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

Chapter 21

In August, Nell took the estate books up to the tenant farms.

It had not been done, she discovered, in two years. The old duke had done it; James had done it; Rowan had come south to a house full of thieves and had spent the first year putting out fires, and had not had the time, and had said so plainly when she asked him about it.

So she went, and she took him with her, because it was his estate and because she was not going to be the one who knew the tenants better than he did.

They rode out on six days over three weeks and went to every farm.

The first was the hardest. Rowan did not know how to talk to a tenant farmer — not because he was proud, but because he had spent his adult life with property disputes and lawyers and men who spoke in paragraphs, and a tenant farmer speaks in facts, and stops speaking the moment he believes he is being handled.

He stood in the yard of the first farm with his hat in his hands and said, “How are the roofs?” and got a one-word answer, and looked lost.

Nell did not rescue him.

She stood to one side and waited, and after a while he asked the next question, and then the next, and by the fourth farm he had stopped standing like a man who had come to inspect something and had started standing the way he stood in his own kitchen — which was to say, like a person in a room.

At the fifth farm, an old woman put a cup of milk in front of him without asking and he drank it, and she watched him drink it, and something in her shoulders let go.

Nell saw it. She said nothing about it for three days.

Then, riding back along the ridge on the third evening, with the light going gold and the whole valley laid out beneath them, she said:

“You were all right today.”

“I said almost nothing.”

“That is what was all right about it.”

He thought about that for a mile.

“I have been told,” he said eventually, “that I am a man who does not know how to be at ease in the sort of room James could work.”

“You were never going to be James,” Nell said.

“No.”

“No,” she agreed. “You are the one who falls in the ditch and gets driven home by a woman with a cart. That is a different sort of thing, and it is the sort we have, and I have no complaints.”

He was quiet for another mile.

“I do not,” he said, “deserve you.”

“You do not,” Nell said. “Nobody does. That is not how it works. You are not owed a person. You are given one, if you are lucky, and then you have to be worth it, which is a different job and a longer one.”

She clicked her tongue at Bramble.

“Get on,” she said. “I am not carrying you home again.”

In September, Susan asked to be taught the accounts.

She asked badly. She came into the office with her eyes on the floor and her hands twisted into her apron and said the whole sentence in one breath, as though she were confessing to something, and then stood there, braced, waiting to be told no.

Nell looked at her for a moment.

“How is your reading?” she said.

“Not good, miss. Missus.”

“Then we will do the reading first.” Nell pulled the second chair up to the desk with her foot. “Sit down. Monday and Thursday, four o’clock, and if you miss a session without a reason I will be extremely unpleasant about it.”

Susan sat down.

Susan came back on Monday at four o’clock, and the Monday after that, and the Monday after that.

By Christmas she could do sums in her head faster than Arthur could do them on paper, and by the following spring she was keeping the poultry accounts, and by the spring after that she was doing the coal.

And when, years later, a woman named Susan Holborn took up the position of housekeeper at a house in the next county and had a letter of recommendation written for her in a hand as steady as a wall, nobody who read it ever once suspected how much it had cost the woman who wrote it to learn, at seventeen, not to flinch.