Her Sisters Were Presented to the Duke—But He Asked About the Daughter They Overlooked

Chapter 6

The corridor was cold. Wren pressed both palms flat against the front of her skirt and breathed until the tightness under her ribs loosened its grip.

She had almost reached the servants’ passage when she heard it. A muffled sob, small and wet, coming from behind the curtain at the end of the hall.

Nell stood there, one hand pressed to her mouth.

“What happened?”

“Mr. Ashby says I’m to be dismissed after supper.” The girl’s face crumpled. “He says I embarrassed the family before His Grace.”

Wren’s mouth went dry. “For dropping a sugar bowl.”

“For catching it badly, miss. He said it doesn’t matter that it never reached the floor. He said the shame was the same.”

Wren looked back down the corridor, toward the drawing-room doors. Through them, faintly, came her father’s voice — warm again, charming, telling some story about the Harrowgate hunt that he had told a hundred times and improved every year.

The shame was the same.

She had heard that sentence before. She had heard it the autumn the steward, Mr. Pike, was dismissed for the crime of bringing her father unpleasant numbers. She had heard it about a tenant who had asked for grace on his rent in front of a guest. She had heard it, in one form or another, her entire life, and it had always meant the same thing: the cost of the family’s appearance would be paid by whoever was standing closest to the floor.

“Go downstairs,” she said.

“Miss—”

“Go downstairs and don’t pack anything. Not a stitch.”

“Miss Ashby—”

“Go.”

The girl went, half-running, wiping her face with her cuff. Wren waited until she disappeared around the turn of the stair, and then she did not go to the kitchen.

She went to her father’s study.

She knew where he kept it. She had known for more than a year, because for more than a year she had been the one writing in it. The household expense book sat in the second drawer of the pedestal desk, beneath a bundle of old racing calendars that had not been looked at since before her mother’s confinement with Blythe.

Wren opened it to the servants’ wages.

If her father insisted that someone pay for the afternoon, then she knew precisely whose name would go beside the cost, and she knew precisely how it would be done — a deduction, entered neatly in the column, dated, initialed. It was the way he had handled the last three. She turned the page and found the line for the scullery, and she stood there with the pen not yet in her hand, deciding what she was going to do about it.

Behind her, the study door clicked shut.

“That,” said Atticus Vale from the shadows near the doorway, “looks considerably more interesting than the conservatory.”

Wren’s hand stayed flat on the open page. She did not jump. She had trained herself out of jumping years ago, in this very room.

“Do dukes often wander into private studies uninvited, Your Grace?”

He leaned one shoulder against the closed door and folded his arms, entirely at ease, as though the room belonged to him — which, in the way of great houses and great titles, it very nearly did.

“Only when escaping conservatories.”

“You were invited to the conservatory.”

“Exactly.”

Despite herself — despite the open ledger under her hand and the servant’s wages inked beneath it — a small, reluctant smile touched the corner of her mouth before she remembered where she was and closed the book.

“This is household business, Your Grace.”

“So I gathered.”

He did not approach. That was what unsettled her more than intrusion would have. He stood by the door with his back to it, giving her the whole length of the room, and watched her with that same quiet, detail-hunting attention from the drawing room.

“And does household business,” he said, “usually require looking over one’s shoulder?”

Wren met his gaze. “Only when the head of the household dislikes how it is conducted.”

The humor left his face, quickly, like water draining from a basin.

“The maid,” he said.

“She said nothing to you.”

“Your father dismissed her.” It was not a question.

“Intends to. For an accident that caused no damage.”

Wren moved around the desk, putting it between them — not from fear, but because it was easier to say true things from behind a piece of furniture.

“My father believes appearances have value,” she said.

“He and half of England.”

“The other half cannot afford them.”

Atticus’s eyes sharpened, and Wren was immediately, thoroughly sorry.

“Forgive me,” she said.

“For what? Speaking freely?” He tilted his head slightly. “I have spent an afternoon listening to people speak without saying anything. I find the change refreshing.”

The clock on the mantel ticked between them — a loud, slow, expensive sound, one of the few things in the house that had never been sold and probably should have been.

Wren glanced at the door. “If my father finds you here alone with me, he will blame you.”

“He will blame you,” Atticus said.

She looked at him. “Yes.”

Something in his expression hardened, as though that answer confirmed a suspicion he had been hoping to lose.

“Then I should leave.” He reached for the handle, then paused. “Will the girl keep her position?”

Wren rested her fingertips on the closed ledger.

“Yes.”

“You sound certain.”

“I am.”

He studied her for another moment — one eyebrow, the scarred one, very slightly raised — and then he opened the door and was gone, and the study was colder and larger and emptier than it had been.

That should have been the end of it.

An hour later, Wren stood in the passage behind the drawing room with a tray in her hands, and she heard her father, through the half-open door, announce pleasantly that the cost of the damaged sugar bowl would be deducted from the wages of the maid who had dropped it.

There was no damage. The bowl was on the sideboard, whole.