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

Chapter 4

The morning at Thornbury House produced the particular species of chaos that only a large country house full of self-important guests can generate.

Three bell-pulls before seven. A crisis in the matter of the breakfast ham. Her ladyship in her dressing gown on the back stairs demanding an explanation for the cold fires in the blue drawing room, which had been explained to her six times since Michaelmas and which she declined, on principle, to remember.

“It is the chimney, my lady,” Nell said. “It is blocked. If I light it, the room fills with smoke and the wallpaper comes off.”

“Then have the chimney swept.”

“Yes, my lady. I put it in the book in August.”

“Then have it done.”

“The sweep will not come out for under nine shillings, my lady, and the coal account is already—”

“Farrow, I do not wish to hear about the coal account before I have had my tea.”

“No, my lady.”

She was in the middle of this — and it was going precisely as it always went, which was nowhere — when the sound of wheels on gravel pulled every head in the corridor toward the windows.

It was not a single vehicle. It was a procession.

Three heavy travelling coaches, a crest painted on each door, moving at a walking pace past the end of the drive. Behind them, two supply wagons stacked so high with trunks that the axles sagged.

Her ladyship reached the window first. She was still in her dressing gown, but her social instincts had already overridden the indignity of it. Her sharp eyes found the crest on the lead coach — a falcon, wings spread, above a line of Latin — and her whole face underwent a transformation.

The irritation went out of it like water out of a tipped jug. What came in behind was hunger.

“The Duke of Blackmoor,” Lady Thornbury breathed.

She gripped the window ledge with both hands.

“He has come. He is in residence. He is our nearest neighbour.”

She was already seating a dinner table. Already moving her three unmarried cousins from Bath across an invisible board like chess pieces, considering angles, considering light, considering who sat where and who was placed beside whom.

“Tell me that procession is turning in at our gate.”

It was not turning in at their gate. It went past, wheels crunching steadily, the falcon disappearing between the trees at the north end of the drive, bound for the high ground.

“He will call,” Lady Thornbury declared, spinning from the window. “He must call. He is a bachelor. He is a duke.”

She stopped. She pointed at Nell.

“Have the good china polished. All of it. Today. Before noon. I want the blue drawing room usable by Friday — no, by Thursday. And the third best bedchamber aired.”

“The chimney, my lady.”

“Then unblock the chimney, Farrow, I am not asking for the crown jewels.”

Nell looked past her, out the window, at the road where the last coach had vanished.

She looked at the place where the falcon crest had been until it was gone.

Rowan.

She turned back to the matter of the blocked chimney and said nothing at all.

Blackmoor Hall came to her the following afternoon, delivered by the simple impossible fact of a large man on a grey horse, appearing at the servants’ door.

Nell was crossing the kitchen yard with a basket of dried herbs when she heard hooves on the gravel. She looked up.

He had bathed. He had shaved. He wore clean clothes of a cut whose quality required no decoration to announce itself. A strip of white linen was pressed against his left temple with surgical precision.

He looked nothing like the man she had pulled out of a ditch.

He looked exactly like him.

He saw her the instant she saw him. The kitchen yard held the quiet of mid-afternoon; the pale October light lay thin across the wet stone. Somewhere behind her, at the kitchen window, she felt rather than saw Mrs. Tandy’s round face appear and vanish again, and she knew with complete certainty that by suppertime the entire household would know a gentleman had ridden into the yard.

“Spirits,” Nell said, nodding at the bandage.

“Spirits,” he confirmed. “Not water.”

He dismounted and led the grey to the wall-post with the ease of a man who had been doing his own horses since he was a boy, which she noted and did not remark upon. Then he turned and held out a folded piece of cloth.

The harness rag. Clean now. Pressed flat.

Nell looked at it.

In eight years at Thornbury House, not one guest, not one visitor, not her ladyship herself, had ever returned a single thing borrowed from the servant side of the house. The concept simply did not penetrate. Things went out and stayed out. That was the natural order.

She took the rag.

“You rode three miles to return a harness cloth.”

“I also wanted to confirm you got home safely. The road was bad.” He paused. “And I wanted to tell you something I should have told you last night.”

She waited.

“I am the Duke of Blackmoor,” he said.

Plain as that. No theatre. No preamble. He said it the way he had said spirits, not water — a fact, stated, with no expectation that the stating would change the fact.

“I know,” Nell said.

Something in his expression shifted.

“You knew last night.”

“I suspected before we reached your gates. And you said nothing.”

“Neither did you.”

She folded the rag and put it in her basket. “I assumed you had your reasons, your grace.”

He looked at her. It was that re-calibrating look she would come to know very well — the slight adjustment of the gaze, as though she kept presenting herself at a marginally different angle than he had prepared for.

“Does Lady Thornbury know you drove me home?”

“No.”

“You did not tell her.”

“I did not consider it relevant to her morning.”

She met his eyes steadily.

“Is there something else, your grace, or only the rag?”

“I require a housekeeper,” he said.

Nell said nothing.

“Blackmoor has been without a competent domestic manager for eleven months. The house is in considerable disrepair. Three staff remain, all of them loyal, all of them elderly, all of them entirely overwhelmed. I am told you manage most of the domestic operations at Thornbury — the provision accounts, the maintenance schedules, the ordering of everything that keeps fourteen servants and forty rooms functioning.”

She kept her face entirely neutral.

“I am a maid, your grace.”

“You are considerably more than a maid, and I think we are both aware of that.”

No flattery in it. A statement of observed fact, delivered in the same plain register he had used to say his own name.

“I am offering you the position of housekeeper at Blackmoor. The salary is sixty pounds a year.”

Sixty pounds.

Three times what she earned. Three times, and four more on top of that.

She looked at him in the pale kitchen-yard light. She thought about the blocked chimney. She thought about the three o’clock bell. She thought about the guest who had sent back the ham twice, and the blue drawing room, which had needed new glazing for two years and had not received it because her ladyship would not commit to the expense, and the way her ladyship had just that morning ordered the chimney unblocked as though it were a matter of will.

She thought about sixty pounds, and what a woman could build out of sixty pounds, and how very quiet the house would be.

Then she said: “I will require a full accounting of the current household expenses before I accept.”

He waited.

“I will not walk into a ledger I have not examined,” Nell said. “Which means I will need to see the books before I give you an answer, and I will need to see them at a time when I am not expected in this kitchen.”

“Tomorrow,” he said. “Six o’clock.”

“I work until six.”

“Then come at half past.”

She nodded once. Then she picked up her basket of herbs and went back inside, and behind her she heard the grey horse turn on the gravel, and the sound of a man riding away, and — because she was not, in the end, made of stone — she permitted herself to look back at the doorway.

He was already gone.

But Mary Bell was standing at the kitchen window with her arms folded and a look on her face that said the news had already gone through the house like a fox through a hen coop, and that there would be questions tonight, and that Nell had better have a very good answer ready.

“What,” said Mrs. Bell, “was that.”

Nell set the basket down on the table.

“That,” she said, “was the chimney.”