She Was Having Tea Alone—Until Duke’s Quadruplet Boys Whispered Pretend You’re Our Mother…

Chapter 14

It took Eleanor a month, and it was the most delicately balanced piece of work she had ever done, far more so than any hem.

She did not ask the Duke for money, and she did not pay for the repairs herself. Either course would have spoiled the thing Mrs. Pruit had understood at once: the school had to become a need he could answer freely, not a kindness pressed upon him or performed in his place.

So Eleanor worked through the middling sort of people, the ones a duke might overlook unless circumstances put them directly in his path. She persuaded the schoolmaster’s widow to gather the old schoolbooks and make an honest account of what remained. She asked the rector to write down the number of children without lessons, the condition of the roof, and what a competent teacher would cost. A builder in town, who had known the Duke’s father, agreed to inspect the building and prepare a fair estimate — nothing more.

Then Eleanor arranged for those facts to reach the Duke without her name attached to them. The rector visited Hartfield and said, truthfully, that he did not know where else to turn. The widow sent her inventory and asked not for charity but whether the school might somehow be made useful again. The builder supplied his estimate. No one told the Duke what decision to make.

And then she waited.

Three evenings later, the Duke came to her sitting room with the particular furrow between his brows that meant he had been working at a problem until it had become personal.

“Vance,” he said — for he had never properly broken the habit of calling her by her name, and after a time they had both stopped noticing it — “did you know the village school has stood without a master for two years?”

“I had heard something of it,” Eleanor said, keeping her eyes on her mending.

“The roof leaks. Twelve children have no lessons. The rector has somehow contrived to place a builder’s estimate, a widow’s inventory, and a list of prospective pupils on my desk within three days of one another.”

“How remarkably organized of him.”

The Duke looked at her for a long moment. “The rector has never been remarkably organized in his life.”

Eleanor’s needle paused.

“You did not ask me for a penny,” he said.

“No.”

“You did not pay the builder.”

“No.”

“You merely made certain I could no longer pretend I did not know what was needed.”

At that, she looked up. “You said once that a kindness done for credit is only payment in another coin. I thought perhaps the school did not need a benefactor to admire. It needed a roof, books, and a teacher.”

Something in his face softened. “I have authorized the repairs. And I mean to find the teacher myself.”

“Then the school may have a chance.”

He crossed the room and took her hand. “You have spent a year teaching me that accepting a kindness is not the same as owing for it.”

“And you have spent a year proving that knowing what is needed is often enough to make you act.”

He bent his head over her hand, smiling in that small, reluctant way she had first seen across a tea table. “Then let us say no more about who arranged the rector’s sudden efficiency.”

“I would prefer that,” Eleanor said.