Page 41 of A Bride for the Ruthless Duke

“And whose task is it now?”

“Nobody’s, in honest truth. His Grace’s orders run to the park and the home farm. The inside, the preserving and the herbs, fell to Mrs. Selby, and Mrs. Selby has forty rooms to run and no hours left for a peach wall.”

Ellen walked down the central path, reading the ground as she went. “These herb borders have seeded themselves into one another. That is three years of nobody, not one.”

“Nearer four, my lady, if we’re being truthful in front of company.”

“And the beans were left on the vine until they went to bullets, which is a waste of the seed and the bed both.” She stopped at the south wall. “That pear’s limb is broken and hanging by the bark. It will canker the whole tree by Michaelmas if it stands.”

“It will, Your Grace. I’ve not had the leave nor the hands.”

“Then it comes off today, clean, and the wound dressed before the dew is down.” She turned to face him. “Tomorrow you and I walk the whole of it with a slate and settle what is saved for the spring and what is torn out. I want the stillroom opened and a full inventory by Friday, and last quarter’s household accounts sent up to my sitting room before dinner.”

Coyne looked at her the way Hibbert had looked at her at the grey’s stall, a man revising his sum. “Might I ask, my lady. Does His Grace know you mean to take it on?”

“No. And I shall not be asking him.”

“It’s only that I’d not want to be caught between Your Grace and His.”

“You will not be. If anyone is to be caught, it will be me, and I have been caught in worse places than a peach wall.” She looked down the long garden, the warm brick at her back. “It is nobody’s task, you said. It is mine now. A garden this size, kept properly, feeds a house of forty rooms through a whole winter and prevents a quite ruinous spending at the market stalls. There is nothing grand in it. It is only sense, and I am tired of sitting in a drawing room while sense goes to seed outside the window. Can you spare a boy this afternoon for the bolted beds?”

“Two, Your Grace. And gladly.”

“Then we begin this afternoon.”

She rode out after luncheon, and Hibbert put her up himself and stood at the mare’s head a moment before he let go.

“She’ll feel the strangeness of you the first half-mile. Sit quiet and let her find you, and don’t go correcting what isn’t wrong yet.”

“I shall behave. Which way is kindest, the first time?”

“Up the south ride to the ridge, and home along the river. Good going, no holes, and you’ll see the whole of what you’ve wedded into from the top.”

“That is either a recommendation or a warning.”

“Bit of both, Your Grace.”

The mare felt the strangeness of her, and then she did not, and by the head of the south ride Heather had stopped asking questions and Ellen had stopped holding her breath. She came out on the ridge into a wind off the river and pulled up to look, and the whole of the valley lay under her, the home farm and the grey roofs of Wrenford and the long shine of the water, and for a moment there was nobody to be a duchess in front of and nothing to manage, and it was the first such moment she had been given in three years.

At the foot of the ridge a woman was pegging washing at a cottage gate, and she straightened and bobbed as Ellen came down the lane.

“Your Grace.” Her eyes went over the mare with frank approval. “That’s the Leicester mare, then. We heard she’d come.”

“You heard of her before I did, I believe.”

“Oh, the whole parish heard, my lady. A lady’s horse stood in His Grace’s yard after all these years. My husband said the world must be ending.” She caught herself and flushed. “Begging your pardon.”

“Your husband may well be right. What is your name?”

“Mary Burton, Your Grace. My man holds the smallholding up the lane, what’s left of it.”

“What is left of it?”

“That’s a longer tale than you’ll want at a gate, my lady.” The flush deepened, and the woman looked sorry she had said it.

“Then you shall tell me the longer tale another day, Mrs. Burton, for I mean to learn this country properly, and I shall need people who will give me the truth of it and not the version fit for a duchess.”

“You’ll get the truth up this lane, my lady, whether you’ve a use for it or no.”