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

Chapter 8

The study at Blackmoor was a large room made smaller by accumulated correspondence, rolled maps, and the productive disorder of a man who thought in several directions at once.

Rowan was at the desk when she knocked and entered, still in his riding coat from the morning, his collar loosened against the heat of the fire. The low afternoon light through the tall windows caught the dust that the new maids were still working their way through, and filled the air with a kind of particulate gold.

He looked tired. Not the tiredness of a man who had slept badly, but the specific tiredness of men carrying responsibilities they had not been trained to carry, and who refuse to let anyone see them stumble under the weight.

He tapped the revised account book.

“You have cut the supply costs by a third.”

“The prior merchant was price-gouging. It required three conversations and one written comparison of regional market rates to correct.”

“The library ceiling?”

“Repaired. The carpenter finished two days ago. I also asked him to assess the east wing window frames while his equipment was on site. Two of them are rotting. I have documented it in the report on your desk, filed under expenditures above ten pounds and twelve shillings.”

He found the report in the stack at his left. He read the relevant lines.

“Approved,” he said, reaching for his pen.

Nell cleared her throat.

“The three alternative quotations are on the following page.”

He stopped. He turned the page. He read the alternatives in silence — the carpenter’s figure against two others, one cheaper and one dearer — and then he initialed the carpenter’s figure, which was the cheapest of the three, and set the pen down.

He was fighting something. She could see it in the controlled set of his jaw. Not anger. Its opposite.

“How do you take your tea?” she said.

He looked up. “I beg your pardon.”

“Tea. It is past four. You have been at that desk since before I arrived this morning, and the tray Craddock brought you at noon came back untouched. I am going to ask Mrs. Tandy to send another. How do you take it?”

A pause long enough to suggest that no one had asked him this particular question in quite some time, or had asked it without wanting something in return for the asking.

“Dark,” he said, after a moment. “No milk. No sugar.”

“Good.”

She moved toward the door and paused with her hand on the frame.

“The window frames in the east wing are rotting because the guttering above them has been blocked for a considerable time, and the overflow has been sitting against the stone. Having the guttering cleared before the first frost will prevent the same problem developing in the west wing. It is in the same report, listed under items I can authorise myself.”

She walked out before he could respond.

The tray that arrived ten minutes later held one cup of dark tea, steaming in a thin straight ribbon. No milk, no sugar. A small plate of bread with good butter, because Nell had observed what came back on his lunch tray the week before and had noted, without mentioning it to anybody, that a man of his size who ate that little would be running himself into the ground by Christmas.

He sat at the desk and drank the tea and ate the bread.

Both were perfect.

And then he sat for a while in the quiet of the late afternoon, with the dust still moving slowly through the low light, and did not pick up his pen for a full three minutes.

Nell, coming back through the passage an hour later to check on the kitchen, heard nothing at all from behind the study door. Which was, she thought, the most hopeful sound the house had made since she arrived.