Page 64 of A Bride for the Ruthless Duke

The room rang with it.

Augusta did not argue. She did not apologise, and she did not explain, and she did not soften any part of what she had said, and that, in the end, was the most respectful thing she could have done, because it took Ellen seriously enough to leave her in possession of her own anger. She rose, and set the embroidery frame down on the seat of the chair, and looked at Ellen one moment longer with something in her face that might have been satisfaction and might have been grief and was very likely both.

“There she is,” Augusta said quietly, to herself more than to Ellen, and went out, and closed the door behind her.

Ellen stood in the middle of the room.

She was alone. Properly alone, for the first time in five days, with no one holding the low fire in the cold room, no one filling the silence with rooks, and the quiet that came down was a different quiet from the one she had been living inside. It was louder. It had her own raised voice still in it.

She had driven off the one person who had sat with her, and the park outside the window had gone fully dark, and she stood there with her heart going hard and understood, with the terrible clarity that only arrives when every comfort has been stripped away, that she had spent five days accomplishing one single thing, which was to prove to the whole of the household and to herself that she could be broken by a man who had been paid to break her.

She did not like the look of that. Standing in the dark with the anger still hot in her, she found she did not like it at all.

Augusta had left the embroidery frame on the seat of the chair. Ellen looked at it a long while in the dimness, the half-worked flowers, the needle pushed through the linen and waiting, a thing set down mid-stitch by a woman who had said her piece and walked out. She understood, looking at it, that Augusta had not forgotten it. Augusta forgot nothing.

The old woman had left it there on purpose, the way one leaves a glove or a book in a room one fully intends to enter again, and the leaving of it said, more plainly than any speech, that the door had been shut but not locked, and that she would be back tomorrow whether she was welcome or not.

The thought ought to have softened the anger. It did not, quite, not yet. But Ellen marked it, the way she had once marked the state of a bed of soil or the honest price of seed, and the marking was the old Ellen, the one who took the true measure of a thing, lifting her head for the first time in five days.

She did not go down to dinner. She was not ready for that, and she knew it, and the knowledge was itself a small return of something. But she lay down on her side that night, on her side and not on her back staring up at the canopy as she had lain for five nights, and the difference was small and it was real.

And lying on her side she thought, not in the slow closing circles of the week but in something straighter, of the kitchen garden going back to weed, and the roof she had ordered and never gone to see, and the stillroom inventory with the ink dried on the quill and the chestnut mare turning her head to the yard gate every morning at the hour her mistress no longer came.

And she understood, lying there in the dark, the thing she had been too far under to take in that morning. Hibbert had not sent up a question about a horse. He had sent her the only message a groom could decently send his mistress by way of a housemaid and a breakfast tray, that a creature she had taught to trust her was standing at a gate, waiting, off its feed, and would mend the very day she came back to it. He had been asking her to come back. He had dressed it as a question about a paddock because a man of his station could say no more than that, and she had told him to do as he thought best and turned her face to the glass.

She thought of the whole of it, the garden and the roof and the inventory and the mare, all the things that had been hers by her own hand, the only things in this entire bought and bargained matrimony that had ever been hers by her own hand and nobody else’s, lying neglected and going back to ruin because she had surrendered her week to the three men who had hurt her and let them keep it, as though they had not taken quite enough already without being handed this as well.

And she thought, with no warmth in it yet, only the bare flat sense of a woman doing a sum, that if she was going to be a woman at all, she might as well be one who got up in the morning.

She did not get up that night. The thought was not strong enough yet to lift her, and she did not pretend that it was.

But the thought was there. And it had not been there yesterday.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“Word has arrived from Carrow, Your Grace. He has given a full account, and quite exceeded your instructions, I fancy.”

Theodore took the packet and broke the seal, and Pearce stood with his hands behind him and waited patiently while his master read, which took some time, because Carrow was a thorough man and had not failed in his mission.

It was all there, laid clearly out in a friend’s dry hand. The Earl of Greaves had nursed his grievance for nine years, since the spring Theodore rose in the Lords and spoke for three quarters of an hour and killed the sugar bill that would have made the earl a second fortune off the backs of men he would never have to look at. The grievance had not faded.

Carrow noted, in a line at the foot of the page, that the earl spoke of the bill still, at his own table, nine years on, the way a man speaks of a wound that has never properly closed, and that those who dined with him had learned not to bring up the name of Pillard at all, the name being apt to sour the port.

Theodore read that twice. He knew the shape of a hatred carried that long. He had carried one or two himself, and they did not improve a man, and he held no illusion that his own were the prettier for being, in his own estimation, the better deserved.

There was more. Through a chain of London agents with names that meant nothing and led nowhere, Greaves had been buying the river bottom-land off Pillard tenants these three years past, quietly, a field here and a water-meadow there, the Burtons’ lost acres among them, assembling along Theodore’s own river the beginnings of a hold he meant one day to close.

And there, at the foot of Carrow’s last page, in the same dry hand, the name of a regiment, and the name of an officer in debt, and a sum of money that had changed hands at a coffee-house in town a fortnight before a certain night at a certain folly.

“He hired the lieutenant,” Theodore said. “Carrow has even the sum.”

“Then Your Grace has him. Whenever you choose.”

“I have him.” Theodore set the pages down, aligned them with precision, and found himself entirely devoid of the emotion he had anticipated. “I have had men ruined for less than is on these pages, Pearce, and slept the better for it. Stay your hand for the time being.”

Pearce’s brows did not move, which was as near to surprise as he permitted himself. “Your Grace was decided, a fortnight since.”

“A fortnight since I had not thought the whole of it through. To bring the earl down I must bring the folly into the light, his hire of Vance, the trap, the trees. And the moment the folly is in the light my wife is in it beside him, the duchess who walked out alone at night to meet an officer, and no court in England will hear the one without relishing the other.” He turned the squared pages face down. “I will not buy his ruin with her name. Hold it. Keep gathering. The earl has waited nine years to move against me. I find I can wait a little longer to move against him.”