"Because fear is expensive, Your Grace, and I cannot afford it." She kept her eyes on the frost-stiff box hedges. "When you have nothing, you learn quickly which men will hurt you and which only wish you to think they might. You are the second kind."
"You frighten people because it is cheaper than trusting them," she continued. "I know the trick. My father did it with creditors until the day he died."
He stopped walking. "You should not be allowed to say such things to a Duke."
"Then dismiss me."
She stopped, too, and met him full on. There was no insolence in it, only a terrible steadiness.
"But you will not," she said. "Because I am the only person in this house who tells you the truth. And a man starving for a thing does not throw away the one who brings it."
For a moment, the cold air held perfectly still between them. Then she added, more gently, "Your father was honest here because no one was watching. You may be honest here, too. I will not carry it back to the drawing room. I have no one to carry it to."
He did not answer. But the next morning he came again, and the morning after. Slowly, the way a frozen river breaks, with a sound like something cracking deep down, he began to tell her things.
The duel and the scar and the friend who had earned it. The commission his father bought to make a soldier of a boy who wanted to be a scholar. The first betrothed, years gone, who had wept prettily over his title at the engagement and never once asked his Christian name.
Clara listened and asked the questions no one had asked him, and gave him back each morning a little more of the man the late Duke had walked this terrace to be. Neither of them called it anything. Both of them began to measure the day from that hour outward.
The old Duke, before he died, had given Clara one thing. In his last clear week, he had called her to his bedside. He had liked her, the only one of the household who read to him without making it a performance, and pressed into her palm a small brass key, cold and heavy, its bow worked into the shape of a sheaf of wheat.
"The desk in the muniment room," he had said. "Mine, not the steward's. When you have need of it, and not before, you will know. Tell no one you hold it."
She had thought him wandering. She had kept the key on a ribbon under her bodice all the same, because a dying man's secret is a heavy thing to refuse. She did not yet know it would be the only weapon she would ever own.
The danger, when it came, wore satin and arrived at a dinner. The Dowager had decided her son would marry Lady Honoria Crewe, whose dowry was £40,000 and whose father held a marker against the Harrogate estate that could be made to vanish on the wedding day. Eudora needed that marriage the way a drowning woman needs the bank, for reasons she had told no one.
So she filled the long table with the Crewes and their friends, and seated Lady Honoria at her son's right hand. She watched, across the candles, the precise instant her son's eyes went instead to the companion seated far down among the poor relations.
It was nothing anyone else would have caught. Clara said something low to Sophia. Sophia laughed. The Duke, hearing that laugh, turned his head and let his guard down for the space of a heartbeat, and his whole hard face changed.
The Dowager saw it. She understood it completely. She understood, with the cold clarity of a woman defending a secret, that the penniless companion was now the single greatest threat to the only plan that could save her.
"Miss Ashworth," she said sweetly down the table into a lull, "do play for us. You are so very accomplished for your situation. We are all curious where a girl of no family learned such fine manners."
It was meant to draw blood, to remind the room exactly what Clara was. Clara rose.
"My father taught me, Your Grace," she said evenly. "He had no money to leave me, so he left me the only things that could not be sold for his debts. I have found them harder to lose than money."
She played, not meekly, but a bright, difficult thing that filled the room and left Lady Honoria's polite tinkling earlier in the evening sounding like a child at a pianoforte. The Duke did not take his eyes from her. The Dowager did not take her eyes from the Duke.
Two different reckonings began at that table, and only one of them would be survived.
He found Clara afterward in the dark library, where she had gone to be unseen.
"You should not provoke her," he said. "You do not know what she is capable of."
"I provoke nothing. I answer." She turned from the window. He was closer than she had thought. "Your Grace. Why are you here?"
"Because I cannot seem to be anywhere else."
The honesty of it appalled them both. He lifted his hand and, with one scarred finger, traced, not quite touching, the line of her jaw. The air between his skin and hers went tight and warm and unbearable.
She could hear his breathing. She could hear her own. The whole room had narrowed to the half inch of cold air between his hand and her face.
Every rule she had ever lived by stood in that gap like a locked gate. For the first time in her life, she wanted to put her shoulder to a gate and break it. She did not step back.
She tilted her face by the smallest degree into his hand.
"Clara," he said.
Her name in his mouth was a thing neither of them could take back.
The door opened. A footman with a lamp. The Dowager's footman, sent to find exactly this.
They sprang apart. Nothing had happened. Everything had.