The Duke Wrote Ten Rules for the Wife He Would Choose — She Broke Every One Before the Hunt Ball
Chapter 2
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The candles at Raxford were not paid for by Lady Sedgwick; that had never stopped her rationing them."Clarissa has nine days before the hunt ball," her aunt said. "I will not have you make a spectacle in the corner while she makes that man look at her.""No, Aunt.""You must see how much I have already done for you, Rosamund. Your gown, your board... a duke's house, when you might be in a curate's attic.""I see it, Aunt.""After the ball, Cousin Margaret in Harrogate requires a companion. I have told her you will come."Harrogate: a widow of 80, a house that smelled of liniment, and a window that looked onto another wall."Unless Clarissa is a duchess by Christmas," said her aunt, "and I find I can afford to keep you."She took the candle with her when she went.Rosamund sat in the dark and did not cry. She had not cried in eight years. She had stopped on the night her aunt came to Cold Harbour. Her father had been buried that morning in the churchyard he had kept for 30 years. The vicarage still smelled of him: ink, pipe smoke, and the dry, sweet dust of old paper. Rosamund had been 19, sitting among his books when the carriage came up the lane.Her aunt walked through the house without taking off her bonnet. She counted the spoons. She counted the books—260 of them—and sent for a bookseller from Ripon before supper. He came the next morning with a cart. Rosamund stood in the hall and watched him load them, one armful at a time: her father's Horace, his Hebrew grammar with his pencil in the margins, the Gibbon he had read aloud to her every winter, a chapter a night.The bookseller paid £11 for the lot. Her aunt put the money in her reticule.It was then that Rosamund began to cry quietly with her back to the room. Her aunt saw anyway."Tears are a luxury, Rosamund," Lady Sedgwick said, buttoning her glove. "They belong to women with fortunes. You will find you have no use for them now."Rosamund had stopped—not because she agreed, but because she understood that every tear she shed in front of that woman would be counted and entered and charged to her account. So she had built a wall stone by stone, and lived behind it for eight years.A knock at the door. It was the housekeeper. Mrs. Corbold was 60 if she was a day, square as a sea chest, with a ring of keys at her waist the size of a dinner plate. She had kept Raxford Hall for 31 years. She carried a scuttle of coal and two new wax candles."His Grace's orders, miss. For this room every evening until you leave.""His Grace does not know which room is mine.""He asked," said Mrs. Corbold, kneeling to lay the fire. "He's never asked where a guest slept. Not in 31 years." The kindling caught. "I'd not mention it to your aunt," she said, and went out.Rosamund held her hands to the fire and could not make it mean anything she understood.