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

Chapter 5

She went at half past six, with the light already gone and the air smelling of wet leaves and woodsmoke, and she walked, because she had no horse and would not ask for one.

It took her fifty minutes. She arrived with mud on her boots and her cap straight, and the door was opened before she had finished knocking by a man so old and so slow that the act of opening it appeared to be a considered decision he had made some weeks earlier.

“You will be Mrs. Farrow,” he said.

“Miss Farrow.”

“Ah.” He absorbed this without any visible adjustment. “Mr. Craddock. I am the butler here, though in a house of this size there ought to be a larger staff and there is scarcely one.” He stepped back. “His grace is in the estate office. He asked that you be brought to him directly and that I not fuss.”

“Do you fuss, Mr. Craddock?”

“Historically, yes.”

He led her through the hall, and Nell walked with her hands at her sides and her eyes everywhere.

Blackmoor Hall in daylight was magnificent in its bones and catastrophic in its present condition. Dark stone outside, falcon-crowned balustrades built to last three centuries. Inside, eleven months of neglect had stripped it of warmth and function. The carpets were thick with dust. Half the chimneys wanted sweeping. In the great hall, a strip of plaster the length of a cart had come down from the cornice and lay in a heap against the wainscot with the resigned permanence of something that had been there long enough to be considered architecture.

The library ceiling, she saw through the open door, was threatening to become the library floor.

In the kitchen the range worked, but the pantry was bare to a degree that approached the philosophical.

Three people stood in that kitchen, and all three looked up at her with the desperate relief of shipwreck survivors sighting a sail. Craddock, whom she had already met. A cook so stout and so old that she seemed to be made partly out of her own bread, who introduced herself as Mrs. Tandy and said that she had been cooking at Blackmoor for forty-one years and had never once in that time been permitted to buy a decent piece of fish. And a footman of about twenty with hair the colour of a carrot and hands that he could not keep still, whose name was Arthur, and who said, “Pleased to meet you, miss,” three times in the space of one introduction.

Nell shook their hands. She asked each of them one question. She then asked Mrs. Tandy two more questions about the state of the pantry, and Mrs. Tandy’s eyes filled up with something that she immediately blamed on the onions.

Rowan spread the ledgers across the estate office desk and then stepped back and stood to one side while Nell read them.

He did not hover. He did not explain. He simply stood with his arms crossed over his chest and watched her work, and she read each page with the slow methodical attention she brought to everything that mattered.

She made notations in pencil. Three, at first. Then five. Then nine.

“Your previous estate manager,” she said, not looking up, “was either incompetent or dishonest. Possibly both.”

“Dishonest.” He said it flatly. “I dismissed him shortly after I inherited the title.”

“The household budget has been catastrophically misallocated.” She turned a page. “The silver maintenance line is three times the appropriate figure, and the silver has not been touched in months. The coal account does not reflect actual consumption. Somebody was routinely taking the difference. This figure here — the cooper’s account — has been carried forward for two years without a single delivery against it.”

“Keep going.”

“Mrs. Tandy is being paid twenty-eight pounds a year. For a house this size, with her tenure and her skill, she should be earning no less than forty-five.” She looked up. “It is the reason there is no fish in the pantry. She cannot buy the fish, so she has stopped trying.”

Rowan uncrossed his arms.

“Adjust it,” he said.

Nell looked at him. Just like that.

“I am not accustomed to arguing with someone who has read a ledger more carefully in twenty minutes than my solicitor has managed in eight months,” he said. “I need the silver situation resolved, the coal account cleaned up, and the library ceiling attended to before it injures somebody.”

“I will need to hire staff.”

“Hire them.”

“That will mean a carpenter, two chimney sweeps, at least two additional maids, a coal merchant—”

“Hire them.”

“—and a household repair budget that does not require your approval for individual items below a certain value. If every necessary repair has to be routed through you personally, every necessary repair will wait six weeks and cost twice as much.”

He studied her.

“Below what threshold?”

She had thought about this on the walk. She had thought about it very carefully, because the number mattered — too low and she would be back in this office every fortnight begging for pennies, too high and he would be a fool to grant it, and whatever else he was, he was not a fool.

“Ten pounds,” she said. “And twelve shillings.”

A silence. His grey eyes held hers across the desk.

“Done,” he said.

She returned her attention to the ledger. “Then I will require two weeks’ notice served at Thornbury.”

“I will speak to Lady Thornbury on your behalf.”

“You will not.”

He blinked.

She set the pencil down with precision.

“If you involve yourself, her ladyship will understand that you have a personal interest in my departure. She will then spend those two weeks making them as difficult as she can arrange, and she is extremely good at exactly that. Also, she will ask you questions, and you will have to lie to her, and you will be bad at it, and she will know.”

He did not deny it.

“I will give my own notice, in the ordinary way,” Nell said, “and I will come to you in a fortnight.”

Rowan looked at her for a long moment. It was the look of a man consistently encountering a situation one degree more interesting than the one he had prepared for.

“In a fortnight, then,” he said.

And Nell Farrow, who had never in her life been given a reason to expect that her life would change on a Thursday, walked home that night through the wet October dark with sixty pounds a year in her pocket and a ledger’s worth of errors in her head, and did not once allow herself to smile until she was safely inside her own door.

The next morning, at the breakfast table, Lady Thornbury received her notice.