Not as performance or punishment, but as plain truth, said with the ease of someone stating a fact about weather. She had not expected affection from anyone in particular. Her parents had always been occupied with Clarissa, the beautiful one, the accomplished one, the one worth investing in. Elara had managed and organized and been invisible, and found her satisfaction in the work rather than the recognition. She watched the Duke absorb this and find he did not quite know what to do with it.
"Very well," he said after a moment. "Mrs. Holt will show you to your rooms." "Thank you, Your Grace," she said, nothing more. No wounded eyes, no bright performance. She simply stood and followed the housekeeper down the corridor, and behind her, she heard Arthur Pemberton sit back in his chair and say nothing at all for a very long time. The London gossip sheets gave them a fortnight before declaring the marriage a curiosity and moving on.
The consensus was that the Duke had settled, that having been abandoned, he had done the practical thing and substituted the lesser sister, the plain one, the one nobody had occasion to mention. "The drab replacement," one sheet called her, with the cheerful cruelty that distinguished that particular publication. Elara read this at breakfast, set the paper aside, and went to find the head groundskeeper, because the rose garden on the east side of the estate had not been attended in 3 years, and she intended to change that. The country estate of Ravenscroft was large and beautiful in the way things are when they are very old and very badly neglected.
The bones were extraordinary. The management was a quiet catastrophe. The tenant ledgers had not been properly reconciled in two seasons. The household staff of 12 moved through their days with the subdued air of a group that had learned not to attract attention. Elara spent the first week watching and listening.
The second week, she began. She did not announce intentions or call meetings. She sat with Mr. Harrison, the butler, a man of rigid propriety and deep professional skepticism, and went through the household accounts line by line. Not to criticize, but to understand. She visited the kitchen and talked to the cook about what was actually needed versus what was being ordered, and found the two lists quite different.
She went to the village twice on foot and spoke to the tenant families directly. Mr. Harrison found this alarming. He mentioned it. "Your Grace," he said, with the expression of a man watching his professional standards being gently disassembled, "it is not customary for the Duchess to carry a ledger through the village in the rain." "The accounts were not going to carry themselves," she said, "and the Whitmore family's roof is leaking onto the east bedroom. Did you know that?" He had not known that.