Three Sisters Were Presented for the Duke to Marry — He Chose the Quiet Woman Pouring the Tea
Chapter 16
They drove out of the city, and neither of them said anything for a long time.
The Duke looked at her where she sat opposite him with the papers in her lap, and did not say any of the hundred things that were in his mouth — none of them, as he knew quite well, worth saying. There are moments when a woman has won a war in a room without a single shot being fired, and the only decent thing a man can do is be quiet, and let her carry it.
But the carriage turned, at the top of Holborn, in a direction that was not Grosvenor Square; and Diana, who noticed everything, noticed it.
“Your grace,” she said. “Where are we going?”
“Southcross,” said the Duke.
She looked at him.
“It is four hours,” he said. “We will arrive at dusk. I have taken the liberty of sending word ahead — there is a room, and a fire, and no one there but the housekeeper and the steward and a cook who will be offended if you do not eat. My mother gave me her blessing for the journey and her opinion of me for making it, and both were equally frank.” He paused. “I told her you would come back with me to Grosvenor Square tomorrow, and that I would not importune you about anything today. She said — I will give her words to you exactly — she said, Then why are you taking her to Kent, my dear, if you have nothing to say there?”
Diana, very quietly, in the corner of the carriage, laughed. It was the first time he had heard her laugh; and it was — as he thought, and remembered for a long time — a small sound, low and dry and real, the laugh of a woman who has not laughed in seven years and is surprised to find the machinery still works.
“I have no clothes for Kent,” she said.
“You have no clothes at all,” he said. “My mother’s woman put a trunk in the boot before I left this morning. She said — and I quote again — that a girl who has just got her own money can afford to lose an argument with a duchess about a dress.”
They rode into the evening out of London, and the city gave way to green, and the green gave way to the wide weald, and Diana watched out of the window, and watched the man across from her, and thought — because there was nothing else to do in a moving carriage, and because a woman who has just been given her own name back has a right to think large thoughts — about the fact that the entire day, from beginning to end, had been arranged around her by someone who had asked her nothing and taken nothing and had sat, patiently, in a carriage in Southampton Buildings for two and a half hours, with his hat on his knees, like a man waiting at a station for a train that might not come.
Men did not do this. She had had seven years in a house full of the season’s calculation to learn exactly what men did, and what men wanted, and how the market worked; and none of it, not one rule of it, fitted the man across the carriage who had written two pages at midnight because a footman had come back to say that Lady Marbrey was not at home.
Southcross came into view at last on a low hill, at dusk, in the rain.
Diana Cranidge, who had been raised on ledgers, saw it before he said a word: saw the great long roof, and the two new slates patched unevenly in the middle of the old ones; the avenue with more stumps than trees; the walled garden gone to seed on the eastern side; the two chimneys smoking out of six. She saw the style of the house — a good house, a house built by people who had money once — and she saw, without needing to be told, exactly the kind of sickness it had: not the sickness of poor land, but the sickness of a long, patient, expensive neglect, the kind that begins when a family’s men stop looking at their own accounts.
He watched her look at it, and said, “You see it.”
“I see the roof.”
“Everyone sees the roof,” said the Duke. “My father saw the roof for eleven years and preferred his hounds. What I would like to know is whether the person who kept the accounts in Mount Street sees anything else.”
“Your grace, I have been in the house four seconds.”
“You saw the roof in four seconds,” he said. “The accounts have waited for me for five years. They can wait for you until morning.”
They came in out of the rain. And that evening there was soup, and a fire, and the housekeeper’s sideways wonder at the girl in the borrowed brown and the plain cap; and the steward — a tired, careful, honest man named Mr. Fitch, with hands like tree roots and the face of a man who has been quietly ashamed of his master’s father for a decade — brought, at the Duke’s request, two ledgers into the long library without being told why.
Diana ate her soup, and then she opened the ledgers, and looked at them for an hour.
At the end of the hour she said, “Your grace, your rent roll is wrong in four places, and has been for three years, and the seed accounts have been in the same hand since before your father died, and the hand has begun to make mistakes in addition, which means your man is tired, not dishonest, which is worse, because tired goes on for years and thieves get caught.” And then she stopped, and put her hand flat on the page, and said, in a slightly different voice, “I am sorry. You did not bring me here to do your arithmetic.”
“I brought you here,” said the Duke, “for two reasons. The arithmetic is the small one, and you have just done it in an hour and exactly as I hoped and knew you would. The other reason I will say to you tomorrow, on the terrace, in daylight, when you have slept, because I have a great respect for you, Miss Cranidge, and a great respect for the plain fact that you have been ambushed enough in your life by people saying things to you in the dark.”
And Diana Cranidge looked at the tired, dark, thorough man across the library table, with the ledgers open between them and the rain on the windows of a house that was falling down; and she said, “Tomorrow, then.”