Chapter One

 

 

“And so, Your Grace, I believe we may consider the matter of the western boundary quite thoroughly resolved, pending Sir Humphrey’s final review, which he assures me shall be completed no later than Tuesday next —is that not so, Sir Humphrey?”

“Tuesday at the latest, Phelps, at the very latest, though I confess the matter has rather more complexity than I initially supposed, and I should like to revisit the question of the fence post’s original placement, because I have it on good authority from my groundskeeper, you recall Tibbins, Your Grace? Stout fellow, ginger whiskers, lost two fingers to a threshing machine in ’09, that the post was set by the third Duke’s man in seventeen-sixty-something, and if we consult the parish records…”

“I believe His Grace has the essential points,” Mr. Phelps interrupted, with the practised diplomacy of a solicitor who had learned to read the particular quality of ducal silence that meant this meeting should have ended forty minutes ago. “The amended terms are quite clear.”

Adrian Ardenwood, the sixth Duke of Thornfield, had not spoken in over an hour. He had, in the course of that hour, counted the ceiling beams, fourteen, catalogued the water stains on Mr. Phelps’s office wall, seven, two of which bore a passing resemblance to France, and composed, entirely in his head, a revised plan for the drainage on his eastern fields that he was rather pleased with and that he could not write down because Sir Humphrey was still talking about his groundskeeper’s fingers and showing no signs of stopping.

It was not that Adrian disliked Sir Humphrey. Disliking Sir Humphrey would have required a degree of emotional investment that Adrian reserved for matters of genuine consequence, such as the aforementioned drainage, the welfare of his tenants, and the question of whether Mrs. Pike had made the walnut cake this week or the seed cake, which was inferior in every respect but which she produced with unshakeable regularity every third Thursday as though bound by some grim covenant.

No, Adrian did not dislike Sir Humphrey. He simply wished, with a fervour that bordered on the spiritual, that Sir Humphrey would stop talking.

This was, Adrian had long ago accepted, an unreasonable wish. Sir Humphrey Banks had been put upon this earth to talk, in the same way that rivers had been put upon this earth to flow and dogs had been put upon this earth to be vastly superior company to most humans. Wishing Sir Humphrey to stop talking was like wishing rain to fall upward, theoretically conceivable, practically impossible, and an exhausting waste of mental energy in the interim.

The meeting should have taken twenty minutes. It had taken three hours. Three hours during which Adrian had consumed four cups of tea he did not want, listened to Sir Humphrey’s opinions on barley, Parliament, and French fashion, and produced exactly one nod, consent to the boundary terms, two blinks involuntary; Sir Humphrey’s description of Tibbins’s threshing accident had been unexpectedly vivid, and zero words.

“Your Grace?” Mr. Phelps ventured, with the careful optimism of a man testing whether the ice will hold. “Are the terms agreeable?”

Adrian nodded.

“Excellent, excellent,” Sir Humphrey said, rising with the satisfied air of a man who believes he has been a significant contributor to the proceedings rather than the primary obstacle to their conclusion. “I must say, Your Grace, it is always a pleasure. You have your father’s temperament, a man of great deliberation, the old duke. I recall he once spent an entire evening at my table debating the merits of…”

Goodness, no. Not the evening-at-the-table story. Adrian had heard the evening-at-the-table story four times. It concerned his father’s opinions on sheep, it lasted approximately twenty minutes in the telling, and it was, in Adrian’s private estimation, the single dullest anecdote in the history of English conversation, which was a field not lacking in competition.

“Sir Humphrey,” Mr. Phelps said gently, “I believe His Grace is expected at Thornfield.”

Adrian was not expected at Thornfield, or anywhere else. No one expected him anywhere, because he had spent the better part of a decade ensuring that no one had cause to, and he considered this one of his more significant achievements. But he inclined his head in a way that confirmed the fiction and stood, and Sir Humphrey, who could take a hint provided it was delivered by someone other than the person giving it, began his goodbyes, which were, naturally, as protracted as his greetings.

In the corridor, Mr. Phelps’s clerk hovered with Adrian’s riding gloves and the nervous expression of a young man who has been given an instruction and is determined to carry it out regardless of whether the recipient wishes to receive it.

“Your Grace, the solicitor sends his warmest regards and hopes…”

“You were present,” Adrian said. “I agreed.”

“Yes, Your Grace. Of course. I only meant…”

But Adrian had already taken the gloves and was walking toward the door, and the clerk, who was developing the instincts necessary to survive in a profession that required interaction with dukes, recognised the futility of continuing and closed his mouth with an almost audible click.

The autumn afternoon was grey and sharp, the air carrying the particular metallic bite that meant frost by morning, and the road between Cressfield and Thornfield wound through three miles of countryside that Adrian knew better than his own library, which was saying something, as he spent roughly nine-tenths of his waking life in his library and the remaining tenth wishing he were in it. He preferred riding to carriages, a preference that his household attributed to his love of horses and fresh air and that was, in fact, entirely attributable to the fact that carriages required coachmen, and coachmen, even the most tactful, even the most rigorously trained in the art of ducal service, eventually said something about the weather, and then Adrian was obliged to either respond or endure the particular quality of silence that meant I have spoken to you and you have not spoken back, and we both know this is happening, and it is uncomfortable for everyone.

The horse did not comment on the weather. The horse did not comment on anything. The horse was, in Adrian’s estimation, the ideal conversational partner.

He was thinking about the drainage problem on the eastern fields, a subject that would have put most men to sleep but which Adrian found genuinely absorbing, because drainage was a problem with a definable solution, and definable solutions did not require one to ask after anyone’s health or express an opinion on the barley crop, when he saw the figure ahead on the road.

A young woman, walking briskly despite the mud that sucked at her boots with each step, wearing a brown dress the precise colour of the November landscape and a bonnet that had clearly been through several campaigns and was now serving out its remaining days with the weary resignation of a veteran who knows the war is lost but refuses, on principle, to desert. She carried a basket on one arm and moved with the determined energy of a person who has somewhere to be and insufficient time to get there, her free hand swinging at her side with a vigour that suggested she was the sort of woman who put her whole body into the business of getting from one place to another.

Adrian would have ridden past with nothing more than the brief inclination of his head that custom demanded when a gentleman passed a lady on a country road. He was, above all things, a man who minded his own affairs, and a stranger on a lane was not his affair, and stopping to make conversation would require him to think of something to say, which would require him to want to say something, which he emphatically did not.

He drew alongside her, close enough to register the basket of folded mending, the faded bonnet ribbons, the dress that hung on her frame with the telltale looseness of a garment that had been altered to accommodate a body that was no longer filling it, and then she was behind him, and he was past, and that, as far as Adrian was concerned, was the end of it.

It was not the end of it.

The sound came from behind him, not a cry, not even a gasp, just the soft, wet thud of a body meeting mud, and Adrian pulled up his horse and looked back and saw her on the ground.

She had not tripped. She had not caught her foot on a stone. Her legs had simply ceased to support her, as though some essential mechanism had quietly failed, and she had gone down in the mud with a gracelessness that was somehow worse than a dramatic collapse because there was nothing theatrical about it at all, just a girl whose body had decided, without consultation, that it was finished.

Adrian sat on his horse for approximately two seconds, long enough for his mind, which operated with the cool efficiency of a well-maintained clock, to cycle through the relevant considerations. He was alone on the road. There was no one else to help. The nearest house was a mile behind him and two miles ahead. If he rode on, the girl would lie in the mud until someone else came along, which might be minutes or might be hours, and the November cold was the sort that turned inconvenience into danger with very little warning.

This was, he thought, with the dry resignation of a man whose afternoon has been thoroughly derailed, extremely inconvenient.

He dismounted. He reached her in three strides and knelt beside her in the mud without thinking about his riding coat, which was new and expensive and was now acquiring a patina of Hertfordshire clay that his valet would regard as a personal tragedy.

She was conscious, barely. Her eyelids were fluttering with the desperate determination of a woman who is fighting to stay present against the insistent pull of a body that has decided it would very much like to shut down, and when she focused on his face, blurrily, with the effortful squint of a person trying to read a sign in poor light, she said, with a small, mortified smile that was so wildly inappropriate to the circumstances that Adrian did not know what to do with it:

“Oh, how embarrassing. I do beg your pardon.”

Adrian stared at her. She was lying in the mud on a cold November afternoon, clearly unwell, possibly seriously so, and she was apologising, not crying, not calling for help, not doing any of the things that a reasonable person might do upon finding themselves horizontal in a country lane, but offering up social niceties as though she had committed a minor faux pas at a garden party rather than collapsed in the road.

“Don’t speak,” he said, which was as close to medical advice as he was qualified to give.

“I’m not usually this much trouble,” she said, ignoring his instruction with a cheerfulness that he found, despite everything, faintly impressive. “Ask anyone. I’m terribly reliable. It’s practically my only quality.”

“Miss…”

“Fieldmore. Molly Fieldmore.” She blinked up at him with enormous brown eyes that were rapidly losing their battle with consciousness. “I should introduce myself, since you appear to be rescuing me. It seems only polite.”

“Miss Fieldmore. Please stop talking.”

“Yes, of course. You’re quite right. I’ll stop. I’m stopping now.”

She did not stop. Her mouth opened again, and Adrian braced himself for another wave of relentless courtesy, but what came out instead was: “You have very serious eyes, sir. Has anyone ever told you that? They’re like, like a winter sky when it can’t decide whether to snow or not.”

And then, as though this meteorological assessment of his eyes had been the last item on an agenda she had been determined to complete before losing consciousness, she fainted properly, her head falling against his arm with the absolute, boneless surrender of a body that has spent its last reserve.

Adrian looked down at the girl, this Molly Fieldmore, who weighed approximately as much as a large cat and who had just compared his eyes to indecisive weather, and thought, with perfect clarity: This is the most ridiculous thing that has ever happened to me.

He gathered her up. She was distressingly light, not slender-light, not delicately-built-light, but wrong-light, the kind of light that meant something was missing, that the body he was holding had been systematically emptied of the substance that should have been there. Through the loose fabric of her dress, which hung on her frame like a sail on a windless day, he could feel the ridges of her ribs with a distinctness that made something in his chest constrict, not sentiment, he told himself; probably the cold.

Her basket had spilled when she fell: three neatly folded shirts, a pair of mended stockings and a spool of thread. The careful, competent work of a seamstress making her rounds. There was no food in the basket, no wrapped parcel of bread or cheese, nothing that suggested she had eaten or intended to eat at any point during what was clearly a walk of some distance.

She collapsed from hunger, he thought, and the conclusion arrived with the clean, unwelcome certainty of a mathematical proof.

He carried her to his horse, which regarded the proceedings with the placid disinterest of an animal that has seen its owner do many odd things and has learned not to form opinions, and he managed the logistics of mounting with an unconscious woman in his arms through sheer determination and a complete disregard for elegance. He settled her against his shoulder, her head tucking into the hollow below his collarbone as though it had been designed to fit there, which was an observation he dismissed immediately and turned his horse toward Thornfield.

She stirred once, halfway through the ride, her eyes opening just enough to find his face above hers.

“I’m terribly sorry,” she murmured, as though she had been composing the apology in her unconsciousness and had surfaced specifically to deliver it. “This is so inconvenient for you.”

“It is,” Adrian agreed, because it was, and because he was not in the habit of lying to people even when they were semi-conscious.

She blinked at him. A faint, incredulous almost-smile crossed her face, as though she had not expected honesty and was pleased to find it. “I’m not usually this much trouble. Ask anyone.”

“You said that already.”

“Did I? I must be more disoriented than I thought. Or possibly I have a limited repertoire of reassurances for men who find me in ditches. I shall have to expand it.”

“You are not in a ditch. You are on a horse.”

“Am I? Oh. That’s… considerably better.” Her eyes were closing again, her voice going thin and distant. “You’re very warm, sir. It’s nice. I haven’t been properly warm in… I don’t remember. Isn’t that funny?”

It was not funny. It was not funny at all. Adrian tightened his arm around her and rode faster, and she was asleep, or unconscious, he could not tell the difference and did not like either option, before the next bend in the road, and he held her carefully and said nothing for the remaining mile and a half, not because he was choosing silence but because, for once, he genuinely did not know what to say.

The girl who hadn’t been warm in so long she couldn’t remember. Who had collapsed from hunger and apologised for the inconvenience. Who had called his eyes a winter sky.

Ridiculous, he thought again, but the word had lost its edge somewhere between the lane and the gates of Thornfield Park, and what remained in its place was something he did not yet have a name for, and was not sure he wanted one.

The groom in the stable yard stared.

“Your Grace, is she…”

“Send for Dr. Ames,” Adrian said.

“Is she injured? Should I fetch help?”

“Dr. Ames. Now.”

The groom ran. Adrian carried the girl inside, where Mrs. Hutchins, the housekeeper, a woman of sixty-two years and imperturbable disposition who had managed the Thornfield household through two dukes and considered herself proof against surprise, appeared at the foot of the stairs and stopped dead.

“Goodness gracious,” she said. “Who is that?”

“I don’t know. A Miss Fieldmore. She collapsed on the Cressfield road.”

“Collapsed? Is she ill?”

“I don’t know.”

“Has she spoken? Has she said anything?”

“She has done almost nothing but speak. She apologised for fainting. Twice. She also told me my eyes look like winter and that I am warm.”

Mrs. Hutchins absorbed this extraordinary intelligence with a single blink, a blink that contained, Adrian suspected, significantly more commentary than she was choosing to voice. She assessed the girl’s pallor and weight in a glance and became immediately operational.

“The blue guest chamber. I’ll have the fire lit and water sent up.”

“And food. She’ll need food when she wakes.”

“Your Grace, I have been feeding people in this house for twenty-five years. I do not require instruction on the subject.”

“I know. I am…” He stopped. He did not know what he was. Concerned, possibly, though concern for a stranger seemed disproportionate. Unsettled, certainly, though the source of the unsettlement was not something he wished to examine while standing in his entrance hall holding an unconscious woman and having a debate with his housekeeper about soup.

“The blue room,” he said, and carried her upstairs.

He laid her on the bed, and Mrs. Hutchins, watching from the doorway, noted the care with which he did it, not merely the physical caution of a man handling something fragile, but something else, something more deliberate, as though he was conscious of every point of contact and was trying to cause as little disturbance as possible, the way one lowers a sleeping child into a crib.

The girl stirred. Her eyelids fluttered. “I’m sorry,” she murmured. “I’m being such a nuisance.”

“You are not a nuisance,” Adrian said, though he had, in fact, thought precisely that word not thirty minutes ago on the road, and the contradiction between what he had thought and what he had said did not escape him.

“I only need a moment. Just a moment and I’ll be perfectly—”

She was asleep before she finished the sentence, and Adrian stood beside the bed and looked at her, at the thin face and the damp curls and the freckles scattered across her nose like seeds thrown by a careless hand, and felt something he could not file neatly into any category his mind maintained, a sensation that existed in the gap between annoyance and concern, between inconvenience and something considerably more alarming.

“I shall see to her, Your Grace,” Mrs. Hutchins said gently. “Perhaps you might wait in your study.”

He left without a word, which Mrs. Hutchins found considerably more eloquent than any speech he might have made.

He intercepted Dr. Ames in the corridor an hour later. He had spent that hour in his study, ostensibly reviewing accounts, actually staring at a column of figures that might as well have been written in Sanskrit. This irritated him. Adrian did not stare. Adrian did not lose focus. Adrian processed information with the reliable efficiency of a well-made clock, and the fact that a stranger’s freckles had somehow jammed the mechanism was both inexplicable and deeply unwelcome.

“Well?” he said, when the physician appeared.

“She is not ill, Your Grace.”

“Then what happened to her?”

“She is underfed. Significantly so, and has been for some considerable time.”

“How long?”

“Months, at minimum. Possibly the better part of a year. The fainting, the pallor, the state of her hair and skin are all consistent with prolonged nutritional insufficiency.” Dr. Ames met his gaze with the steady calm of a man delivering an unpleasant truth. “In plain terms, Your Grace, she has been starving.”

“Starving,” Adrian repeated, and the word sat in his mouth like a stone.

“Slowly, and I suspect deliberately, in the sense that she has been giving whatever food is available to someone else. The mother, most likely, given that Mrs. Hutchins tells me the mother is an invalid. The patterns are quite distinct, the body consumes itself in a particular order when food is withheld over a period of time, and Miss Fieldmore’s condition is consistent with someone who has been eating last and eating least for a very long while.”

Adrian said nothing. He was thinking, not about drainage ditches, for the first time in recent memory, but about a girl who had walked miles on an empty stomach carrying a basket of other people’s mending and had fainted in the road and had smiled while doing it, and the calculus of that, the sheer, brutal mathematics of a woman starving so her mother could eat, settled into his understanding with a weight he had not anticipated.

“She is not in immediate danger,” Dr. Ames continued, “but she is not far from it, either. Another few weeks of this, perhaps less as the cold sets in, and the consequences would be considerably more serious than a fainting spell.”

“Is there family? Someone who should be notified?”

“Only the mother. And Miss Fieldmore was most anxious on that subject, she asked me three times if she might leave tonight.”

“She cannot walk home in this condition.”

“No, Your Grace, she certainly cannot. I told her as much, though she did not appear convinced.” The physician permitted himself a wry half-smile. “She attempted to stand while I was taking her pulse. Very nearly succeeded before the room disagreed with her. She then apologised to me for being, and I quote, ‘inconvenient.’”

“She said that to me as well,” Adrian said. “On the road. She seems to believe her primary offence is causing trouble, rather than the fact that she is starving.”

“That is often the way, Your Grace, with people who have been managing alone for a long time. The shame of needing help outweighs the reality of the need.” Dr. Ames paused. “I have been practising medicine for twenty years. I am not easily moved. But a girl who is starving and apologises for the trouble of it, that is a particular kind of bravery that I find rather difficult to witness.”

“Yes,” Adrian said, very quietly. “It is.”

“See that she eats. That is the prescription. Food, rest, warmth. Simple enough.”

“Simple enough,” Adrian repeated, and the physician left, and Adrian sat down at his desk and discovered that the drainage plans, the accounts, and every other matter that normally occupied his mind with comfortable efficiency had become entirely, infuriatingly irrelevant, displaced by the image of a girl who weighed nothing, whose ribs he could count through her dress, who had called his eyes a winter sky and apologised for the inconvenience of dying.

She has been starving. Slowly.

The adverb lodged itself behind his ribs and would not leave.

She has been giving whatever food there is to her mother.

He thought about this for a long time. He thought about the particular kind of mathematics that led a young woman to calculate, every day, how little she could eat and still remain standing, and how that calculation had finally, on a muddy lane in November, come up short.

He thought about the smile. The damnable, impossible smile she had offered from the ground, as though the worst thing about collapsing from starvation was that it might have disrupted his afternoon.

Ridiculous, he thought, for the third time, and the word had no force left in it at all.

 

 

 

Chapter Two

 

 

“Oh, I have died,” said Molly Fieldmore to the ceiling, “and heaven has very good linens.”

She said this with perfect sincerity, because the ceiling above her was white and flawless, not a crack, not a stain, not a trace of the slowly expanding map of Italy that had colonised her own bedroom ceiling and was now, by her latest assessment, making territorial advances toward the Balkans, and the bed beneath her was so extraordinarily, implausibly, almost offensively comfortable that she could not conceive of any explanation that did not involve her actual death and subsequent relocation to a significantly better postcode.

The fire was lit. Not the careful, rationed, single-coal-at-a-time fire that Molly maintained at home with the anxious vigilance of a woman who knows exactly how much each flame costs and is doing the arithmetic in her head even as she warms her hands, but a proper fire, a generous, extravagant, roaring fire that warmed the room all the way to its corners and did not appear to be operated on a budget.

I could lie here forever, Molly thought, and then, because she was Molly Fieldmore and Molly Fieldmore did not lie anywhere forever because there was always something that needed doing, she corrected herself: I could lie here for five more minutes. Perhaps ten. Perhaps just until the feeling comes back to my feet.

Then memory returned, and with it the full, catastrophic awareness of what had happened.

The lane. The dizziness, not the usual kind, not the manageable kind that she had learned to breathe through over the past several months, but the serious kind, the kind that started at the edges and rushed inward like a tide, and the ground rising to meet her with an inevitability she could not argue with, and then, A man. A tall man, dark-haired, kneeling beside her in the mud with an expression of, what had it been? Not concern, exactly. Something drier than concern, something that had looked almost like irritation before it shifted into something else, something she could not name because she had been too busy fainting to study his face with the attention it apparently warranted.

She had talked to him. Oh, Goodness. She had talked to him. She had apologised, she remembered that much, and she had said something about his eyes, something about winter, something that she very much hoped was a fever dream but suspected, with the sinking certainty of a woman who has spent her whole life saying things and regretting approximately forty percent of them, was not.

She had told him he was warm.

She had told a complete stranger on a country road that he was warm, and then she had fainted on him, and now she was in a bed that was not hers in a room the size of her entire cottage, and, the door opened, and a woman of considerable presence entered carrying a tray.

“Ah,” said the woman, with the calm authority of someone who has been managing crises for so long that she has forgotten how to be flustered by them. “You’re awake.”

“I’m so sorry,” Molly said immediately, because apologising was her first, second, and third instinct in any situation and she had found it served her well in most of them and at least bought time in the rest. “I really am most terribly sorry. I cannot think what happened, one moment I was walking and the next…”

“You fainted, Miss Fieldmore. On the Cressfield road. A gentleman found you and brought you here.”

A gentleman. Molly’s mind seized on the word with relief. A gentleman was manageable. A gentleman was a man of some local standing, a country squire perhaps, someone she could write a thank-you note to and repay with mending and eventually stop being mortified about in perhaps four to six years.

“How kind of him,” Molly said, sitting up against the pillows with an energy she did not entirely possess. “I must thank him, of course. I shall write a note, or perhaps I could thank him in person? I feel dreadful about the trouble. I’m not usually the fainting sort. I fainted once when I was twelve because Betty dared me to hold my breath, but that was self-inflicted and hardly counts.”

“I am Mrs. Hutchins,” the woman said, setting the tray on the bedside table with the decisive clink of someone who is about to deliver information and wishes to ensure the recipient is not holding anything breakable. “Housekeeper to His Grace the Duke of Thornfield. You are in the blue guest chamber of Thornfield Park.”

Molly’s brain performed a manoeuvre that she could only describe, in retrospect, as a controlled crash.

His Grace.

The Duke.

Of Thornfield.

She had fainted on the Duke of Thornfield.

She had fainted on the Duke of Thornfield, the same Duke of Thornfield that the village discussed in tones normally reserved for natural disasters and mythological beasts. The Duke of Thornfield, who was said to have killed a man in a duel. The Duke of Thornfield, who was said to have driven a woman to madness with his silence. The Duke of Thornfield, whose estate bordered the village and whose person was never seen in it, because he apparently preferred the company of his wolfhounds to the company of human beings, and who could blame him, really, but the point was that she had fainted on a duke.

Not merely fainted on a duke but fainted on that duke, the tall, dark, serious-eyed man on the road, and she had called his eyes a winter sky. She had told a duke that he was warm. She had told a duke who was rumoured to have killed a man in a duel that he was warm and nice and then she had fallen asleep on his shoulder like a child being carried home from a fair.

“Oh,” Molly said, in a very small voice.

“Indeed,” said Mrs. Hutchins, with the faintest suggestion of amusement.

“Mrs. Hutchins.”

“Yes, Miss Fieldmore?”

“When you say the Duke of Thornfield, you do mean, that is to say, the gentleman on the road, the one who, that was…”

“His Grace, yes.”

“The actual Duke of Thornfield.”

“We have only the one.”

Molly pressed her hands to her face. Behind them, her cheeks were burning with a heat that could have warmed the room without the fire’s assistance. “Mrs. Hutchins, I told the Duke of Thornfield that he was warm.”

“So His Grace mentioned.”

“He mentioned it?”

“He did. He also mentioned that you apologised twice and compared his eyes to the weather, which I must tell you, in twenty-five years of service, no one has ever done.”

“I would very much like to die now,” Molly said, with calm finality. “Right here, in this bed, which is the most comfortable bed I have ever encountered and is therefore an acceptable location for my demise.”

“I’m afraid dying is not on the agenda, Miss Fieldmore. Eating, however, is.”

Mrs. Hutchins gestured at the tray, and Molly’s spiralling mortification was interrupted, hijacked, really, ambushed by a force more powerful than embarrassment and that was by the smell of soup.

It was the smell of real food. Not the thin, watery, carefully rationed broth that Molly made at home, stretching a single chicken carcass across three days of meals and calling it economy. This was soup with substance, golden, steaming, fragrant with herbs and chicken and the unmistakable richness of a kitchen that did not operate on a budget. Beside it sat a plate of bread, freshly cut and still warm, and a dish of butter, actual, genuine, pale-yellow butter, and a pot of tea with cream.

Molly’s stomach made a sound so prolonged and so emphatic that it constituted, in her opinion, a complete betrayal by an internal organ.

“His Grace’s instructions,” Mrs. Hutchins said, as though the sound had not occurred, “are that you are to eat and rest. Dr. Ames has already seen you, you were asleep, and has confirmed that you are in need of nourishment, which this household is more than equipped to provide.”

“A physician!” Molly’s mortification, which had been briefly displaced by the soup, returned with reinforcements. “Mrs. Hutchins, a physician was entirely unnecessary.”

“He has come and gone, Miss Fieldmore. The matter is settled.”

“But I am perfectly well. It was only a dizzy spell, the sort of thing that happens to everyone.”

“It does not happen to everyone, Miss Fieldmore.” Mrs. Hutchins’s voice was gentle, but beneath the gentleness was something immovable. “It happens to people who have not been eating.”

The words landed in the warm room with the precision of a surgeon’s knife, and Molly felt them cut through every layer of bright deflection she had built around herself, the smiles, the chatter, the relentless, exhausting performance of being perfectly fine, and for a moment, just a moment, the mask slipped, and what was underneath was not cheerful or bright or fine at all but tired, so terribly tired, and afraid in a way she would not admit to anyone, least of all herself.

Then the mask was back. It was always back. Molly Fieldmore’s mask had a faster recovery time than any other mechanism in nature.

“I simply forgot lunch,” she said, with a brightness that was almost convincing. “One does, when one is busy.”

“Indeed.” Mrs. Hutchins’s expression conveyed, without a single word, that she did not believe this for a moment. “In any case, I should warn you that Mrs. Pike, our cook, takes a very personal interest in empty bowls. An uneaten meal is, in her view, a moral failing on the part of the cook and an act of war on the part of the guest.”

“I would not dream of declaring war on Mrs. Pike.”

“Very wise. She is considerably more frightening than His Grace, though neither would thank me for saying so.”

“Is His Grace very frightening?” Molly heard herself ask, and then immediately wished she hadn’t, because inquiring about the temperament of the duke whose hospitality one is currently enjoying after collapsing on him in the road seemed, even by her standards, somewhat forward. “He did not seem frightening. On the road. He seemed, I don’t know. Serious. But not unkind.”

Something shifted in Mrs. Hutchins’s expression, a softening that Molly recognised as the look of a person hearing someone they are fond of described accurately.

“His Grace is not what most people think he is, Miss Fieldmore. But you will form your own opinions. Now, eat. Before it gets cold.”

Molly reached for the spoon, and from the first taste, every other thought, the mortification, the duke, the fact that she had told a possibly murderous aristocrat that he had nice eyes, fell away like scenery from a moving carriage, because the soup was transcendent.

It was so good that it hurt, in the way that warmth hurts when you have been cold for so long that you have forgotten what temperature your body is supposed to be. It filled her, not just her stomach, but every hollow, hungry, carefully hidden place that months of rationing and sacrifice and smiling through the gnawing had carved inside her. Her hands trembled around the spoon. She ate with a desperation she could not disguise and a focus so complete that a small, detached part of her mind, the part that was always watching, always performing, always making sure the mask was in place, noted that she was eating like a starving person and that this was, in fact, exactly what she was, and that pretending otherwise was becoming increasingly difficult to sustain.

Mrs. Hutchins stepped into the corridor to speak with a housemaid, a retreat so perfectly timed that Molly knew it was deliberate, the tact of a woman who understood that some hungers were too private for witnesses.

When Mrs. Hutchins returned, the tray was devastated. Every drop of soup. Every crumb of bread. Every scraping of butter. Molly sat very straight against the pillows with her hands folded in her lap and her composure restored by force of will.

“That,” Molly said, “was the finest soup I have ever eaten in my life. Mrs. Pike is an artist. A genius. A national treasure. If she ever tires of working for a duke, I shall offer her my cottage, my cat, and my undying devotion.”

“I shall convey your sentiments. She will be pleased.”

“Has she always cooked for Thornfield?”

“Eighteen years. She came from Lord Pemberton’s household and has been the undisputed sovereign of the kitchen ever since. His Grace values her enormously, though he has never told her so, because His Grace does not tell people things.”

“He told me to stop talking,” Molly said. “On the road. Rather firmly.”

“That is practically an oration, for His Grace.”

“And he agreed that I was inconvenient. Which I appreciated, actually. Most people would have said, ‘Oh no, not at all,’ which we both would have known was a lie.”

Mrs. Hutchins gave her a look that Molly could not quite decipher, something between appraisal and approval, the look of a woman who is recalibrating her initial assessment and finding it insufficient.

“He is the best man I know, Miss Fieldmore,” Mrs. Hutchins said. “He simply does not have the words for it. Or rather, he does not believe the words are necessary, which is both his finest quality and his greatest limitation. He has been alone a long time. Not because anyone forced him to be, but because the world was never quite built for the way he is.”

Molly was quiet. Genuinely quiet, which was unusual enough that she noticed it herself, the absence of the constant, chattering current that normally ran through her mind and out of her mouth without pause. She was thinking about a man who had knelt in the mud beside a stranger and told her not to speak and then carried her home and sent for a physician and ordered soup and had not, at any point, said a single unnecessary word, and how this was somehow the kindest thing anyone had done for her in two years.

“That,” Molly said softly, “is very sad.”

“It is. Now, please rest, Miss Fieldmore.”

“But my mother, she doesn’t know where I am, she’ll be terrified.”

“His Grace has sent word to the village. Your mother knows you are safe.”

Molly blinked. “He already…”

“When His Grace decides a thing shall be done, Miss Fieldmore, it is generally accomplished before the rest of us have finished discussing whether it ought to be.”

“What a remarkable quality.”

“It is, though it makes him rather difficult to argue with. I have been trying for twenty-five years.”

“And?”

“I win approximately one argument in six. Better odds than most.”

Molly lay back against the pillows, and the warmth held her, and she closed her eyes and thought: He agreed that I was inconvenient, and it was the most honest thing anyone has said to me in months.

And then, because she was Molly Fieldmore and her mind did not rest even when her body demanded it: I told a duke he had winter eyes. I am going to think about that every night for the rest of my life. I am going to be ninety years old in my grave and still cringing.

She slept deeply and well for the first time in months, and if her cheeks were damp when Mrs. Hutchins drew the curtains, neither woman said a word.

 

 

 

Chapter Three

 

 

“Good morning, Your Grace, and I owe you the most tremendous apology.”

She was standing by the sideboard when Adrian entered the breakfast room the next morning, already dressed in her brushed-clean brown frock with her bonnet in hand and her entire bearing communicating, with the volume of a church organ, that she intended to be out the door within the next five minutes and would not be persuaded otherwise by any force short of divine intervention.

Adrian had not prepared himself for this encounter. He never prepared himself for encounters, because he did not have encounters, he had routines, and routines did not include finding young women stationed by his sideboard at seven in the morning with expressions of determined mortification. He had expected the breakfast room to be empty, as it always was, as it had been every morning for a decade, and the presence of this particular girl, with her freckles and her gap-toothed smile and her air of someone who has made a plan and will execute it even if the plan is terrible, brought him to a halt in the doorway.

She had colour this morning. That was the first thing he noticed, that the grey pallor of yesterday had been replaced by something warmer, something closer to what her complexion probably looked like when she was eating regularly, and the relief he felt at this observation was disproportionate to his acquaintance with her, which was approximately fourteen hours, half of which she had spent unconscious.

“I cannot imagine what you must think of me,” Molly continued, the words rushing out with the particular velocity of a woman trying to outrun her own embarrassment. “Collapsing on the road like some character in a gothic novel, I assure you, I am not generally so dramatic. I have never fainted in my life. Well, once, when I was twelve and Betty dared me to hold my breath for a full minute, but that was self-inflicted and hardly counts. And I must apologise for the things I said when I was, well, I understand I made several remarks about your eyes and your, your temperature, which I can only attribute to delirium and which I hope you will disregard entirely.”

She is mortified about the winter sky comment, Adrian thought, with something that was not quite amusement but was adjacent to it. Good. That makes two of us.

“Please sit down,” he said, because she was talking at a speed that suggested she might exhaust herself into another faint, and managing one collapse per week was the maximum he was prepared to accommodate.

“Oh, yes, thank you, but I truly mustn’t stay, Your Grace. My mother will be expecting me. I have the Hendersons’ mending to deliver by Thursday, and I have already imposed on your hospitality in the most spectacular fashion…”

“Have you eaten?”

“I, well, not yet this morning, but…”

“Then sit.”

It came out more clipped than he intended, the imperative mood, unpadded by pleasantry, in the manner that had been making people think him cold and strange since he was old enough to speak. But Molly Fieldmore, instead of looking offended or frightened, tilted her head and regarded him with an expression of frank curiosity, as though he were a book written in a language she did not speak but was interested in learning.

“You sound exactly like Betty,” she said. “My maid. She has the same way of issuing instructions as though they are natural laws. ‘Sit down, Miss Molly.’ ‘Eat your soup, Miss Molly.’ ‘Stop giving your food to the chickens, Miss Molly.’”

“Is it effective?”

“Devastatingly so. I have never won an argument with Betty in twenty-two years of trying. She is the most stubborn woman in England, and I include the Queen in that assessment.”

“Then I am in good company. Sit down, Miss Fieldmore. Please.”

She sat, and Adrian took his customary seat at the head of the table, and a footman materialised with tea and toast and eggs, and Molly’s eyes moved over the spread with a hunger she was desperately trying to conceal and entirely failing to, because the hunger was enormous and her ability to hide it was, this morning, somewhat diminished by the fact that she had slept in a warm bed and eaten real food for the first time in months and her body, having been reminded of what adequate nourishment felt like, was now staging a full-scale revolt against the regime of deprivation she had been imposing on it.

“Help yourself,” Adrian said, gesturing at the sideboard. “Mrs. Pike always prepares too much.”

“Your Mrs. Hutchins said precisely the same thing yesterday.” Molly reached for the toast with studied casualness, as though she were merely being polite rather than fighting the urge to pile her plate with everything in reach. “Does the kitchen routinely cook for a regiment, or is this a polite conspiracy?”

Adrian did not answer, because both available responses, yes, it is a conspiracy and I instructed them to feed you because the physician says you are starving and I am finding this information extremely difficult to sit with, were equally unsuitable for the breakfast table. He opened his newspaper, which was his customary method of indicating that the social obligations of a meal had been satisfied and silence could now commence.

Silence, however, appeared to be a natural impossibility in the vicinity of Molly Fieldmore.

“This is a beautiful room,” she said, buttering toast with the reverent care of a woman who has not seen butter in six months and intends to honour the occasion. “The light is lovely at this hour. And the wallpaper, is it Chinese? My mother had a screen once with a similar pattern. She sold it when — well.” A pause, barely perceptible, a door closed before he could see what was behind it. “She sold it. But the birds were just like these, with the long tails.”

Adrian glanced at the wallpaper. He had eaten in this room for ten years without examining it closely. The birds were, now that he looked, rather well-painted.

“My mother chose it,” he said. “I believe it is Chinese. I cannot speak to the birds.”

“Oh, they are absolutely gossiping. That one on the left is saying something terribly scandalous about the one near the window. You can see it in the angle of the beak.”

He looked at the bird near the window. It did, he had to admit, have a rather judgmental expression for a hand-painted waterfowl.

“You may be right,” he said.

“And that one by the door is pretending not to listen but clearly is. She has the expression of a woman at a card party who has just overheard something devastating about the hostess and is trying to decide whether to be shocked or delighted.”

“You have given them a great deal of character on short acquaintance.”

“It is a gift. Also a flaw. Betty says I could befriend a lamppost if it stood still long enough. My mother says I light up a room. I suspect the truth is somewhere between, I light up the room while befriending all the lampposts in it.”

“The lampposts must appreciate the attention.”

Molly stared at him. “Your Grace, was that a joke?”

“I don’t make jokes,” Adrian said, which was, technically, true, he did not make jokes in the way other people made jokes, with setups and punchlines and expectant pauses. He simply said things that happened to be funny, and then looked faintly surprised when people laughed, which usually made them stop laughing immediately because his faint surprise looked exactly like his faint disapproval, and nobody wanted to be caught laughing at a duke who might be disapproving.

“That was absolutely a joke,” Molly said, with the delighted certainty of a woman who has found something she was not looking for. “It was dry and subtle and delivered with a completely straight face, which is the best kind. I shall mark this day in my diary.”

“Please don’t.”

“Tuesday the fourteenth of November: the Duke of Thornfield made a joke about lampposts. It was magnificent. There were no survivors.”

Something was happening to Adrian’s mouth. A definite upward movement at the left corner, a muscular insurgency against thirty years of habitual severity, and he suppressed it with the kind of effort usually reserved for feats of physical endurance. He retreated behind his newspaper with renewed determination.

Molly watched him from across the table, her tea in both hands, and thought: There is a person in there. Behind all that silence and severity, there is someone who makes jokes about lampposts and almost smiles, and I think he might be the most interesting man I have ever met, and I have absolutely no business thinking that because he is a duke and I am a girl who faints in roads and I need to go home.

A pause settled between them, the first comfortable one, the first that did not feel like a gap to be filled but like a space to be inhabited, and when Molly spoke again, the performance had dropped away, and her voice was quiet and true.

“I must go home, Your Grace. My mother is alone and not well, and she will worry.”

Adrian folded the newspaper. “The roads are not safe for walking. I will have the carriage take you.”

“Oh, that is not necessary, truly, I am perfectly capable…”

“Miss Fieldmore.” He met her eyes, and she saw in his, those winter eyes, those serious, not-unkind, deciding-whether-to-snow eyes, something that was not coldness and not severity but simply resolve, quiet and total, and she understood that arguing would be like arguing with a wall, if the wall happened to be right.

“The carriage,” he said.

She held his gaze for a long moment. Then the resistance softened, not defeat, not capitulation, but recognition, the look of a woman who has been doing everything alone for so long that being helped feels foreign, like a language she once spoke and has since forgotten.

“Thank you,” she said. “That is very kind.”

There it is again, Adrian thought. The shift. The turning of something rusted. He stood, and his chair scraped back, and he said, “Mrs. Hutchins will see to the arrangements,” and he left the room, and he did not acknowledge the thought that followed him down the corridor and into his study and stayed there for the rest of the morning, which was that the breakfast room had never, in all the years he had sat in it alone, felt as empty as it felt right now.

In the corridor, Mrs. Hutchins was waiting with the air of a woman who had been listening at the door, a habit she would deny under oath and that Adrian had never once challenged, because her eavesdropping was more efficient than any briefing he could provide.

“The carriage for Miss Fieldmore,” he said.

“Already ordered, Your Grace.”

“And a hamper. Food. Enough for…”

“Mrs. Pike has been assembling one since dawn. She took a personal interest after I mentioned the state of Miss Fieldmore’s appetite.”

“What did you tell her?”

“That the young lady ate as though she hadn’t seen a proper meal in six months. Mrs. Pike took this as a personal affront to the culinary profession and has been cooking in a state of righteous fury ever since. I believe she views Miss Fieldmore’s hunger as a challenge to her vocation.”

“Excellent.”

“She said, and I quote, ‘That girl hasn’t had a proper meal since the old king was sane, and I’ll not have it said that anyone left my kitchen hungry.’”

“It is my kitchen, technically.”

“I would not recommend making that argument to Mrs. Pike, Your Grace. She has been here longer than you have and considers the ovens her sovereign territory.”

“Then I shall cede the ovens.” Adrian paused. “Mrs. Hutchins, there should be medicines in the hamper. For the mother. Whatever Dr. Ames recommends for an invalid.”

Mrs. Hutchins raised an eyebrow. “Shall I wrap them subtly?”

“Under the food. She would refuse them if she saw them first.”

“You know this after one breakfast, Your Grace?”

“She spent twenty minutes deflecting every question I might have asked with stories about wallpaper birds and lampposts. That is not the behaviour of a woman who accepts help easily. It is the behaviour of a woman who has been managing alone for a long time and would rather talk herself hoarse than admit she needs anything.”

“It is,” Mrs. Hutchins agreed. “And you noticed all of this.”

“I notice things. It is what I do instead of talking.”

“So I have observed, in twenty-five years.” She paused. “Shall I send the carriage weekly? With provisions?”

“She would notice. She would refuse.”

“Then what does Your Grace suggest?”

“I don’t know yet.” Adrian turned toward his study. “But she will not starve. That is not negotiable.”

“No, Your Grace,” Mrs. Hutchins said to his retreating back, with a small, private smile. “I don’t believe it is.”

At the front door, Mrs. Hutchins placed the hamper in Molly’s arms.

“From the kitchen,” she said. “Mrs. Pike always prepares too much. You would be doing us a kindness.”

Molly looked down at the hamper. It was heavy enough to require both arms and probably a structural engineer. “Mrs. Hutchins.”

“Yes, Miss Fieldmore?”

“This is not surplus. This is a siege provision.”

“Mrs. Pike is an enthusiastic cook.”

“There is a joint of beef in here.”

“As I said. Enthusiastic.”

“And butter, and cheese, and — is this a pie?”

“Chicken and leek. Her specialty. She will be gravely offended if it goes uneaten.”

Molly looked at Mrs. Hutchins. Mrs. Hutchins looked at Molly. Between them passed the silent understanding shared by women who are fluent in the arithmetic of pride and necessity and know exactly how to balance the books.

“Please tell Mrs. Pike,” Molly said, her brightness wavering at the edges, “that I would sooner perish than give her offence.”

“Very well, Miss Fieldmore.”

“And please tell His Grace…” She paused. Her throat worked. “Tell him I am grateful. For all of it. Every single bit.”

“I shall, though I should warn you that expressions of gratitude make His Grace profoundly uncomfortable. He prefers to do kind things and then pretend he hasn’t done them.”

“What a peculiar man.”

“He is, Miss Fieldmore. But he is a good one.”

Molly climbed into the carriage, and she held herself together through the gates and along the lane and past the hedgerows, her spine very straight, her smile firmly in position, and it was only when the carriage turned the final corner and she was entirely alone that she pressed her face against the hamper and allowed herself one shuddering breath that was almost, but not quite, a sob.

He hid the medicines under the cheese, she would discover later. He hid them so I wouldn’t have to feel ashamed.

She straightened. She set the smile back into place. She prepared to tell her mother a very convincing lie about mending.

In the Thornfield kitchen, Mrs. Pike stood with arms crossed, watching Mrs. Hutchins return from the front hall.

“Well?” Mrs. Pike said. “Did she take it?”

“She took it.”

“All of it? The pie as well?”

“Every morsel.”

“Wonderful.” Mrs. Pike shook her head with the particular fury of a cook who considers hunger a personal enemy. “That girl is the thinnest creature I have seen walk into this house since the greyhound His Grace’s father kept, and that animal was built to be thin, which is more than can be said for a young woman of two-and-twenty.”

“The world is what it has always been, Mrs. Pike.”

“The world is a disgrace.” She rolled pastry with a violence that suggested the dough was standing in for the entire social order. “Did His Grace say anything? About the girl?”

“He said she will not starve, and that this is not negotiable.”

Mrs. Pike’s rolling pin paused. “He said that?”

“Those exact words.”

“Well.” The rolling pin resumed with diminished fury. “That is the most I have heard His Grace say on any subject that was not drainage. You don’t suppose—”

“I don’t suppose anything, Mrs. Pike. And neither do you.”

“I am a cook, Mrs. Hutchins. I observe, I feed, and I keep my opinions to myself.”

“That would be a first.”

“It would,” Mrs. Pike agreed. “But I mean to try.”