the most unlikely instruments.
The room went quiet. The young woman who played the pianoforte looked at her hands.