She Gave a Lost Stranger a Ride Home—Hours Later, the Duke Knocked on Her Door

Chapter 13

December came to the county with its habitual absence of mercy.

The first real snow fell in the second week, burying the moors in white and cutting the estate off from the world beyond the ridge with a thoroughness that was, in its way, a relief. The Bath cousins retreated to Bath. The county could not call if the road was impassable.

Within the walls of Blackmoor Hall, for the first time in a year, everything was warm.

The fires burned in every occupied room. Mrs. Tandy’s kitchen smelled of bread and braised mutton and the dried apple she hung from the beams this time of year. Craddock moved a fraction faster than he had in autumn, which was his version of flourishing. Arthur had stopped overcorrecting and had become merely, steadily useful, and had learned to lay a fire without being told twice.

And Susan — the girl of seventeen with the kindling wrists, whose name was now attached to the east rooms and who had in six weeks gone from flinching at a raised voice to turning up at Nell’s elbow every morning with a list of what needed doing before Nell had thought of it herself — Susan was blooming in the way that people do when the world stops hitting them, and Nell watched it happen and said nothing about it to anyone, and felt, privately, that it was the best work she had done in her life.

She had taken the girl aside once, in the passage by the linen press, and said one sentence: Nobody in this house will strike you. If anyone does, come and tell me, and I will end it. Susan had looked at the floor for a while, and then had nodded, and had never mentioned it again, and did not need to.

On a Sunday evening, when the snow was coming down in a determined curtain against the black glass, Rowan was in the library.

The library was the room Nell had saved for last, which meant it was the room she had thought about most. New shelving along the north wall. The ceiling repaired and painted the colour of clotted cream. The carpet taken up and beaten and laid again. And the fireplace — blocked for years, bricked in during some earlier economy that had never been reversed — opened, swept, and now burning a deep, clean heat that reached the far corner of the room.

She brought the tea herself, as she had begun doing in the evenings.

She told herself it was efficiency. Mrs. Tandy was sixty-eight and tired by eight o’clock, and there was no reason to keep her standing about for one tray. She told herself this every evening, and believed it a little less each time.

Rowan was at the window, watching the snow, his hands clasped behind his back, a book tucked under his arm that he had clearly not opened.

He turned at the sound of the tray.

“Sit down,” he said.

“I should see to the—”

“You have managed this house for six weeks,” he said, “and I have not once asked you to sit in the same room with me and drink a cup of tea.” He nodded at the chair opposite his own. “Sit down, Nell.”

She sat.

She poured two cups. She handed him one, and kept one for herself, and the firelight stretched out across the polished floor between them, and the snow pressed its white silence against the windows.

They sat in silence.

It was the silence of the cart, she realised. The same particular quality. The absence of performance between two people who had nothing left to prove to one another, and no audience for whom to prove it.

“You never told me,” Rowan said, “how you came to be a maid.”

It was not prying. It was simply direct, in the way he was direct about everything, and she found that she did not mind it.

“My father was a schoolmaster,” she said, “in a town in Durham. He died when I was eighteen. There was no money and no family to speak of. I had two choices. Maid, or governess.”

She looked at her tea.

“I chose this. A governess is expected to perform belonging in a household she does not belong to. I preferred to know exactly where I stood.”

He was watching her in the firelight with a quality of attention that she had long since stopped being able to dismiss as professional interest.

“And did you know exactly where you stood at Thornbury?”

“Yes. Precisely.” She looked up. “Here it is somewhat less clear.”

The silence that settled then was weighted with the thing neither of them had yet named. It had been accumulating in the spaces between their conversations for weeks, building with the quiet inevitability of water finding its level.