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

Chapter 19

The solicitor’s reply came in eleven days.

It was six pages long, and it began with a paragraph of outrage, and ended, by the fourth page, in a tone that Nell recognised very well — the tone of a man who has been caught, has done the arithmetic on what the alternatives would cost him, and has concluded that the fastest route out of the room runs through the terms he has been offered.

He would repay in full, over eighteen months.

He would file the corrected valuations.

He would acknowledge the error in writing, in terms that Nell had drafted herself and that had been designed to be accurate without being either cruel or deniable.

The second page of his reply contained one further sentence, in a different ink, in a hand that was less steady than the rest. It read: I should like it recorded that I have practised in this county for thirty-one years and that this is the first such matter.

Nell read that sentence three times.

Then she picked up her pen and wrote one line at the bottom of the page, in the margin, and left it where Rowan would find it.

It is recorded. The file is closed.

Rowan read it that evening. He read it, and then he looked up at her across the study, and said nothing for a while.

“You did not have to do that,” he said eventually.

“No.”

“You chose to.”

“I chose to,” said Nell, “because he is going to be watched for the rest of his professional life, and a man who is watched and also humiliated will make a mistake, and a man who is watched and treated fairly will not.” She turned a page of the inventory she was working on. “It is arithmetic.”

He looked at her for a long moment.

“Everything is arithmetic with you.”

“Everything is arithmetic,” Nell agreed. “The rest is only decoration.”

He laughed — the short, surprised, unguarded laugh that had first come out of him in the rain on the Mireside Road, and had been getting easier ever since.

Then he came around the desk, and bent, and pressed his lips to her temple. Careful. Deliberate. The exact pressure of a man who understood what had been given to him and was not going to treat it as anything less than what it was.

She felt his hand rest briefly on her shoulder, warm and steady.

Then he straightened, picked up his coat, and went back to his own work, and Nell returned to the inventory, and neither of them said anything else, and it was — she thought, sitting there in the lamplight with the figures running away down the page — the single most intimate thing that had ever happened to her.

That evening they dined in the properly furnished dining room, at a table that could seat twenty-four, set with two covers.

Placed directly beside each other.

Nell had done that herself, having considered it, and having concluded that the formal distance the tradition mandated — one at each end of a ten-foot table, shouting — was a waste of perfectly good proximity.

Craddock had not said a word about it. He had simply moved the two candles to the middle of the table, where they would actually be useful, and had gone out of the room looking, for one whole second, almost smug.