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

Chapter 15

“I will remain as housekeeper until you find an adequate replacement,” she said. “I will not leave this household in disorder.”

Rowan looked at her. The ghost of a smile was not a ghost anymore. It reached his eyes and stayed there.

“Of course. We will draw up a list of candidates together.”

“I expected nothing less.”

“And if we are to do this properly,” Nell said, “I am going to require full access to the estate accounts. Not only the household — the entire estate. Your solicitor has clearly not been managing them with any rigor, and somebody needs to.”

He stood. He crossed the library to where she was standing by the window.

“I am also going to require something else,” she said.

“Name it.”

“Your brother’s things.”

She watched the words land.

“There is a room in the east wing that has been shut since you came,” she said. “Not locked. Shut. Craddock will not go in it, and Mrs. Tandy will not go in it, and Arthur does not know that it exists, and you have not opened it in fourteen months. Susan found the door last week and asked me what was behind it, and I did not have an answer for her, because I did not have one for myself.”

Rowan said nothing for a moment.

“James’s study,” he said.

“Yes.”

“You want me to open it.”

“I want you to decide whether it stays shut for another fourteen months,” Nell said. “I will not do it for you. And I will not ask you again. But I have run a house for two months, and I can tell you exactly what a shut room does to a building. It is not only the room.”

He was quiet for a long time.

Then he said: “Tuesday.”

“Tuesday,” she agreed.

Then he crossed the last of the distance between them, and reached out, his hand palm up in the space between their bodies. Unhurried. The gesture of a man who had been carrying something alone for a very long time, and had finally — specifically — found the right person to share the weight with.

She put her hand in his. His fingers closed. His skin was warm. The calluses were exactly as she remembered them from the night of the cart — the hands that had gripped a harness rag to his own temple, and accepted a cup of water without any performance about it.

Real. Entirely real.

“Tuesday,” he said again.

The room took four hours.

They did it together, and it was not dramatic. That was the thing Nell would remember. It was not dramatic at all. It was a man opening a door he had not opened in fourteen months, and then standing in the middle of a room full of another man’s books, and not moving for a while.

James had kept his study the way a man keeps a study when he intends to come back to it. Papers arranged. A pipe on a stand. A half-finished bottle of port gone to dust. Two pairs of boots by the door. A coat on the back of the chair.

Nell did not touch anything for the first hour. She stood at the window with the shutters open for the light, and let him move around the room at his own pace, and said nothing, and that was the whole of her contribution for sixty minutes.

At the second hour, he began to sort.

The books went to the library. Some of them she recognized from his descriptions. The county papers went to the estate office. The pipe and the stand went into the fire, at his decision, and she did not question it. The port went down the sink, because it had turned years ago.

And the letters went into a tin box, and the tin box went onto the shelf in the library, and Rowan did not open a single one of them, and Nell understood that he would, one day, and that this was not that day.

At the fourth hour, they stood in the middle of an empty room with the shutters open and the snow-light coming in flat and grey, and Rowan said:

“I did not realize until this afternoon how angry I have been at him.”

“That is normal.”

“Is it?”

“You did not get to say goodbye,” Nell said. “You were in Edinburgh, managing a property dispute for a man who was dying, and you came south to a corpse and a title and a household full of thieves. Of course you are angry at him. He left you the whole of it, and he did not ask you first, and he had the considerable bad manners to die in a week.”

She looked at the window.

“It will pass.”

Rowan looked at the empty room. Then he looked at her.

“I have never met anyone,” he said, “who could say a true thing in a plain voice and make it bearable.”

“Practice,” she said.