Chapter One

“You will, of course, find your own arrangements.”

Lady Foskett said it over the butter, the knife moving in long even strokes, her eyes never once lifting from the toast.

“Of course, Aunt.” Cecilia’s voice came out perfectly level, which gave her a small private satisfaction she had no intention of showing.

“The house closes at the end of next week. I shall be at my sister’s in Wiltshire by Friday. Mrs Potts has had her notice, and Thomas comes with me.” She paused to drink. “The agency is seeing to the rest. I trust you have some connection you might apply to.”

“I have a few lines I mean to follow up on.”

It was not, in any strict sense, true. The governess post in Hertfordshire, her last real prospect, had dissolved three weeks ago in a short apologetic letter about a younger candidate, and she had folded it into the grate and gone back to the accounts.

“Have you, indeed? You might have mentioned them rather earlier, you know. But then you were never very forthcoming about your intentions.”

“I had not supposed my intentions to be of much interest to the household.”

“They have never had cause to be. You have been comfortable enough these eight years, I think. Fed, housed, and kept in respectable company. There are a great many women in your situation who would have given a good deal for as much.”

“I am aware of it, Aunt. You have been good enough to remind me with some regularity.”

“And yet you say it as though it were a grievance.”

“I say it as though it were the weather. One remarks upon it, but one does not expect it to alter.”

“They are of interest now, in any event, when they have grown inconvenient.” Lady Foskett dabbed at her mouth. “I do hope you have not been counting on remaining past Friday. The lease will scarcely keep itself open for the sake of one person’s want of foresight.”

“I had not imagined it would.”

“You might write to the agency yourself, if it eases you. A companion of your years and your particular usefulness is not so very difficult to place, provided one is not overnice about the terms.”

“You are all consideration, Aunt.”

“I am practical, Cecilia, which is a good deal more useful than consideration and rather more to be relied upon.”

“You will want a character for me, I suppose.”

“I shall write you something suitable.” Lady Foskett considered the prospect as though it were a novel and faintly tiresome one. “Steady, capable, discreet. Nothing that commits me to an opinion, you understand, but enough to open a door. It is a great deal more than the Wrens of Devonshire have offered you, who, I observe, have still not troubled to write.”

“They have not.”

“No. Blood is a good deal less reliable than people are fond of pretending. The world runs upon usefulness, Cecilia, and very little besides, and you have at least had the wit to make yourself useful.” She rose, settling her wrapper about her shoulders. “One cannot always have what one hopes for. You of all people ought to know that by now.”

“I had hoped, at the least,” Cecilia said, and the evenness of it cost her something she kept off her face, “that my own arrangements might not be wanted quite so promptly.”

Lady Foskett paused at the threshold, and it was the particular pause that always preceded the remark she had been saving for last.

“Who else would have you, Cecilia, at your age and with your prospects?” Pleasant, almost kind, which was somehow the worst of it. “You ought to be grateful I kept you about me as long as I have.”

The door drew shut behind her, soft and well-oiled, her tread already on the stairs to oversee the trunks.

Cecilia allowed herself one minute by the clock and not a second more. There was no connection to apply to and never had been, only the registry office, a letter that could go out today, and the open question of where she was to sleep and what she was to eat until something came of it. She got as far as the fourth sentence at the writing desk, the one obliged to explain her availability, before the footman appeared with the silver tray.

“A card, miss.”

She took it up. Lord Everett Vane. The name struck no chord, though the Lord suggested a viscount, and the Vanes were respectable enough.

“At this hour?” She turned the card once in her fingers. “Is the gentleman still waiting?”

“In the drawing room, miss. I did not quite like to turn him away.”

“You did very right. I shall come down directly.”

He stood at the window when she came in, a man of perhaps thirty, fair-haired and broad through the shoulders, examining Lady Foskett’s porcelain shepherdesses with an expression that managed both genuine interest and faint alarm. A dimple showed when he glanced up, and he smiled as though he had never once in his life been unwelcome anywhere.

“Miss Wren. Forgive the intrusion. I had hoped you might spare me half an hour.”

“As it happens, Lord Vane, I have a good deal more than half an hour at my disposal.” She took the chair that had always been her aunt’s, for no reason beyond a sense that this was a morning for choosing where she sat. “You may even have the whole of it, should you prove interesting.”

Something recalibrated in his face as he understood that her freedom this morning was not the pleasantry she had dressed it as.

“You will think me forward,” he said, taking the chair opposite, “but I would rather not waste your morning, nor my own, on the usual pleasantries.”

“Then we already agree. I have had a surfeit of pleasantries before noon and very little to show for any of them.”

“I had hoped we might be of one mind on that,” he said, and clasped his hands.

“You have brought no papers,” she went on before he could begin. “No portfolio, no letter of introduction, no list of a family’s requirements. Whatever you have come to propose, it is not a governess you are seeking, or you would have come equipped to engage one.”

“I was warned you would notice as much within the quarter-hour. I see the warning has done me no good whatever.”

“Few warnings do. People are forever being told what I am likely to observe, and forever astonished when I observe it. And who, may I ask, gave you so accurate a warning?”

“That is rather further along than I am permitted to be just yet.” The dimple again. “Might I put a question to you instead? Would you call yourself a practical woman, Miss Wren, by disposition?”

“I would call myself a woman who has never been able to afford to be anything else, which I expect comes to much the same thing for your purposes.”

“It comes to a great deal for my purposes.” He leaned in. “I am relieved, in truth. I had begun to fear I was sent to find someone ornamental.”

“Then you were sent to the wrong houses entirely, until this one. I have never in my life been ornamental, nor had the leisure to learn the trick of it.”

“Discretion, then. Is that a quality you possess, Miss Wren, or only one you would claim if a gentleman were tactless enough to ask?”

“A woman who has spent eight years in other people’s drawing rooms learns to hold her tongue, or she does not last eight years. I have swallowed a great many things I might have said. I have found, on the whole, that the unsaid keeps rather better than the said, and costs a good deal less to keep.”

“That is very nearly the most useful answer anyone has given me in a fortnight.”

“Then your fortnight has been poorly spent, my lord, or poorly populated.”

“And if a position were to take you a good distance out of London,” he said, “to a household in the country, where the society is thin and the evenings are long, would that weigh with you?”

“It would weigh in its favour. London has shown me a great deal of itself these eight years, very little of it kindly, and I should not grieve to see the back of it.”

“You have no attachment to keep you, then? No one who would object to your going or expect to be consulted upon it?”

“You ask that as a man who already knows the answer and would merely like to hear me say it plainly. There is no one. My father has been some years dead, his people in Devonshire have made their feelings tolerably clear, and my aunt, as you may have observed, will be glad to have the matter settled before her trunks are loaded.”

“I am sorry for it,” he said, and to her mild surprise he sounded as though he meant the thing.

“You need not be. A woman who expects nothing is very seldom disappointed, and I have made rather a long study of expecting nothing.” She tilted her head a fraction. “But you have not come the length of London to condole with me over my relations, Lord Vane. You have come to satisfy yourself of something. Have you done it?”

“Very nearly, Miss Wren.”

“Then put the last of your questions to me, whatever it is, and we shall both be spared the suspense.”

“And were you to be offered a situation,” he said, “unconventional in certain respects, but answering to something of genuine and lasting value, would you consider…”

“Lord Vane.” She said it pleasantly, in the voice she kept for her aunt’s roundabout strategies and for solicitors explaining a disagreeable thing at the greatest possible length. He stopped at once. From overhead came the muffled commotion of trunks hauled down from storage, and she let it sit between them for a moment, in no hurry at all to fill it. “You are either very poor at paying social calls, or remarkably good at something else altogether, and I confess I should like very much to know which it is.”

He looked at her for a moment. Then he laughed, sudden and quite without guard, nothing at all like the practised warmth he had carried in through the door.

“The second,” he said. “Entirely the second, Miss Wren, and I begin to think I have been sent to precisely the right house.”

He leaned forward, and for the first time since he had entered the room, he looked as though he were about to say something that mattered.

“In that case,” said Cecilia, “I suggest you say what you came to say.”

Chapter Two

“You have not eaten since breakfast, Your Grace.”

Mrs Fenn set the dinner tray on the corner of the desk with the quiet precision of over thirty years’ service, nudging a stack of drawings half an inch aside to make room, as though the drawings were the imposition and the dinner a settled matter.

“I am aware of it.” Gideon did not lift his eyes from the report under his hand.

“I merely mention it.”

“You always merely mention it.”

“And you always let it go cold, and one of us is obliged to be consistent in this house.” She had no apparent expectation of an answer, which was as well, for he gave her none. She had been at Aldenmere many years, had run his father’s household, and had outlasted three dukes, two estate agents, and one memorable kitchen fire, not one of which had ever taught her to quit a room without the last word in it. “Phelps tells me you mean to bring children into the house.”

“Phelps talks a great deal for a man so careful of his own breath.”

“He does, when a thing wants saying, and the master will not say it.” She straightened the cloth on the tray. “Three of them, I am told. Girls.”

“My brother’s daughters. You will have the rooms in the east wing opened and aired, and the nursery floor put right. I will give you the particulars in the morning.”

“I shall want a week’s notice before they come, not a morning’s.” A pause at the door, shorter than her custom. “And I shall want to know whether they are coming to a house or to a duke, Your Grace, for they are not at all the same thing to a child, and you have rather more practice at being the second.”

“Then it is as well they will have you to teach me the difference.”

“Flattery, and on an empty stomach besides. You must be in earnest about these children after all.” She went before he could answer, and the latch settled behind her almost without a sound.

The study took the lamplight and gave very little of it back; his own drawings hung on every wall, elevations, floor plans and sectional views in his own hand, some gone yellow at the edges and some still sharp with new ink. He had been home three hours from London and had already written to Vane from the road, the message as spare as everything else he sent the man. The situation is worse than Phelps reported. Proceed with what we discussed.

He pressed two fingers to the bridge of his nose. The afternoon would not leave him, and he had given up trying to make it go away.

He remembered then his visit to his brother’s children. Mrs Norwood had received him in a cold front parlour with a fire too small for the grate and a warmth of manner that did not reach past her teeth.

“Your Grace honours us. You will forgive the quiet of the house. We keep very much to ourselves here, the girls and I, and they are not at all used to visitors.”

“I have come to see my brother’s daughters, Mrs Norwood, and not your front parlour. Will you take me up to them?”

“They are at their lessons just at present. Rosalind is most particular about her lessons, and Tabitha frets so at any disturbance to the hour. I am sure Your Grace would not wish to unsettle the poor things on his account.”

“I am sure I would not, but take me up regardless.”

She had taken him up, in the end, being unable to refuse a duke the sight of his own wards under his own brother’s name, but she had taken him the long way and talked the whole of the climb, and contrived that he should be shown almost nothing at all. A door stood ajar on the attic floor. Through it, he saw the eldest at a desk, sitting far too straight for twelve, a book held rigid before her, and when she looked up, her eyes met his for the length of a breath before Mrs Norwood drew the door gently with a bright word about not disturbing the child’s reading. From behind another door came a small sound, a cup or a dish going over, and a gasp swallowed almost before it was made.

“Tabitha is clumsy when she is startled,” Mrs Norwood said. “It is of no consequence. She will be spoken to about it.”

He marked the word, and the relish she gave it, but said nothing.

The youngest he found in a cold upstairs parlour, lining carved wooden animals along the sill and talking to them under her breath. She looked up at him with the whole of her small face, open and unguarded, and drew breath to say something.  Mrs Norwood spoke the child’s name once, flat and quiet, and the small mouth closed on whatever it had held; her small shoulders crept by degrees toward her ears, and she turned back to her animals in a silence that told him a great deal more than the front parlour had been arranged to tell him.

“I should like a quarter of an hour with them,” he said. “Alone, if you will permit it. They do not know me, and a man they do not know is only one more thing in this house for them to be afraid of.”

“I think not, Your Grace. Not today. They are tired, and strangers upset them. I will not have them fretful at their bedtime for the sake of a visit that might as easily wait for another.” She had already begun to steer him toward the stairs. “You may write to them if it would ease you. I shall see that anything suitable is read out to them.”

“Read out, and suitable, and the whole of it decided upon by you.”

“I am their grandmother, Your Grace. Who else should decide it?”

He had not been permitted a single word with any of the three. That, in the end, was the thing that decided him. A man might argue with a cold room and an ungenerous fire. He could not argue with three children taught to go quiet at the sound of their own names.

“You keep them very close, Mrs Norwood.”

“I keep them safe, Your Grace, which is a grandmother’s whole office once the mother is in the ground. They are settled. They know their hours and their rules. Children are happier, in my experience, when they know exactly where they stand.”

“They are kept in attic rooms with the fires unlit, and the smallest of them falls silent when you say her name. If that is your settled, I find I do not care for the word.”

“You will forgive my plainness.” The warmth had gone a shade brittle. “A gentleman situated as you are, alone in a great house, and, if I may say it, marked as you are, is not at all what a court has in its mind when it speaks of a suitable home. People will talk. For the girls’ sake, one is obliged to think of such things.”

“People have been talking for over twenty years. I have survived the whole of it.” He held her eye until she found somewhere else to put her own. “I will have my brother’s daughters out of this attic, Mrs Norwood, even if I must carry them down the stairs one at a time myself.”

“You will find it is not so simply done.” She smiled the entire way through it, which was worse by some distance than if she had not. “I have my own counsel, and the law is a slow business, and a very great deal may be said of a man in three months that he will not unsay in three years. Wanting a thing, Your Grace, and being judged fit to keep it, are two matters entirely separate.”

“Then we have agreed at least that it is a contest.” He had taken up his hat. “I will tell you without any heat, Mrs Norwood, that I have lost a great deal in my life and learned the trick of minding very little of it. I do not intend that three children should be added to the account, and I have never in my life wanted a thing as quietly or as completely as I want them out of this attic.”

He had come away from that house with the cold clarity he brought to anything that could be solved instead of merely borne.

Arthur would have wanted it. That was the short of the matter, beneath all the rest. Of the whole family, his brother alone had looked at him after the fire with none of what the others carried, not the horror, not the pity, not the careful distaste that hardens into never quite meeting a man’s eye.

“It signifies very little, does it not?” Arthur had said, being but eleven years old and entirely persuaded of it. Gideon, who had only that week been informed by their father that no one would ever again regard him without shrinking, answered with a confidence he did not possess. Yet his brother’s unaffected certainty remained with him for years afterwards, lending him a measure of steadiness he could scarcely have found elsewhere.

Arthur was in the ground now, his wife beside him, and his three daughters were stacked in a Mayfair attic, kept by a woman who could quiet a child of four simply by walking into the room.

He had put the rest to himself as a problem with a solution, because a solution was a thing his hands could close around. Find me a wife, he had written to Vane that morning, before the sensible part of him could object. Someone practical. Not a girl wanting her season, not a creature who would need managing, but a woman who would take the house and the children in hand and ask him to be no other man than the one he was. He had added, since it was only just, that he would require no pretence of her in return, this being no arrangement of that kind.

His father’s voice had arrived on its usual cue. No one will ever look at you without flinching. He had set it down again with the ease of long practice, though it always cost him something to do it.

He ate because Mrs Fenn had carried the tray up the stairs and he was not, in the main, an unreasonable man, tasting none of it, his eye travelling the drawings he had made and remade for six months together. The east wing. The children’s rooms. The garden front with a conservatory pencilled along the south wall, drawn long before he had any right to expect it built, in the hours when sleep would not come and there was nothing for it but to draw. He had never once pencilled the conservatory with any particular person in mind, and he saw no occasion to begin tonight.

Vane’s letter had been waiting on the blotter, forwarded up from town, read through once and now read again. I may have found someone, which meant Vane had begun looking before having received his letter. They had discussed it once, and he had started looking, on the strength of nothing but a single visit and his own long habit of being right about Gideon before Gideon was right about himself.

He set the letter down, and kept himself, that evening, from the word that had been waiting at the edge of the whole business, the small unfamiliar shape of it sitting awkwardly in his chest where there had been nothing for it to sit beside in a very long time. The fire burned down to its last embers, and he let it go out. He sat in the dark a good while, which was an ordinary enough thing for him, and which had never, until tonight, had the particular quality of waiting in it.

Chapter Three

“You might have told me,” Cecilia said, “that this was to be an interview.”

Lord Vane had the grace to look mildly abashed, though only mildly. He was not, she was beginning to gather, a man much given to self-reproach.

“Would it have altered your answer?”

“It would have altered my preparation, which a woman in my position has learned to value rather highly.”

“You seem tolerably well prepared as you are,” he said, choosing the words with some care.

She studied him across the carriage; his hat was balanced on his knee, his face was pleasant and open, but beneath it, he was watching her very closely, taking in a good deal more than he gave back. Eight years of composing Lady Foskett’s letters had taught her to look from the inside.

“You came to my aunt’s house knowing it was closing,” she said. “Which means you knew a good deal of my situation before the door was ever opened to you. This arrangement, whatever it proves to be, has been thought out with some care because I was not being assessed this morning so much as confirmed.”

He looked at her for a moment, then smiled, and the smile had none of the polish of his earlier ones. “He said practical. He ought to have said formidable.”

“You say it as though there were a particular gentleman behind all this,” she observed, “and as though you have been steering me toward him since the moment you sat down in my aunt’s drawing room.”

“It is the gentleman you are going to meet,” he turned the hat once on his knee, “who does not, I will tell you plainly, make a favourable first impression, and would be the first man to tell you so himself. I would far rather you had the truth of it from me in the carriage than be left to assemble it for yourself in his drawing room.”

“Then tell me what I am walking into. I prepare a great deal better with facts than without them.”

“A duke.”

“A duke?” She let it settle. “You will forgive me for observing that dukes do not, as a rule, send to Mayfair for penniless companions.”

“This one does, for reasons that will make their own sense to you within the hour. He has lately become guardian to three small girls, his brother’s daughters, both their parents dead within a twelvemonth. They are at present kept by their other grandmother, Mrs Norwood, who holds the guardianship and a portion of what little the children were left, and who means to keep her grip on both.”

“And he means to take them from her?”

“He means to give them a home, which the law will let him do only if he can show it to be a settled and respectable one. A bachelor of his reputation, alone in a great house in the country, will not answer the case. The court will want a wife, a household, the whole ordinary furniture of a family.”

“So, he requires a wife and requires her soon.”

“With enough urgency that I have driven the breadth of London at nine in the morning to interview a woman I had never met, and find myself, an hour later, hoping a good deal harder than is professional in me that she will say yes.”

The carriage had stopped, and she stepped down onto the pavement of a quiet, well-kept street and gave herself a moment to settle the weight of the thing before she permitted herself to feel any part of it. A duke who wanted a wife on paper, and a woman who wanted a roof, an income and a door of her own to close behind her. They would discover, in the next half hour, whether two such needs could be persuaded to fit together. She had stood in less promising rooms, though she could not at that moment have named one for him.

***

Vane’s drawing room was everything her aunt’s had never been: comfortable and a little disordered, with books left where they had last been set down, and two chairs drawn companionably up to the fire. A room lived in, rather than a room performed in, and she liked it rather more than she had meant to.

The man at the window did not turn at once. He stood with his right side to the room and his left to the street, a placing too exact to be an accident. His shoulders held very still and braced, as though he were waiting for a reaction and determined not to show that he expected one. He was tall and broad, and he filled the room without appearing to mean to, too much of him for the space he had been given.

Then he turned, and she saw the scar, old and long healed, running the left of his jaw and down beneath a cravat knotted higher than fashion asked of any man. His eyes were grey, level, set in the careful blankness of someone with long practice at waiting. He was watching her for the flinch.

She gave him none, having nothing in particular to flinch at. The man was not monstrous. He was braced against a hurt, and she had read that much off him in the first second with a sureness that startled her a little.

Something moved in his face and was put away again, there and gone, suppressed almost before it had surfaced, as though it had caught him off his guard.

“Miss Wren.” His voice was low and even. “Gideon Crane. Sit, if you like.”

Not please sit down, nor may I offer you a chair, only sit if you like, which was either the bluntest invitation she had ever been paid or the most honest one, and she could not on the instant decide which she preferred. She sat. He stood a moment longer, then appeared to judge the standing theatrical and took the chair across from her, while Vane folded himself into the seat by the fire, present and careful not to intrude.

“I will be direct,” Gideon said.

“I should be grateful for it. I have had a morning of people being otherwise.”

“I have filed a petition for the guardianship of my brother’s three daughters. Mrs Norwood has entered a counter to it, and the court has made it tolerably plain that it will not hand three girls over to a man rattling alone about a house in the country on the strength of his name.” He set it out plainly and in order, without one persuasive word or the least attempt to dress the thing finer than the facts would bear. “It wants a settled establishment, a wife, in plain language. The marriage would be legal, and it would not be,” he paused a moment over the word, “conventional. I would ask nothing of you that the arrangement does not name.”

“Which is the management of your household, the care of the children, and the appearance of a working marriage, sufficient to satisfy a court.”

“That is the whole of it, and I will not pretend it is a small thing to ask of a stranger before noon.”

“And Mrs Norwood’s petition? How serious a thing is it, in your honest estimate?”

Something sharpened in him. “More serious than I was first advised. She is methodical, her solicitors are thorough, and she holds the standing of the existing guardianship already in her hand, which I cannot simply wave aside. She will not give up the children, nor the income that comes attached to them, without a long fight.”

“Then this is not a matter of showing a tidy house to a magistrate and going home satisfied. This is a contest, and very likely a long one.”

“It is, and likely a long one.” He held her eyes without retreat. “I want you to understand that much before you decide anything at all.”

“Then tell me about the children.”

Something happened to his face, less a softening than a shift in some inner arrangement that altered its set without quite changing it.

“Rosalind is twelve and careful. She has been the eldest long enough that it has become a way of being rather than an accident of birth, and she is sharp, and wary, and she will not make a moment of this easy.” He said it without complaint, as a man describes ground he means to cross, whatever the crossing costs him. “Tabitha is eight, and gentle, and has been frightened long enough that it has settled into her body more than her mind. She startles at sounds. She will want steadiness before she wants warmth, though I think she will take the warmth in the end, once she has decided it means to stay.”

He paused.

“And Louisa is four.”

The careful blankness dropped a fraction, briefly, without his leave.

“She is afraid of nothing, as far as I know, except for her grandmother. She talks without once drawing breath, she holds decided opinions on the subject of horses, and she arranges her toys in order of battle and will defend the arrangement to the last.” Something warm and faintly helpless sat beneath the words.

He stopped, appeared to hear how much of himself he had let into the room, and the blankness drew back together with impressive speed. She had seen it all the same, and entered it quietly in the account she had already begun to keep on him. The man loved them already, before they were even his to keep, and it frightened him. She could see that much plainly enough. A man did not guard his own face so carefully over children he was indifferent to.

“Then my answer is yes, Your Grace,” she said.

He was quiet for a moment. “You have not asked about the settlement.”

“I will, though it would not alter the answer, and it seemed only fair you should know that before we spend twenty minutes upon the particulars.”

Then he put out his hand, and she took it, and his grip closed warm and careful about hers, firm without any of the force that lesser men mistook for firmness. His thumb came to rest a moment at the inside of her wrist, no more than the natural set of a large hand about a smaller one, but she was aware of the warmth of it in a way that had very little to do with any agreement and a good deal to do with how long it had been since a single soul had touched her with care of any kind, even the plain official care of a bargain struck. Neither of them let go at quite the moment they ought to have. She marked it, but kept the marking to herself.

The settlement was made, the marriage set for the Friday of the following week, and going toward the carriage afterwards, Vane considered her with what she was learning to read as his thinking face.

“You did not flinch.”

“I had no occasion to. He is not a man who wants that kind of behaviour.”

He looked at her with something pleased in his face, and something more guarded than pleased beneath that.

“No, he is not,” he said quietly. “The wedding will be on Friday, at the house, and very quiet. A carriage will come for you on Thursday. There will be papers enough to paper a wall, and a settlement a good deal more generous than you will feel you ought to take, but my advice is that you take it without argument, for he has thought about it a great deal longer than you have and he cannot abide being thanked.”

“You appear to know him very well.”

“Fifteen years since Oxford.” The lightness went out of him by a degree. “He will not court you, Miss Wren. It is not in the bargain, and I do not think there is much left in him to attempt. Only do not mistake the silence for indifference. He feels a great deal more than he allows the world to see of him, and the world has given him every reason to allow it very little.”

“You are fond of him.”

“I am nearly the last person left who is, and I hope that three little girls will accompany my feelings for him.”