"Then we shall open them," said the Duke quietly, "one at a time, beginning tomorrow. I have a correspondence in four languages that has been read to me for years by men I am no longer certain I can trust. I should like to hear it for the first time in the voice of someone who has no reason to lie to me. Will you read it to me, Miss Took? Truly read it."
"I will," she said, and something in her father's old phrase came true even as she said it—a door somewhere swinging quietly open, and the warm, lit room beyond it not a stranger's house at all.
She stayed.
She became in the months that followed the thing his household never had a proper word to learn to be: a companion, too trusted to be a servant, too constantly at the Duke's side in matters of state for the county's comfort. She read his foreign correspondence and caught the flattery folded into it. She sat at his table when envoys came, and the envoys learned swiftly that the Duke of Mardenholt could no longer be lied to because the quiet woman at his elbow heard everything.
More than once she stopped him from signing a courtesy that was in truth a snare, or softened with a single deftly chosen phrase a refusal that would otherwise have given offense and cost him an ally. The steward, who had at first resented a former maid promoted above her station, came in time to bring his own difficult letters to her because she alone could tell him whether a foreign creditor was threatening or merely posturing, and she was never once wrong.
The scorn she had lived under for four months turned by slow degrees into something else entirely—into deference from the staff, into respect from the steward, and into a thing in the Duke's own dark eyes when they rested on her across a table full of documents that she did not at first dare to name.
She caught herself that winter watching for it and being ashamed of the watching. It was a foolishness she had no right to, she told herself: a former maid, a woman of no fortune, sitting night after night across a desk from one of the great men of the kingdom and learning the particular way he frowned when a sentence puzzled him, the rare and sudden warmth of him when something pleased him, the dry humor he kept folded away as carefully as she kept her own.
She had been hired for her ear. It would not do to let her heart take up listening as well.
And yet the heart, she found, was the one organ that had never in her life consented to be told what it might and might not do, and it had decided its business in that house long before her good sense was consulted.
The Duke, for his part, had grown careless of precedents in a way that scandalized his neighbors and delighted his envoys. He set a chair for her himself. He sent away the undersecretary who used to read his letters and gave the office in all but name to her. When an old marquess remarked over cards that it