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

Chapter 7

In the fortnight before she crossed over, Nell Farrow drove north on three separate afternoons.

She did not announce these visits as anything other than what they appeared to be — household correspondence, a few practical questions, a bundle of measurements and specifications that needed to be confirmed in person. She rode up on the provisions cart, because Bramble was as much hers as anything at Thornbury was, and because after eight years the old horse had earned the right to be borrowed.

In truth she was walking the house.

She walked it from the attics down, room by room, with a pencil and a small bound notebook that lived in her apron pocket. She counted chimneys. She counted windows with cracked panes and windows with no panes at all. She stood in the long gallery and listened, and heard water where water should not be. She went into the cellars with a candle and came out again with the candle still lit, which was more than the last person had managed.

She talked to Craddock about the way the house had been run under the old duke — not the old duke, she corrected herself, the brother, the one who had died — and listened to what he said and to what he carefully did not.

She talked to Mrs. Tandy about suppliers, and about which of them had been overcharging Blackmoor for a decade on the assumption that nobody would ever compare one invoice against another.

She talked to Arthur, who was twenty and eager to the point of overcorrection, and who told her — within four minutes of their second conversation — the entire history of the household’s coal deliveries, including several details nobody had asked him for and one that mattered a great deal.

And on the third visit, standing in the middle of the kitchen passage with her notebook open, she made her lists.

Then she crossed over permanently, and she did it with the quiet economy of a woman who had already done the work in her head.

She hired a coal merchant out of the village who did not water his deliveries — she had Arthur weigh three loads from three different merchants over three weeks and put the results in a column, and the column told the whole story. She engaged two chimney sweeps, the second one because the first one refused to do the west stack without scaffolding at ruinous cost and the second one did it from the roof with a boy and a rope for eleven shillings. She found a carpenter in the village whose estimates were honest by the simple expedient of asking him for three estimates on three separate jobs and comparing what he had quoted against what he charged.

She engaged two additional maids through the church notice board at Mireside. One of them, a girl of seventeen named Susan with wrists like kindling and a habit of flinching when spoken to, she hired on the spot, and did not examine her reasons for doing so.

She moved Mrs. Tandy’s provisions from the Thornbury-preferred merchant to a farm cooperative on the Hexham road, and the fish arrived on a Thursday, and Mrs. Tandy cried for the second time in a fortnight and again blamed the onions.

And she reduced the weekly household expenditure by a third in ten days.

It was not magic. It had never been magic. It was simply that no one had ever done it. Nell had a mind that held figures the way a well-made basket holds water, and eleven months of neglect had left a great deal of water lying about in the wrong places, and she had gone and picked it all up.

Craddock brought the revised accounts to Rowan on a Wednesday afternoon with the trembling reverence of a man bearing miraculous news.

Rowan looked at the figures in silence for a long moment. He turned a page. He turned another. He looked up at Craddock, who had been in that house for forty years and had seen three dukes of Blackmoor and had opinions about all three of them that he kept entirely to himself.

“Send Miss Farrow to the study,” he said.