The Duke Gave Her the Servants No House Would Take—They Ran the Finest Kitchen She’d Ever Eaten In

Chapter 2

He had been sent down from London in the third week of April with a hatbox, a writing case, and a set of instructions he had not been consulted about.

Daniel Hollis had been the Duke’s estate agent at Ashwell for six years, and he was a neat man of forty with a high, quick forehead and the habit of holding his hat rather than wearing it indoors, as if he were permanently preparing to leave. He kept the estate ledgers in a clear sloping hand. He was neither cruel nor kind; he was accurate, which in the service of a man like the Duke of Marabe was almost the same thing as being honest.

The Duke was thirty-six. He had inherited three estates and a house in town at twenty-one, when his father had gone into the ground at Ashwell in the November of a bad winter, and he had spent the fifteen years since proving that grief could be managed the way a man manages a portfolio — at a distance, and with a good man on the ground to keep it working.