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

Chapter 9

Lady Thornbury did not accept the situation gracefully.

She arrived on a Wednesday morning in November, without announcement, which was either extraordinary social confidence or extraordinary social blindness, and Lady Thornbury had spent her whole life choosing to believe it was the former.

Nell reached the entrance hall at the precise moment her ladyship swept inside with the forward momentum of an incoming weather system.

The hall had been cleaned and polished, and the smell of old damp had been replaced by woodsmoke and beeswax and the faint green note of the juniper Mrs. Tandy had hung by the door in the country fashion. Lady Thornbury’s eyes went around it and registered the transformation, and something moved behind them, cold and quick.

“The house looks remarkably well,” she said, adjusting.

“Thank you, my lady.”

“His grace is—”

“His grace is with his steward this morning, reviewing the tenant boundary agreements, and is not receiving visitors.” Nell held her ground pleasantly. “If you would care to leave a card, I will ensure he receives it.”

Lady Thornbury did not care to leave a card. Lady Thornbury cared to stand in the Duke of Blackmoor’s drawing room and be seen to be doing it. She was, however, sufficiently intelligent to understand that she was being managed — and managed by her own former maid, which was a humiliation she was not yet prepared to process in public.

She left a card with the air of a woman making a tactical retreat rather than a concession.

On her way out, she paused on the threshold and said, in the tone one uses to leave a chess piece on the board as a reminder of available moves:

“The cousins from Bath are staying through the month.”

“Very good, my lady.”

The door closed. Nell stood in the hall for a moment with the card in her hand, and then she did something she would not have done a year earlier. She laughed — once, silently, with her hand over her mouth and her shoulders shaking — because it was that or nothing, and there was nobody in the hall to see.

Rowan appeared in the kitchen passage an hour later, still carrying a survey map.

He found her at the kitchen table with the linen inventory spread out before her.

“Lady Thornbury called,” he said.

“She did.”

“You turned her away.”

“You were occupied. I did not wish to interrupt your morning before establishing whether that was your preference.”

He leaned his shoulder against the doorframe. The map hung from his hand.

“And if my preference is to receive her?”

“Then I will show her to the drawing room in future without question.”

She looked up from the linen list.

“I simply make no assumptions about what a person wants until they have told me.”

He looked at her for a moment.

“My preference,” he said, “is not to spend a Friday evening listening to descriptions of northern landscape paintings by three women I have never met.”

“There are two paintings now. Another arrived by post on Monday.” A pause. “The perspective on the falcons is somewhat improved from the first.”

“Burn it.”

“I have been burning them in the kitchen range. Mrs. Tandy says they make excellent kindling — better than the green wood from the west orchard.”

The sound that came out of him then was a full, genuine laugh. Short, explosive, entirely unguarded.

It struck the kitchen walls and scattered, and Mrs. Tandy looked up from her stockpot with the expression of a woman who had been waiting a long time for something and had just watched it arrive.