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

Chapter 17

The news reached Thornbury House by post within the week.

Lady Thornbury was reported, by sources reliable enough to be believed, to have taken to her bed for the better part of an afternoon.

By the following morning, she had entirely revised her position, and was telling everyone in the county that she had of course always recognised Nell — that Miss Farrow had been an exceptional woman, that she had been quietly instrumental in the match, that she had in fact been the one to insist the girl take the position at Blackmoor when the opportunity arose, and that she had written a character reference which she was sure his grace had found most useful.

Nobody believed her.

Everybody was polite enough to pretend that they did, because that is how a county works.

And Lady Thornbury needed somewhere to spend her wounded pride, and a woman with useful social fictions is occasionally easier to manage than one without, and so the county let her have her story. It did her no good at all, and that was that.

She wrote to Nell once, in February. A letter of warm congratulation, four sides long, that contained two requests, three implications, and one invitation to dine.

Nell read it at the estate office desk, with her husband’s account books open in front of her.

Then she wrote back. It was one side long. It thanked Lady Thornbury for her kind wishes, declined the invitation on the grounds of the estate’s spring commitments, and closed with the assurance that the drainage easement on the north boundary was being maintained as before.

Nothing else.

She sealed it, and addressed it, and handed it to Arthur to take down on his way to the village, and then she returned to the ledger.

“That was generous,” Rowan said, from the other side of the room, where he had been pretending to read a newspaper.

“That was arithmetic,” Nell said, without looking up. “She is a frightened woman who behaves badly because she has no power over anything that matters to her. The easement costs us nothing and represents a great deal to her. I am not interested in punishment. I am interested in what is useful.”

She turned a page.

“Lady Thornbury owing us a favour is useful. Lady Thornbury nursing a grievance costs us nothing now and may cost us something later. The sum is straightforward.”

A silence.

“Restore it quietly,” she said. “Have your solicitor cite an administrative error in the original review.”

Rowan set the newspaper down.

“You want me,” he said, “to restore Lady Thornbury’s drainage easement.”

“I want you to stop pretending you were ever going to leave it dry,” Nell said. “You have been sitting on that instruction for two months waiting for me to ask for it, and I am asking for it.”

He looked at her across the room.

Then he picked up his pen, and wrote the instruction, and did not argue, because there was nothing left to argue about.

That was February. The snow melted off the high ground. The road opened. The estate woke up.

By March, Blackmoor Hall was a different building.

The tenants had been seen — all of them, every farm, which had not happened in two years. The roofs were sound. The boundary walls that had been falling down since before the old duke died were being rebuilt by a man from the village who worked with two sons and a cart and who charged by the rod and did not pad the rod.

The silver had been sorted, weighed, inventoried against a list that Nell had made in November, and found to be short by nine pieces. Six of those had been recovered from a pawnbroker in Newcastle through the good offices of a constable who owed Rowan’s steward a favour. The other three were written off, and Nell wrote them off in red ink with a note that said unrecoverable — accept and proceed, because a ledger that lies about a loss is worse than the loss.

The coal account had been cleaned, audited, and renegotiated, and Arthur had become, without anyone ever announcing it, the person who weighed the deliveries.

And in April, on a Saturday, Nell went into the estate office in the morning and found a letter on the desk.

It had come from Edinburgh.

It was six pages long, in a fine copperplate hand, and it was from the solicitor.