Chapter One

“Mr Vane gave me his word, miss. His word as a gentleman.”

Mr Hollis stood in the back passage at Wrenfield with his hat crushed in both hands and his account book held flat against his chest like a writ. He had ridden the eleven miles from Tavistock to say it, and by the set of his jaw he meant to say it twice.

“I know he did,” Elowen said. “And I am ashamed of it on his behalf, because my brother’s word has not been worth the breath that carries it since Easter, and you have known that longer than I have liked to.”

It stopped him where he stood. People came to the door at Wrenfield braced against excuses, and an excuse was a thing a man could argue with. Agreement left him nowhere to put his feet.

“I’d not say that, miss,” he managed. “Not of a gentleman.”

“You needn’t. I have said it for you.” She drew the coins from her own pocket, where she had counted them out an hour since against just this knock. “Eight pounds today, into your hand. The rest at Michaelmas, and my name on the note in place of my brother’s.”

“Your name.”

“Mine pays. His promises.” She put the money into his palm and closed his fingers over it, because he was the sort who would stand counting it twice on the step and shame them both. “There. Now you have ridden eleven miles for something better than a gentleman’s word.”

He looked at the coins, and at her, and some of the starch went out of him. “It’s a hard thing, miss. Coming to a house and finding only the lady to pay a man.”

“Yes,” she said. “It generally is.”

By the time she had walked him to the yard and admired the new mare he could not afford, the morning was half gone, and three more of her brother’s small disasters were waiting for her in the house.

Wrenfield had been a comfortable house once. There were paler squares on the wall of the long gallery where the good paintings had hung before they were quietly sold, and the second carriage had gone the same way, and half the stable, and three of the maids. What was left ran on Elowen, and on a handful of servants who stayed less for their late-paid wages than for her, who saw that they were paid at all.

She did the accounts in the morning room, which was where she did her best thinking. The household ledger was a patient book; she kept it in a small upright hand, and in the margins she kept everything that would not go in the columns: which child had the croup and wanted horehound, whose mother was failing, the price of beeswax at three chandlers so she might always buy of the cheapest. She turned to September, and a sprig of heartsease she had pressed there in June and forgotten slipped loose against the seam, flat and brown, the purple gone out of it. She smoothed it with her thumb, turned the page down over it, and went on adding the butcher’s column.

Susan brought the tea at eleven. Elowen poured a cup for Cook, who was at war with the fish, and one for Silas, who was not yet up, and set her own at her elbow and let it go cold there, as she did most mornings, because there was always something nearer her hand than her own cup.

Susan did not go away. She stood turning the corner of her apron. “Begging pardon, miss. Cook wants to know whether we are to use the good cloth tonight, only the laundry is not dry. And Mr Vane’s man says he will want his blue coat, and it is at the tailor’s still, for the mending has not been paid.”

“The second-best cloth, pressed, and set the epergne in the middle of it so no one looks at the cloth. And tell Mr Vane’s man the blue coat comes home Friday, the grey will do for tonight, and he looks the better in the grey besides.” Susan bobbed and turned. “Susan. Have you eaten?”

The girl stopped, surprised. “Miss?”

“You have been on your feet since five. Go down and eat something before the rush of the dinner. The house will not fall in the quarter hour.”

Susan went with the look of a girl handed a small thing she had not expected to be given.

The harder business of the morning went by the name of Mrs Pengelly, whom Silas had cut dead at the lending library earlier that week. He had meant nothing by it; Silas meant nothing by anything. But Mrs Pengelly was old and proud and could make the winter assemblies very cold for a family that could not afford the cold. So Elowen wrote three warm lines laying the whole misunderstanding at the door of her brother’s wretched eyesight, enclosed a pot of the quince cheese the old woman had once admired, and signed it with her love. By Friday, Mrs Pengelly would be telling the parish what a devoted creature Miss Vane was, and what a pity it was she had never married.

There was a dinner that night besides: Silas’s doing, as awkward things so often were. He had invited the new rector a fortnight ago, and Sir John Heale on Sunday, with no memory of the first, so that a quiet four had become a table of seven, with a baronet at the foot of it, on the very evening the fish had come up from the coast already turning.

Elowen went down to the kitchen.

“I give my notice,” said Cook, before she was through the door. “I give it this very hour. Seven to dinner, and a fish that smells of the churchyard, and Mr Vane never a word to me till the butcher’s boy let it out—”

“You will not give your notice,” Elowen said, “because if you do, I shall have to cook the dinner myself, and you have eaten my cooking.”

A pause. Cook’s mouth twitched against her will. “The fish is off.”

“Then we shall not give them the fish. We shall give them the ham, and the partridges meant for tomorrow, and I will make up a sauce in the stillroom sharp enough that Sir John Heale will praise it to the skies and never once suspect he is eating yesterday instead of today.” She was already reaching for her apron. “Send the boy to the home farm for cream. And, Cook, yesterday’s pastry was the best in the county. I meant to say so this morning, and the day ran off with me.”

Cook, mollified and a little teary, sent the boy.

The stillroom was the one room at Wrenfield that was wholly Elowen’s: north-cold, its rafters hung with drying lavender and tansy, its shelves crowded with tinctures in labelled jars. She made the sauce. Then she stood a moment in the green quiet of it, longer than the sauce required, because it was the only quiet she was likely to be given that day.

She was wiping down the slate when Silas found her, freshly shaved and smelling of his good cologne, a glass of Madeira in either hand.

“There you are. I have hunted the whole house for you.”

He had not, she observed, thought to hunt in the stillroom, where she might be found six mornings in seven. “You have found me now.”

He gave her a glass. She set it on the slate, untasted, beside everything else she had been handed that day, and waited, because Silas with wine at five in the afternoon and that bright, coaxing look about him was Silas with something to ask.

“You are a treasure, El.” He said it as he always said it, warmly, and a little too soon. “I do not know how the house will go on without you for the autumn.”

The word went through her like a draught from an opened door. “Without me?”

“It is the most splendid thing.” He was pacing now, pleased with himself, telling it as a story in which he came off clever. Lady Seraphina Wycliffe—the Duke of Marcombe’s own aunt, El, the Duke’s aunt—wanted a sensible woman of good family for the season; the great house was in want of a steady hand; there was a young sister to bring out. Silas had heard the whole of it over Sir John’s port, written back that very night, and recommended his own dear sister. He had, in point of fact, already accepted.

“You have accepted,” Elowen said.

“For you! There is not a connection in the West Country to touch it. It will be the making of—”

“You have accepted.” She heard her own voice come out harder than she had allowed it to do in years, and could not call it back. “You have lent me out for the autumn, Silas, the way you would lend a man a book, and come to tell me of it with wine in your hand, and call it a gift.”

He stopped. He was not used to her sharp. No one was. “El—”

“Did you think to ask me?” The question escaped before she could hold it. “Once? Between the port at Sir John’s and the letter that same night, did it cross your mind to come home and say, Elowen, here is a thing; should you like it?”

For a moment, he only looked at her, the way a man looks at a chair that has spoken. Then, because his world was a place where his sister’s anger was passing weather that always cleared, he smiled and came to kiss her cheek, fond and careless and warm.

“But you would have said yes. You always say yes. You would no more let a great house run aground for want of you than you would let this one.” He drank his Madeira, and then hers, since she had not touched it. “You are the best of all women, and I shall tell the county so. Her ladyship looks for you Thursday.”

Thursday was three days off.

That night she gave them their dinner. She gave it from the foot of the table and from the doorway and from the cold passage to the kitchen, in the dozen small places where a dinner is truly made, while at the head of it Silas was charming and easy, and took the credit a host takes for a feast he has not lifted a finger to provide.

“My compliments to your cook, Vane,” said Sir John Heale, who had taken three helpings of the rescued partridge. “That sauce. I have not had its like since I dined with the lord lieutenant.”

“We do tolerably well at Wrenfield,” said Silas, who could not have named the sauce.

“You do a deal better than tolerably.” Sir John turned down the table. “And you keep the house for him, Miss Vane? He is a fortunate fellow. A man wants a good sister the way he wants a good road: never thinks of her at all until he finds himself without one.”

“Then I hope my brother keeps to the turnpike, Sir John,” said Elowen, “and is spared the discovery.”

Sir John laughed until his chair creaked, and the rector’s wife said, not for the first time nor the last, what a comfort Miss Vane must be to dear Mr Vane, and no one at the bright table but Elowen knew that the partridge had been meant for tomorrow’s dinner, or that the cream had come four miles at a gallop in a boy’s hot hands. She kept the talk turning, steered Sir John off politics before the port, watched the candles burn to their sockets, and was thanked, warmly and generally, for nothing anyone could have named.

She packed afterwards, when the house had finally gone quiet. It did not take long. A useful woman’s wardrobe runs to the serviceable, and hers was serviceable indeed: grey and brown and one good blue for Sundays, nothing that would give itself airs in a duke’s house. She folded it into the trunk, and her workbox after it, and the stoppered bottles from the stillroom she could not do without, and last of all the household ledger, because Silas would lose his place in it inside the week.

Then, because there was no one to see, she took the pressed heartsease from the September page and tucked it into the bodice of her travelling dress, over her heart, where it weighed nothing and no one would think to look for it.

She did not let herself wonder what Marcombe would be like. Wondering was only wanting with its manners on, and she had given up wanting the way one gives up any habit that costs more than it returns. But she stood a moment at the cold window with the candle in her hand, looking east towards a house she had never seen, had not chosen, and would be sent home from the moment she was no longer wanted in it.

And she caught herself thinking the one thing she had no business thinking: that at Marcombe, at least, no one yet knew to call her a treasure. For a month, a season, however long they kept her, she would be a stranger in a house full of strangers: owing nothing, owed nothing, unwritten.

A stranger, she thought, blowing out the candle, might turn out to be anything at all.

Chapter Two

Marcombe Hall sat at the head of its avenue like something that had never once been hurried. Honey-coloured stone, a long symmetrical front, rows of tall windows giving back the last of the afternoon without warmth. The lawns were cut close as baize, and not a leaf lay on the gravel, though it was September and the limes along the drive were dropping them by the hundred everywhere else.

The carriage that had brought her the last six miles was a Wycliffe carriage, crested and well-sprung, and it had made the hired chaise before it feel like an apology. Elowen had watched the country grow tidier and richer the nearer they came, until even the cottages looked swept, and the swept look of everything had begun, by degrees, to feel less like prosperity than a held breath.

A footman came down the steps before the wheels had stopped, handed her down, and took her trunk.

“Her ladyship is lying down with the headache, miss, and begs you will make yourself comfortable until dinner.”

“And Mrs Pike?” Elowen asked. “The housekeeper. She is expecting me, I think; she had my letter.”

The footman’s face did something careful. “Mrs Pike is poorly, miss.”

And that was all he would say. He set her trunk inside the door and left her standing in the great cold hall like a parcel delivered to the wrong address.

The hall was the size of the whole ground floor at Wrenfield. A great cold staircase went up into shadow. A long-case clock ticked somewhere out of sight. Dead dukes looked down from the walls in their gilt frames, every one of them with the same long, careful face. There were no flowers anywhere, and no smell of anything—not polish or woodsmoke or cooking—only a clean stone coolness, the smell of a house that was kept rather than lived in.

She had been travelling since before light, and her feet had swelled in her half-boots. Chairs stood ranged along the wall, gilt and high-backed and so exactly placed that she could not picture a living soul ever having disarranged one by sitting in it. She did not sit. She stood in the middle of the cold hall and waited to be remembered, and felt, somewhere beneath her patience, a small flat spark of temper she did not let herself examine: at being fetched clear across the county like a chair, set down in a hall, and forgotten.

She had been standing perhaps ten minutes, cold through her pelisse, when she heard the bell.

It came from deep in the house, thin and frantic, the sound of a pull worked too hard by an impatient hand. She waited for an answering tread. None came. The bell stopped, then started again, more urgently than before, and still the hall stayed empty, and the clock ticked on as though a bell ringing into silence were the most ordinary thing in the world.

At Wrenfield, a bell that rang twice unanswered meant something had gone wrong, and her feet had started before she gave them leave. She followed the sound out of the hall, down a corridor that narrowed and grew plainer as it went, the marble giving way to flagstone and the silk to whitewash, until she came out into a long, low passage that could only be the spine of the house below stairs.

The bells hung along the wall in two rows, two dozen at the least, each on its own coiled spring beneath a little ivory tab. One was still dancing, a bright brass bell halfway along, and beneath it the tab read, in faded copperplate, Lady Amabel.

A scullery maid stood frozen at the far end of the passage with a colander in her hands.

“Is there no one to answer it?” Elowen asked.

“Mrs Pike answers the family bells, miss. Always Mrs Pike.” The girl’s eyes were huge. “Only she went down in the larder of a Thursday, and they carried her up, and she’s not been right since, and the men are all gone to the home farm, and I daren’t go up to the family, miss, I’m only the scullery, and it’s been ringing and ringing…” She ran clean out of breath. “It’s Lady Amabel’s. She’ll be wanting something and there’s nobody.”

Elowen had been in the house a quarter of an hour and did not know which stair was which. She went up anyway, gloves still on, bonnet still on, the girl’s frightened directions in her ears. The house went on and on around her as she climbed—long galleries, shut doors, the cold gleam of a great deal of money and no sign at all that anyone lived inside it—and the bell pulled her through it like a thread.

It brought her, by a back stair and a gallery and a turning she would never have found twice, to a bedchamber where a girl of seventeen sat up in a vast bed in the half-dark, the bell-pull still gripped in her fist.

“You’re not Pike,” the girl said. Her voice wobbled. “I rang and rang. I rang half an hour and nobody came.”

“No. I am Miss Vane, and I have only just come. They tell me Mrs Pike is unwell.” Elowen crossed to the bed. “Were you frightened?”

“No,” said the girl.

And then, because Elowen had asked it gently, and no one in that house had asked her anything gently in some time, her face came apart. “Yes. The room would not stop going round, and I rang, and I rang, and I thought… I thought everyone had gone. That the whole house had got up and walked out of doors and left me here, ringing.” She scrubbed at her eyes, furious with herself for the tears. “It is a stupid thing to mind. I daresay it is nothing.”

“It is not a stupid thing to mind. Anyone would mind a dark room that would not hold still.” Elowen drew the heavy curtains back a hand’s breadth, since a turning room is always worse in the dark, found the water jug, wetted a cloth, sat down on the edge of the bed, and laid the folded cloth across the girl’s hot brow.

She took off her gloves at last to wring it.

“You’ll stay?” Amabel said. “Tonight, I mean. You won’t go down and leave me by myself.”

“I will stay until you are asleep.”

“Aunt Seraphina said a lady was coming. To see to the house, and to me.” The girl’s voice was growing soft and slurred with lateness and the cool of the cloth. “To bring me out. Everyone is forever going to bring me out, as though I were a mare to be walked round a ring at a fair. You won’t be tiresome about it, will you? Tell me you won’t.”

“I shall do my best not to be.”

“Good.” A pause; she was drifting. “Are you clever? You sound clever. Aunt Seraphina is clever, and my brother is clever, and I am not clever at all. I am only frightened. There is a great deal of difference between the two.”

“Being frightened is not the opposite of clever,” Elowen said. “One may be frightened and still do what must be done.”

“Are you ever frightened?”

“Every day of my life.”

The girl smiled, drowsy. “I shall like you, I think. No one clever has ever troubled to like me. They are all too busy being clever at my brother.” Her eyes were closing. “He is not unkind, you know. My brother. People think he is, because he does not say much and he never smiles. But he is not unkind. He is only…” She yawned hugely. “…far away. Even when he is in the room with you. Like one of his own portraits downstairs, on the wall.”

“There,” Elowen agreed, and stayed where she was until the breathing beneath her hand went slow and even and sure.

When the girl had drifted off, Elowen went back down and did what should have been done hours before. She found a housemaid to sit with Lady Amabel, sent up barley water and dry toast against the morning, and gave word that Mrs Pike was to be left to rest and not roused for the family’s bells on any account, and that anything the family wanted was to come instead to Miss Vane. The scullery maid took it all with relief, and then with a kind of wonder, as though being told plainly and kindly what to do were a thing that had run short in the house.

No one had thought to show her where she was to sleep, so she found the room for herself, at the cold end of a passage above the servants’ stair: a narrow room, a narrow bed, a washstand, a window overlooking the stable roof, a fire laid but not lit. It was a between-room, above the maids, below the family, the kind a house keeps for a person it has not yet decided what to make of.

She lit the fire herself, since there was no one to do it for her, and she did not unpack her trunk. Unpacking was a thing you did when you had been told how long you might stay.

She did take out one thing. She set the candle on the washstand and drew the pressed heartsease from the bodice of her travelling dress, where it had ridden against her heart the whole way, and looked at it a moment in the small light: flat and brown, the purple long gone out of it, a thing of no use to anybody. Then she put it back where it had been. It was the only thing she had carried to Marcombe that no one could find a use for, and she meant to keep it that way.

Her way down in the morning would take her through the passage of bells again, past the two patient rows beneath their little names—Lady Amabel, the Duke’s Study, the Library, the Blue Morning Room, Lady Seraphina—names enough to keep a houseful of people running from dawn to dark. But that was for the morning.

No one had asked whether she had eaten, or was tired, or wished to sit. She had been at Marcombe a handful of hours, and in them she had nursed a frightened girl, set a household to rights, and lit her own cold fire, and not one soul in all the great house had thought to wonder whether the new lady might want a single thing herself.

Three nights ago, packing by candlelight, she had imagined Marcombe might offer, for a little while, the mercy of being unknown. She understood now that she had been wrong about that inside the hour.

Somewhere below her, faint and thin, a bell began to ring.

She went to answer it.

Chapter Three

The Duke of Marcombe rose before his household, as he did every morning, and came down to a house that was not as he had left it.

The fires were lit in rooms no one would use before noon. The hall was swept and the great staircase gleamed. The breakfast things stood laid and warming a full hour before the family kept. Three days ago, the place had begun to come apart at the seams. Mrs Pike had gone down at last under a weight she had carried too long; the house had run for a day and a night like a clock with its mainspring out; and Lucian had written three close pages of instruction, left them where the upper servants would be sure to find them, and braced himself for a week of things done badly or not done at all.

The house was in order. It was not his order. That was the thing that stopped him on the stairs.

He found a housemaid on her knees at the morning-room grate.

“Who gave the day’s orders?”

She scrambled up so fast she upset the blacking. “Miss Vane, Your Grace. The lady who came Thursday, for her ladyship. She’s had us all going since five; black the grates, turn out the morning room, count over the linen… and she has Mrs Pike’s keys, Your Grace, all of them, and I don’t… that is, I’m sure it’s not my place to…” The girl heard herself and stopped, scarlet to the ears. “Begging your pardon.”

He told her to get on, and went to find Miss Vane.

He went down to the housekeeper’s room himself, which he had not done in years. She was at the table with the household books open before her and Mrs Pike’s keys laid out in a row, sorted by some logic of her own, writing in a fair, quick hand. She did not start when his shadow fell across the door. She finished her line, set the pen in the standish, and rose.

“Your Grace.”

“You have my housekeeper’s keys.”

“I have. She could not keep them and her bed both, and the house could not run without them.” She did not add an apology, which was the first thing he noticed, because people apologised to him; it was one of the duller facts of his life. “I will give them up the hour she wants them back.”

“They tell me you have been giving orders in my house since yesterday.”

Something moved in her face, not quite a flush and not quite temper: the look of a tired woman weighing whether a thing was worth the saying. She decided that it was.

“Someone had to, Your Grace.” Her voice was level, but there was an edge beneath it, fine as a wire drawn tight. “Your housekeeper is on her back. Your steward is buried to the eyes in the Michaelmas audit. There is a rent dinner inside a fortnight, and a young lady to bring out before the whole county. Yesterday, Lady Amabel rang her bell for the better part of an hour, and not one of forty servants would go up to her, because going up to the family was Mrs Pike’s office, and Mrs Pike had been carried to her bed. So I went up. And this morning I took the keys, because a great house cannot be run on a sick woman’s habits and a busy man’s good intentions.” She stopped. He watched her hear her own voice, and rein it in. “I beg your pardon. I have been awake a long time.”

He was not, as a general rule, contradicted in his own house. He found that he did not mind it nearly so much as he ought.

“You went up to my sister,” he said.

“Someone had to.” She said it more quietly the second time, but she did not look away from him as she said it, and that, the not looking away, was a thing he was even less used to than the contradiction.

He looked at her then, properly. She was perhaps thirty, in a plain grey gown, with the look of a woman who had been useful to a great many people for a very long time and had slept too little doing it. There was ink dried along the edge of her hand. She had asked him for nothing in the whole of the exchange: not his thanks, not his leave, not reassurance that she had done rightly in taking what she had taken. That, more than the keys, was the thing he could not put down.

“You found my instructions,” he said.

“In the margin of the cellar book. I followed them where they still served. Some had been overtaken. There was a standing note about airing the green room for a guest at Michaelmas, but the guest wrote a week since to cry off; there seemed no sense in preparing the room, so I did not.”

He had not known the guest had cried off. The note had been sitting there for a fortnight, one of a hundred small reminders he set down and expected the house to obey, trusting the margins of his books to hold what he could not be troubled to say aloud to a living face. It was a strange thing, to have what he had put in a margin handed back to him by a person.

She had crossed to the wall while she spoke—there was a small row of bells here too, below stairs—and laid her hand under one near the end, its wire slack, the bell above it dead and dusty on its spring.

“This one does not answer,” she said. “The nursery bell. The wire has gone. No one rings it now, I daresay, but it ought to be put right.”

“It has been broken a long time,” Lucian said.

“I can see that it has.”

He knew the bell. He had known it was broken since before his father died; the last nurse had complained of it, and nothing had come of the complaint. He had meant ever since, in the way of the hundred small things a busy man means to do and never does, to have it seen to. It had never once risen to the top of any list. That a stranger should have found it in a single morning, and minded it, sat oddly with him.

“Have the man come,” he said.

“There is one thing more, while you are here. Mrs Pike’s keys do not open the plate, and I shall want the plate for the rent dinner. There is no doing without it before a baronet.”

He carried, as his father had before him, a ring of keys at his belt that he never used: keys to rooms he did not enter and presses he did not open, kept because a duke kept them, the way he kept a good many things whose use had gone out of them years since. He took the ring off, turned it over in his palm, and had to try two before he found the one she wanted. He did not, as a rule, know his own keys.

He gave it to her. Her fingers closed over it without brushing his, and she thanked him with a single nod, as one steward to another, and turned back to her books.

He did not go at once.

“The rent dinner,” he said. “You mean to manage it yourself?”

“Unless you would rather it managed you, Your Grace.” She did not look up from the column she was adding. Then she did look up, briefly. “Forgive me. I did tell you I had been awake a long time.”

“You have told me twice.”

“Then it bears the telling, for I keep proving it.” And there, the smallest thing, gone almost before he had seen it: the corner of her mouth moved, dry and tired and wholly without deference, as if she had caught herself being amused in this grave cold house and was not at all sure she was permitted to be.

He did not say amusing things, nor have them said to him. His household was grave with him because he was grave with it; gravity went round the house like a second livery. He could not remember when anyone in his service had last spoken to him as though he were someone who might be answered back, rather than a duke who must be carefully steered.

“See that the dinner does not manage you either,” he said. “You will be of no use to my sister laid flat beside Mrs Pike.”

It was as near to a kindness as he came, in those days, and it came out stiffer than he had meant it, as such things always came out of him. She looked up properly at that, and something in her face closed as quickly as it had opened, the way a hand closes over a coin.

“I am never of any use laid flat,” she said. “I will take care to stay upright. Was there anything further, Your Grace?”

There was not. He had again been dismissed, in his own housekeeper’s room, by a woman he had engaged through his aunt by way of a letter, and he was halfway up the stairs before it came to him that he was not, in point of fact, displeased.

His aunt was down by noon, in the small sitting room she kept off the south front, with the embroidery she never finished and the fire built higher than anyone else in the house could bear. Lady Seraphina had been widowed before Lucian came into the title, and had stayed on to keep house for a young duke who had not the first notion how. By slow degrees, she had become the one person at Marcombe who spoke to him as a nephew and not as an institution.

“You have met Miss Vane,” she said, before he had so much as sat down.

“She has my housekeeper’s keys, my sister’s confidence, and the running of my house, and she informed me this morning that a great house cannot be kept on a sick woman’s habits and a busy man’s good intentions.” He sat. “She had been awake since five o’clock when she said it.”

Seraphina’s mouth curved over her work. “And so you came straight up to me to complain of her.”

“I came to ask where you found her.”

“In a letter. From a Mr Silas Vane, of Wrenfield, in Devonshire, recommending his own sister: a gentleman’s daughter who had kept his house since their mother died, and who could, he assured me, turn her hand to anything that wanted running.” She set a stitch. “I did not credit a word of it. A brother who praises a sister so very warmly to a stranger generally wants her settled comfortably under some roof other than his own.” She looked up. “I find, this once, that he told the truth and undersold it. She sat on the edge of Amabel’s bed last night and talked the girl to sleep. Amabel has asked for her twice this morning. She has not asked for a living soul in above a twelvemonth.”

“She seems competent,” Lucian said.

“That she is.” Seraphina threaded her needle against the light. “I cannot manage the dinner, the launch, and a sickroom all at once, Lucian. Not as I am now. It is a mercy she came. You would have managed all three by writing a memorandum to everyone concerned and shutting your study door upon the result.”

“The house was in disorder. I saw it put right.”

“You went down to the housekeeper’s room to see it put right. Yourself.” She did not look up from the needle. “You have not set foot below stairs in this house, to my certain knowledge, since the day your father was carried out of it.”

“The circumstances required it.”

“So I gather.”

She returned to her stitching.

He went back to his study and his correspondence, and answered his letters one after another in his small, even hand, and put the matter of Miss Vane where he put everything that unsettled him to no clear purpose: away, beneath the day’s work, where it need not be looked at.

He was glad of her. It was a plain, practical gladness, the sort a man feels for a good steward, or for a dry summer at haymaking, and he gave it no more thought than that.

Or meant to. He rode out after noon to the home farm with Felton, and twice before they had cleared the avenue he found that his mind had gone back of its own accord to the housekeeper’s room, to a woman with ink on her hand who had not once looked away from him; and twice he called it firmly back to the matter in hand, and did not, on either occasion, stop to ask what it had been doing there.