“I’ll Marry the First Woman Who Enters,” the Duke Declared— Then She Burst In Chasing a Bird With…

Chapter 4

Ashbourne Hall was not a house. It was a decision someone had made several centuries ago and never revisited.

Clara stood in the entrance hall with her one trunk at her feet and a footman on either side of the doors and had the distinct sensation of being swallowed. Above her, a staircase climbed into shadow. Somewhere to the left, a clock ticked with the patience of a thing that had outlived four monarchs.

She had expected grandeur. There was plenty of that.

She had expected servants. There were far too many of them.

What she had not expected was Adrian Sinclair, Duke of Ashbourne, standing at the bottom of the stairs in shirtsleeves with his cuffs undone and his hair visibly pushed back by his own hand, arguing with a man holding a ledger.

“—the eastern cottages need repairs,” the steward was saying. “I have told you. Twice.”

“You have told me three times.”

“Then may I be permitted to ask why nothing has been done?”

Adrian took the ledger, turned a page, turned another. “Because the roofers are occupied at the west barn until the end of the month, and I will not split them and finish neither.”

“Miss Hale.”

The steward looked past him. Adrian turned.

Clara had not planned to speak. She had a trunk, a headache from four hours of carriage springs, and no standing whatsoever in this house. But she had grown up in a village where the same four families had waited eleven winters for a bridge that kept being postponed, and something about the phrase occupied until the end of the month set her teeth on edge.

“The roof does not care about the barn,” she said.

Silence.

The steward’s eyebrows rose. Adrian’s expression did something complicated — surprise, irritation, and, beneath both, an inconvenient flicker of interest.

“Miss Hale,” he said. “You have been in my house for four minutes.”

“Yes.”

“Can the work be split?”

The steward blinked. “I beg your pardon, Your Grace?”

“The roofing. Two crews instead of one. Roughing the barn in the mornings, the cottages in the afternoons, or alternating days. Can it be split?”

“I—” The steward looked at his ledger as though it had betrayed him. “It could, in principle. The quality would suffer slightly if the men are rushed.”

Adrian looked at Clara.

“Then they will not be rushed,” he said. “They will take two weeks longer and both jobs will be finished. Arrange it.”

The steward bowed and left, and the great door closed behind him with a sound like a verdict.

Adrian turned.

“You could have told me that privately,” he said.

“You could have thought of it privately.”

“I had not finished the accounts.”

“The roof does not care.”

He looked at her for a moment. Then, unwillingly: “That is an irritatingly good point.”

“I know.”

“You are pleased.”

“I am.”

“Why?”

“Because you admitted I was right.”

He handed his ledger to a footman, shrugged his coat back on, and began walking down the hall. Clara followed, because the alternative was standing alone in the largest room she had ever seen in her life.

“Do not get used to it,” he said over his shoulder.

She laughed. He did not turn around, but his pace slowed — just slightly, the way a person slows when they have decided to be walked beside.

Later, in the gallery, she stopped dead.

Portraits lined the wall like a row of judges: dark oils in heavy frames, generations of Sinclairs staring down their noses at whoever had the misfortune to pass. Clara read the names on the little brass plates because there was nothing else to do with her hands, and because looking at anything for too long in this house made her feel like an exhibit.

Then she saw it.

A woman in a high-collared gown, painted sometime in the last century, one hand resting on a stone balustrade. At her throat hung a gold chain with a flat oval pendant, exactly the shape of the one in Clara’s trunk upstairs.

She stepped closer. The varnish had gone brown with age, the colors muddy, but the line of the chain was unmistakable — the same heavy link, the same plain oval seal.

“It is a copy,” she told herself, out loud, which is what people say when they are afraid of what they are thinking.

Because her mother had never been in a house like this. Her mother had sewn other women’s hems and died at thirty-six in a rented room that smelled of camphor.

Clara looked at the painted woman for a long moment. Then she went upstairs, unpacked her trunk, and put the necklace in the bottom drawer under her winter stockings, where it could not be seen.

That night she did not sleep. And at some point past two in the morning, walking the corridor because lying still had become unbearable, she passed a window at the end of the west passage and saw a light burning in a room on the far side of the courtyard — steady, yellow, patient.

Someone else in this house was awake.