Page 43 of A Bride for the Ruthless Duke

“I should think not. He goes to a great deal of trouble to be thought worse than he is.”

“Yes.” The old woman said it with an odd satisfaction, as if a thing long suspected had been confirmed by an unbiased witness. “He has done that since he was a boy. It is a tiresome habit and I have never found the cure for it.” She set the cup down. “Drink your tea, child. You have the look of a girl who has been living on resolve, and resolve is poor fare. Tell me about the garden. I am told you have frightened the gardener half to death, which is the best news I have had of this house in eleven years.”

“The mare has a crooked blaze and a good heart, and the housekeeper is a terror and we have come to an understanding, and the country is not the punishment I took it for.” She turned her cup on its saucer. “And I do not understand my husband at all, and I am beginning to think I never shall.”

“No one does, my dear.” Augusta set down her own cup. “No one has been permitted to do so, these eleven years, and the reasons for that are his to give you and not mine. I will tell you only the one useful thing I know.”

“Which is?”

“That he is not a locked room because the room is empty.” She looked at Ellen steadily. “There is a great deal behind that door, and it was worth the locking, once, and he was a boy when he turned the key and never learned the turning back. You will get nothing by hammering. You will get a great deal, in time, by persisting.”

“And if I have not the patience to persist against a locked door for the next forty years?”

“Then you will be like every other woman who entered into matrimony with a difficult man, and you will manage.” Augusta’s voice gentled. “But I do not think you are like every other woman, or he would not have written a groom three pages about a kind eye. Persist, Ellen. It cost me sixty years to learn that word, and I am making you a present of it over cold tea.”

Ellen did not mention the kitchen garden, and Augusta did not ask what she was holding back, and the tea went quite cold between them while the light moved across the floor.

She had her confirmation at dinner.

Augusta needled him through the soup and the fish, about his solitude, about a sober coat, about a vote in the Lords she pronounced wrong-headed in a tone built to be argued with, and Theodore, who gave the rest of the world two words and an unreadable countenance, returned every serve of it dry.

“You will end your days alone in that great barn at Lockton,” Augusta told him, “talking to the portraits, and the portraits will pretend to be from home.”

“The portraits and I understand one another. They do not give me advice across a dinner table.”

“They would not dare. I am the only one left in England with the nerve, and I shall not last forever, and then where will you be.”

“Quieter,” he said, “and worse advised,” and there was something under it that was almost affection.

“You see?” Augusta turned to Ellen, delighted. “Almost a compete sentence. I have seen him last a whole dinner less words.”

The corner of his mouth moved, and his eyes warmed, and for the length of a breath the locked room stood open and Ellen saw plainly what was kept in it, which was nothing more terrible than ordinary fondness, freely given to a woman he trusted.

He possessed it. That was the sum of the discovery, and the realisation settled upon her heart like a sudden, chilling weight.

Augusta caught her at the foot of the stairs afterward, when Theodore had gone to his study.

“You saw it,” the old woman said quietly.

“I saw it.”

“Then you know it is not that the man has no warmth in him.”

“No.” Ellen put her hand on the cold rail. “I know exactly what it is. He has it, and he has decided where it goes, and he has looked at me and decided I am not the place.” She went up two steps and stopped. “Do you know, my lady, I think I should have found the empty room easier to bear.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

“Hibbert sends word, Your Grace. The duchess has taken the mare out alone, and she has been gone above the hour.”

Theodore set down his quill.

Across the table, Crewe looked from the estate map to the unfinished notes, his finger still resting near the marked ditches. “We have not settled the Hartside drainage, Your Grace.”

“We will finish the drainage tomorrow.”

“It is only that the Hartside ditches will not wait much longer on the weather,” Crewe said carefully, as if long service had taught him the difference between objection and self-preservation.

Theodore reached for his gloves. “They have waited eleven years. They will wait until tomorrow.”