Cecily said, "Thank you."
Beatrice paused. She had the look of a person who had aimed at a target and found it had not moved.
Cecily said, "The accounts were a considerable project. I am glad it shows."
She said it pleasantly. She said it the way she said most things, which was plainly and without heat. Then she excused herself because she had a meeting with the steward about the spring planting records, and the steward did not like to be kept waiting.
She did not look back. She did not check to see if anyone had noticed. She had trained herself out of checking.
The Duke had noticed. He had been in the doorway at the far end of the gallery. She did not know this. She found it out later from Mrs. Peel, who mentioned it in passing, the way Mrs. Peel mentioned most things of consequence.
He was not in the gallery when she crossed it again. But at supper, he placed her at the table in a position that required Beatrice Vane to stop looking at the head. And afterward, he said nothing about it.
She thought about that for several days.
January came. She had been at Cresthollow for 6 weeks. The steward had begun to ask her questions rather than answer them, which she took as a sign of progress. The underfootman had stopped knocking things over, mostly. Sam Fenwick had appointed himself the guardian of the stable's smallest and most irascible pony. And the pony had accepted this arrangement with the indifference of something that knew its own mind.
She was in the estate office one afternoon when the Duke came in. This was not unusual. What was unusual was that he sat down in the chair across from her desk, which he had not done before, and did not immediately ask about anything.
She waited.
He said, "How did your family come to have the inn?"
She told him. Her grandfather had built it. Her father had kept it. Her father had died when she was 12, and her mother had kept it until she could not, and then Aldous had come. And then her mother had died. And then it had been Cecily and Aldous, and the question of what was practical.
He listened. He did not offer sympathy in words. He asked, when she finished, whether she had wanted something else.
She said, "I wanted to keep the promises I had made."
He said, "What promises?"
She said, "To the people who worked there. To the accounts. To the fact of the thing."
He looked at her for a long moment. The fire made its small sound.
He said, "The woman who was engaged to me before—she wept when she was asked to give something up. She wept very convincingly. And then I watched her speak to a kitchen maid."
Cecily did not say anything.
He said, "I have been looking for someone who does not weep where it shows, and does the right thing when no one of rank is watching, and does not believe it is a sacrifice worth naming. I have been looking for some time."
She said, "And the inn?"
He said, "Aldous has the money. The offer was genuine. I wanted a reason to ask you here."
She said, "You could have simply offered the position."
"I could have." He did not look away. "I was not certain you would take it."
"And now?"
He said, "Now I would like to ask you something else, but not tonight. I am not asking tonight." He stood. "The question will keep. You may have as much time as you need, and your 'no' will not change any arrangement already made."
He left.
She sat for a long time with the fire and the account books and the question that was not yet asked. She did not answer it that night. She was not sure she had the answer.
February passed. March came. The park went from gray to something between gray and green, which was better than gray alone. She walked out most mornings before the house woke, because she had always been a person who needed cold air and quiet to think, and she had more to think about than usual.
Mrs. Peel found her one morning at the edge of the kitchen garden. She had not been looking for her, she said; she had only come to check on the cold frames because the boy who was supposed to have done it had a head cold and could not be trusted.
They stood for a while. The cold frames were intact.
Mrs. Peel said after a time that she had been at Cresthollow for 22 years, that she had been there when the old Duke died, and when Edmund had come back from the north with a face that looked like it had learned something it would rather not have known. That she had been there for the engagement and the ending of it, and the three years after when the house had been very quiet.
She said, "He paid the schooling for seven children in this village. He did not put his name to it. The schoolmaster knows. I know. That is all."
Cecily looked at the cold frames.
Mrs. Peel said, "The Fenwick boy. The doctor who came in December when the girl in the kitchen had her brother take ill. The boots left on the step at the Harwell crossing with no note."
Cecily said very quietly, "The boots were his."
Mrs. Peel said, "He asks not to be named. Always. It is not a performance. He cannot stand to have it known."