BONUS CHAPTER ONE

33 years before

Thomas Miller had been standing in the study doorway for something over four minutes, and he was beginning to suspect he had made a tactical error in asking at all.

"Three days," the Duke said.

"Three days, Your Grace."

"To London?"

"Yes, Your Grace."

Anthony Russell did not look up from the ledger in front of him. He was making a note in the margin of it, in the small precise hand he used for figures, and he went on making it while he spoke.

"Is your mother ill?"

"No, Your Grace."

"You would tell me if she were ill."

"She is in excellent health, Your Grace." Thomas turned his hat once. "She has written to inform me that I have forgotten her, that she does not expect to be remembered at her age, and that she is entirely reconciled to it. There are four pages on the subject."

The pen stopped.

"Four pages?"

"She has many complaints, Your Grace."

"Mm." The Duke set the pen down and finally looked up, and Thomas braced himself, because he had worked more than four years in this house and he knew that look and he knew precisely what came after it.

"Who has the horses?"

"Whitmore, Your Grace."

"Whitmore is twenty-two."

"He is twenty-three next month, and he has been under me two years, and he is better with the grey mare than I am." Thomas said it evenly. "She will not take the bit for anybody else on this ground, and she takes it for him because he does not fuss at her about it."

"And the chestnut? He is off in the near fore."

"He is. It is the shoe and not the leg, and Fisher is coming out on Thursday to see to it, and Whitmore has instructions in writing because I did not trust him to remember them, and he knows I did not trust him, and he was perfectly civil about it."

"You have written it down."

"Twice, Your Grace. There is a copy in the tack room."

The Duke considered him.

"Which road?"

"Your Grace—"

"Which road, Miller?"

"The Barnet road as far as the turn, and then the lane, as I have gone every year for four years, and I shall be walking it in daylight both ways."

"There have been two men stopped on the Barnet road this autumn."

"There have been two men stopped on every road in England this autumn," Thomas said. "It is autumn."

Anthony did not smile, but something moved at the corner of his mouth that was very nearly related to it.

"How much money will you have on you?"

"Your Grace, I have been going to see my mother since before—"

"That is not an answer to the question."

"Not enough to interest anybody, and I keep it in my boot, and I have never in my life been robbed, and if I am, the man will be extremely disappointed."

"Mm." The Duke sat back. "And the return? What day, and by what hour?"

"Thursday. By dark."

"By dark. You say that as though dark were a fixed point in the calendar. Dark in October is—"

"Anthony."

Neither of them had heard the door.

The Duchess was standing just inside it with a letter in one hand and an expression of the most perfect patience, which was, Thomas had learned over the years, the single most dangerous face in that house.

"You will drive the man out of his senses," she said.

"I am establishing the particulars."

"You are conducting an inquiry into a man visiting his mother in London." Claire came the rest of the way in. "Mr. Miller. How long has he been at this?"

"Not long, Your Grace."

"Mr. Miller."

Thomas hesitated for exactly as long as loyalty required.

"Some minutes," he admitted.

"There." She turned back to her husband. "Some minutes. Over a visit to his mother. You have interviewed cavalry officers in less."

"Cavalry officers do not walk the Barnet road alone with money in their boots."

"No. They ride down it in company and get themselves robbed anyway, which I believe was the substance of your own story at the Earl Harrington’s table last spring. And I do not understand why we went there in the first place, he is weird and always thinks of new machinations."

‘‘He is young and ambitious and I prefer to have men like him close to me than against me.’’

‘‘And how can you be certain he will remain by your side?’’ Claire did not wait for an answer to that. She turned to Thomas instead, and her whole manner changed, the way it always did.

"Give your mother our regards," she said. "Our particular regards, and not the polite kind — tell her we are aware of the four pages and that we take her side entirely."

"I shall, Your Grace."

"And tell her that we should like her here at Christmas."

Thomas blinked.

"Christmas is in three months, my dear," Anthony observed, from the desk.

"I am aware of when Christmas is."

"You are inviting a woman in October to a thing in December."

"Yes. Because she is fifty-one and she will want to think about it, and she will want to tell everybody in her street that she has been invited, and then she will want to say that she cannot possibly, and then she will want to be persuaded." Claire said all of this without pausing. "It takes time, Anthony. It has always taken time. You have never once in your life had to arrange anything that does not involve you giving orders."

There was a small silence.

"That is largely true," the Duke conceded.

"Thank you." She turned back to Thomas. "And one more thing, Mr. Miller, and I want it understood as a matter settled rather than discussed. You will not come back before you have had the full week."

"Your Grace, three days is—"

"A week. Seven days. You have not taken one since the year my son was born and I have been counting, and I have got rather good at it." Claire lifted her chin very slightly. "That is an order, Thomas."

And she went out, and shut the door behind her, and left the two men looking at it.

Thomas turned back to the desk.

"She has begun to copy your way of speaking, Your Grace."

"She has begun to mock my way of speaking," Anthony said. "She has been at it since June. She has a whole performance now. She does it at dinner and my own son laughs at me."

"I should not like to say, Your Grace."

"You would not have to." The Duke got up and went to the window, and stood there a moment looking out at the yard. "It is the army in it. She says I speak to this house as though it were a platoon. Which I daresay is fair, and which I do not much intend to alter at my age."

"There has been a soldier in this family for six generations, Your Grace. It gets into a house."

"It does. And it will be wanted." Anthony said it easily, half-attending, the way a man says a thing he has never once questioned. He was patting his coat for something. "When it all comes apart — and it does, Miller, it always does, once in every man's lifetime at least — it will not be the lawyers who put it right. It never is. It is the army that comes and gets you out."

He found what he was looking for, which was a small leather pouch, and did not appear to have noticed that he had said anything at all.

"Now. Since you are going to London in any case."

"Your Grace."

"I want a new coat. My tailor has the measurements and he has had them for nine years and they have not altered by very much, whatever he tells you about it." Anthony crossed the room and put the pouch into his hand. "That is for the coat."

Thomas felt the weight of it and looked down and opened it, and then looked up rather quickly.

"Your Grace, this is a great deal more than a coat—"

"It is what I am willing to pay for a coat."

"But—"

"If you can get the man down, and I have every confidence that you can, because I have watched you get a farrier down and it was frightening to observe" — the Duke was already walking back toward his desk — "then whatever remains is yours to dispose of as you see fit. Buy your mother something. Buy her something absurd. Women of fifty-one are extremely susceptible to absurd things and nobody ever buys them any."

"Your Grace, I cannot—"

"And I do not want to see one of those coins come back into this house." Anthony sat down and picked up his pen. "Not one. This is an order, Miller."

Thomas stood there with the pouch in his hand.

He had worked four years for this man. He knew perfectly well what had just happened, and he knew that Anthony Russell knew he knew it, and he knew that neither of them was going to say a word about it now or at any point in the next eleven years, because that was not how it was done in this house and it was one of the reasons he had never once looked for another position.

"As you wish, Your Grace," he said.

"Good. Go away." The Duke was writing again. "And Miller."

"Your Grace."

"Seven days."

"Your Grace, I—"

"Do not make me have this conversation with my wife on your behalf. I have not won one of those since we got married."

◆◆◆

The house in London was smaller than he remembered it, which it was every year, and his mother was sitting in the same chair by the same fire with her leg up on the same stool, and she began before he had got his coat off.

"It is the damp."

"Good afternoon, Mother."

"It is the damp and it is the stairs and there is nothing to be done about either, and Mrs. Petch says I ought to have it up in the evenings, which is very well for Mrs. Petch, who has a daughter three doors along and a son in Highgate." She adjusted the stool half an inch. "I am not complaining."

"No, Mother."

"I am simply telling you how it is. There is a difference." She looked him over. "You are thin."

"I am the same as I was last year."

"You were thin last year."

Thomas hung his coat on the nail that had been his father's nail and sat down in the chair opposite, and let her look at him for a while, because she wanted to and because it cost him nothing.

"They are good to me, Mother."

"Mm."

"They are. The Duke asks my opinion — not on the horses, that is nothing, any man asks a stablemaster about a horse. On other matters." He said it as levelly as he could manage and did not entirely succeed. "He asked me last month whether he ought to keep on a tenant who had gone two seasons behind. Asked me straight out, and listened to the answer, and did what I said."

"And did the man keep his farm?"

"He did."

"Then he is what they say he is." His mother nodded slowly. "There is not a woman in this street who does not know that name, Thomas, and not one of them has a bad word. A man of that rank, decent to the people under him. It is not common. It was not common in your father's day either and it is a good deal less common now."

"He is the kind of man other men measure themselves against," Thomas said. "And come up short."

"And her?"

"Formidable."

His mother's eyebrows went up.

"In the best sense," Thomas said. "Nobody says much about the Duchess, because when the two of them are in a room, his is the presence that fills it, and she lets it. But it is her house. Every part of it that works, works because she has arranged it so, and she does it in such a way that a person does not notice being arranged until afterward." He shook his head. "Between the two of them there is not a family in the county that does not either fear them or wish very much to be them."

"Then you are a lucky man."

"I am."

"And luck," his mother said, "is a thing one ought to make use of while it is in the house."

Thomas looked up.

"Mother."

"I have said nothing at all."

"You have that face on."

"I have the face God gave me." She shifted the stool again. "Only that Mrs. Petch's girl is looking for a job. That is all. And I thought that a man who is asked his opinion about tenants might be asked his opinion about a kitchen."

"You might have simply asked me."

"I am asking you now."

Thomas thought about it, and found that there was no reason in the world not to.

"They are short in the kitchen, as it happens," he said. "Mrs. Rowe has been at Her Grace about it since the spring. Is the girl any use?"

"She is a great deal more than any use."

"That is not an answer."

"You will see for yourself. I shall have them to dinner tomorrow."

"Mother—"

"It is arranged."

"It cannot be arranged. I have been in this house eleven minutes."

"It was arranged when I sent you the letter," his mother said comfortably. "You need only sit at the table."

Thomas put his head back against the chair.

"Could you not simply tell her to present herself at the house? She may come up with me on Thursday and Mrs. Rowe can look at her and that is the whole of it. There is no earthly need for a dinner."

His mother's chin came up.

"Mind your tongue, young man."

"I have not said anything."

"You have said a great deal, and all of it in the tone of a man who thinks a dinner is a waste of an evening." She let that sit exactly long enough. "When your father died, it was Mrs. Petch who came."

"I sent money."

"You did."

"Every month. I have never once missed it." Thomas heard his own voice go up and did not much care. "What would you have had me do, Mother? Leave a position most men would give an arm for, and come back to this street, and be no use to you at all inside a twelvemonth? Is that what was wanted?"

His mother did not answer him.

"That was unfair," Thomas said.

"It was."

She said it without any argument in it, which was worse than an argument, and the two of them sat with it for a moment.

"She came every day," his mother said at last. "That is all I meant to say and I said it badly. She came every day and she would never let me thank her for it properly, not once, and now she has a girl who wants a job." She picked at the arm of the chair. "I should like to be able to do something for that woman, Thomas. Just the once. Before I am past doing anything for anybody."

Thomas rubbed his face with both hands.

"Fine," he said. "Tomorrow. Fine."

"Good."

"Ah — and I nearly forgot." He straightened, glad of it. "You have been invited for Christmas."

His mother stopped adjusting the stool.

"By whom?"

"By Her Grace. She was quite clear about it, and I would not describe the manner of it as leaving a great deal of room for objection."

"The Duchess of Beaumont has invited me for Christmas."

"She has."

His mother did not say anything for a moment, and Thomas watched her decide not to let him see what her face was doing, and fail.

"Well," she said. "I do detest travelling."

"I know."

"At my age it is a great deal to ask."

"I know."

"But I should be honored," she said, "and you will write and tell her so, and you will not put it in your own words, Thomas, you will bring me the paper and I shall put it in mine."

"There is one thing."

"What thing?"

"It will be rather more travelling than you are imagining." He said it as gently as he could. "She does not mean to keep Christmas at Beaumont. She means to keep it at Ashcombe."

His mother stared at him.

"Ashcombe?"

"Yes."

"Where in heaven's name is Ashcombe?"

"A village near Berkshire. There is a house there."

"Berkshire." She said it the way another woman might have said Constantinople. "Good heavens, Thomas, could the woman not have found somewhere further off? Is there nothing available in Scotland?"

"It is the summer house."

"It is October."

"I am aware."

"Nobody keeps Christmas in a summer house."

"She does." Thomas found he was smiling. "I am told it is the only house she is fond of. The great house is a monument, she says, and Ashcombe is a home, and she has been saying it since before I came into the family and His Grace has stopped arguing about it."

His mother considered this.

"How far?"

"Eight hours by carriage. And I shall come and fetch you myself, and I shall bring the good one, and there will be bricks in it for your feet and you will not sit up beside me and pretend you prefer the air."

"I do prefer the air."

"You do not."

"No," she admitted. "I do not." She settled back into the chair, and looked at the fire, and after a moment she said, in a rather different voice: "Christmas in Ashcombe. Your father would have laughed himself sick."

"He would."

"Fine." She recovered. "It is settled. But before any of that, you will do this thing about Alice."

"Alice," Thomas repeated.

"Petch. Mrs. Petch's girl. Alice." His mother reached for her knitting with the air of a woman closing a file. "Do try to remember the name before tomorrow evening, Thomas. It will not do to sit down at a table and call her the girl."

◆◆◆

The dinner was worse than he had expected, and he had not expected a great deal.

Mrs. Petch was a small, anxious, immensely kind woman who had put out a better table than she could afford, and Thomas was aware of that from the moment he sat down and not aware enough to do anything useful about it.

The girl was — he could not entirely place the girl.

She was perhaps four and twenty, dark, quick-eyed, and she had said almost nothing for the first quarter of an hour, and Thomas had made the mistake of concluding from this that there was not a great deal to hear.

"It is good of you to come all this way, Mr. Miller," Mrs. Petch said, for the third time.

"It is no distance at all." He put down his fork. "And I am glad of the occasion, if I am honest, because I have owed you something for a long while and I have never had a proper chance to say so."

Mrs. Petch went pink.

"You were good to my mother," Thomas said, "when I could not be. Every day for eleven weeks, and you never once asked me for a thing, and I have not forgotten it and I am not going to." He looked up. "So. The kitchen at Beaumont. They are short, and it is a good house, and the work is not difficult — it is long hours and it is standing up, but any sensible girl learns it inside a month. I shall speak to His Grace."

There was a small pause.

"You will speak to His Grace," Alice said.

"I shall."

"On my account?"

"Yes."

"Because my mother sat with yours."

Thomas looked at her properly for the first time.

"Alice," Mrs. Petch said.

"No — I should like to understand it, since it is being arranged over the table." Alice had not raised her voice at all. "Is it your opinion, Mr. Miller, that I am a debt you are paying?"

"I did not say that."

"You said very nearly that. You said it kindly and you meant it kindly and I do not doubt that for a moment." She set her knife down. "But you have not asked me one question. Not one, in an hour. Not what I can do, nor where I have worked, nor whether I can keep a still-room book, nor whether I have ever been in a kitchen larger than this room. You have decided that any sensible girl learns it inside a month and you have decided that I am owed a place because of a kindness done to somebody else, and you have not troubled yourself with the question of whether I am any good."

"I—"

"I have been in service since I was thirteen." She said it flatly. "Four years under a cook who threw things. I can dress a bird, I can keep accounts, I can read, and I can tell you within a shilling what a week's meat ought to cost in this street and what it ought to cost in Marylebone, and I have never once been let go from a place." Her chin came up. "I am not asking for charity, Mr. Miller. I was asking for a chance to do honest work and be judged for it. But it is quite clear that you did not want to be at this table tonight, and I would rather have nothing at all than have it handed to me by a man who is here to settle an account with my mother."

The room was extremely quiet.

Alice stood.

"Thank you for the dinner, Mrs. Miller," she said — to his mother, not to him. "It was very kind of you."

And she went out.

Nobody said anything for a moment. Mrs. Petch had both hands on the table and looked as though she wished to be somewhere else in England.

Thomas's mother did not say a single word. She only looked at him, steadily, for a good deal longer than was comfortable.

"Have you paper in the house?" Thomas said.

Mrs. Petch fetched it.

He wrote at the table, with all of them watching, and it took him about two minutes, and he did not explain himself while he was doing it and he did not apologize afterward either. He folded it and held it out.

"She is to take that to the east gate at Beaumont and show it to the man there," he said. "She will not be turned away. Mrs. Rowe will look at her herself, and I shall speak to His Grace when I return, and I will tell you plainly that I cannot promise the place — that is Mrs. Rowe's to give and she has refused better than me." He paused. "But she will be looked at first. That much I can do and that much I shall."

Mrs. Petch took the letter in both hands.

"She has a sharp tongue on her, Mr. Miller. She has always had it. I have told her a hundred times."

"She has," Thomas agreed.

"I will see that she goes." Mrs. Petch turned the letter over. "They say the wages at Beaumont are the best in the county, and that nobody is turned off when they get old. Is it true?"

"It is."

"Then she will go if I have to walk her there."

Thomas got his coat.

At the door he stopped, because something had been sitting in him for the last ten minutes and he had not decided what to do with it.

"You ought to know how that house runs," he said. "His Grace values peace and order. He runs it as he runs everything, which is to say like a military camp, and there are men on that ground who have been afraid of him for twenty years and have never once been given cause."

Mrs. Petch's face fell.

"Her Grace runs it like a family," Thomas said.

He put his hat on.

"She will do very well there," he said, and went out into the street, and could not for the life of him have said why he was so certain of it.

BONUS CHAPTER TWO

Beaumont Estate, Four Weeks Later

The message came down to the stables at four in the afternoon, and it said only that His Grace would see Mr. Miller in the study, which told Thomas nothing at all and was therefore a good deal worse than a message that told him something.

He went over everything twice on the way up.

"Sit down," the Duke said.

Thomas sat.

Anthony got up, went to the cabinet by the window, and came back with two glasses and poured into both of them, and set one down in front of Thomas without any ceremony whatever, and then sat down again on the same side of the desk rather than behind it.

Thomas looked at the glass for a moment.

He did not say anything about it, and neither did the Duke, which was how those things were done in that house.

"I wanted to thank you," Anthony said.

"Your Grace?"

"The girl. Alice." He turned his own glass a quarter turn on the wood. "Mrs. Rowe has had her three weeks and has stopped complaining, which I am told has not happened in that kitchen since before I was married. She is out of her bed at five, she is quick, she does not have to be told a thing twice, and last week she found an error in the tradesman's book that had been running against us since August." A pause. "You spared us a great deal of trouble and about two months of looking. So. Thank you."

"It was my mother's asking, Your Grace, not mine. She wanted a word put in for a neighbor's girl and I put it in."

"And your mother's asking has served the girl, and her mother, and my kitchen, and my accounts." Anthony sat back. "Generosity pays a great deal better than people give it credit for. It is the only thing I know of that pays in three directions at once and nobody ever writes it down anywhere."

"I learned that watching you, Your Grace."

"You learned it before you came here or you would not have recognized it." The Duke said it flatly, without any warmth in the delivery, which in Thomas's experience was how the man paid his highest compliments. "What did you make of her?"

Thomas hesitated.

"Go on."

"I had reservations, Your Grace. I will say that plainly, because I would rather you heard it from me."

"What sort of reservations?"

"She is strong spirited." Thomas turned the glass in his hand. "She spoke to me at her mother's own table in a way that a girl looking for a job does not generally speak to the man who is arranging it. And I did not think — forgive me — I did not know if you would hire her. You do not much like people who talk a great deal more than they do."

Anthony looked at him for a moment.

"That is not it," he said.

"Your Grace?"

"It is near enough that I understand why you should think so, and I daresay I have given you cause. But it is not it." He set his glass down. "I do not object to a person having opinions, Miller. I object to a person having opinions they have not earned. There is a very great difference and half the men I have ever served with could not tell them apart."

Thomas said nothing.

"She is stubborn," Anthony said. "She is opinionated. I would go as far as to say she is fearless, and I have used that word about four men in my life and none of them were in a kitchen. She is also the best thing Mrs. Rowe has got, and she knows it, and she has not once traded on it." He shrugged. "Merit first. Then the appetite to use it. Give me those two together and I will put up with a great deal of trouble in the rest of the package, and I have never once regretted it."

"Then I was wrong, Your Grace."

"You were cautious, which is a different thing and generally more useful." Something moved at the corner of the Duke's mouth. "Claire has taken a considerable liking to her, which I mention chiefly as a warning. She has decided the girl is clever and she has begun to say so at dinner, and you know what that means in this house."

"I do, Your Grace."

"It means the girl will be running something inside two years and none of us will remember agreeing to it."

Thomas laughed before he could stop himself.

"She is a handsome girl besides," Anthony said, in the same tone he had used about the tradesman's book. "I mention that only because I am told there has already been a certain amount of nonsense from the stable yard, and I would like it understood that I have no patience for it."

"There has been nothing from my yard, Your Grace."

"I know there has not. I said the stable yard, not your yard. There is a distinction and everybody who works under you is aware of it." He picked up his glass again. "There is one other thing, and I do not entirely know what to make of it."

"Your Grace?"

"She seems very interested in my son."

Thomas looked up.

"She finishes at seven," Anthony said. "Six days a week, at seven o'clock, with fourteen hours behind her and her own bed waiting, she goes up to the nursery instead. She is there an hour at least. Longer, if Claire does not send her away, and Claire has stopped sending her away." He turned the glass. "Nobody has asked her to do it. It is not in her work and she is not paid for it and she has never once mentioned it to anybody. I learned of it because I went looking for my two year-old son on a Tuesday evening and found the two of them on the nursery floor with every toy in that room laid out in a line, and Benjamin telling her about all of them in a language I do not believe either of us speaks."

"That is—" Thomas stopped.

"Yes," the Duke agreed. "It is."

He did not elaborate, and Thomas did not ask him to, and the two of them sat for a moment with the thing unsaid between them.

Then Anthony put his glass down and stood.

"Come here."

"Your Grace?"

"Come here, and leave off the ‘Your Graces’ for an hour, I cannot be doing with it while I am working." He was already unrolling something across the desk — a long sheet, badly drawn, weighted at one corner with an inkwell. "I need your help."

Thomas came round the desk.

It was a plan of a stable block. A bad one.

"The military camp in the north," Anthony said. "The whole of the east range is coming down and they have been patching it since the war and pretending otherwise. I have told them I would see to it myself, which I now regret, because I have spent two evenings on this and produced something that would kill a horse inside a year."

Thomas looked at the drawing.

"The drainage runs the wrong way, sir."

"Does it?"

"It runs toward the stalls." Thomas leaned over it. "And these are too narrow by about a foot and a half, and you have got the doors opening inward, which is a thing a man only does once, and then he does not do it again because of what happens the first time."

"Right." Anthony pulled the chair round and sat down at the corner of his own desk. "Take it. Tell me what it wants."

Thomas hesitated for about half a second — a stable master, in a Duke's study, with a Duke's pen being held out to him handle first.

Then he took it.

And the two of them worked until the lamps had to be lit, and neither of them noticed when they were, and it was well past nine before either man looked up.

◆◆◆

A few weeks later, Thomas Miller had come round the end of the south walk with a bridle over his shoulder and no particular business in that part of the grounds, which was a thing he did not examine at the time and had cause to examine a good deal later.

Alice was at the flower beds along the wall.

She was not, it had to be said, enjoying it. She had a spade in her hands and she was using it the way a person uses a tool they have not been taught to use, and she had got soil up one sleeve to the elbow, and every few minutes she stopped and blew a piece of hair out of her face and went back to it with her jaw set.

Thomas stood and watched her do it for rather longer than he had intended to.

"The garden is not her strength."

He turned round very fast.

The Duchess was perhaps four feet behind him, in a grey shawl, with her hands folded, looking past him at the wall beds with an expression of mild interest.

"Your Grace. I did not—"

"No." Claire did not take her eyes off the girl. "You did not."

Thomas got the bridle off his shoulder and held it in both hands, which did not help.

"She has no aptitude for it whatever," Claire went on. "She has killed two things this week that I did not know it was possible to kill. And she volunteered, which is the part I find interesting — the gardener is laid up with his back and there was nobody to do the flower beds, and she heard of it at breakfast and came and asked me for the spade." A small pause. "Nobody asked her. She does not like it. She is doing it because there was a thing wanted doing and she was the one who noticed."

"She has a good heart, Your Grace." Thomas heard how quickly it came out of him. "I know the family that raised her. Her mother sat with mine for eleven weeks and never asked for so much as a word of thanks."

"That is generally where it comes from."

Claire was quiet a moment.

"She is also a very handsome girl," she said.

Thomas did not say anything at all.

"I mention it because I have seen a great many handsome girls come through this house, Mr. Miller, and there is nearly always something in the way they carry it. A slight awareness. A small calculation about what it is worth and who might be made to pay it." Her voice did not change. "That one has not the least idea. She is four and twenty and she has evidently never once in her life thought of using it for anything, and she has instead gone into a kitchen at five in the morning for six weeks and found an error in my tradesman's book. I find that considerably more remarkable than the face, and I would not have expected to."

"So would I, Your Grace."

"Mm." Claire tilted her head slightly. "She is up in the nursery again at seven, you know. Every evening this week."

"His Grace mentioned it."

"He would. He has been telling people. He believes he is being discreet about it and he is not." Something warmed very slightly in her voice. "Benjamin has begun asking for her. He cannot say her name properly — it comes out as something else entirely — but he asks, and he asks at the same hour, and last night he would not go down until she had been up."

Thomas found he did not have anything to put next to that.

"Now," Claire said, briskly, before he had worked out what to say, "since I have you. Your mother."

"Your Grace?"

"Ashcombe. I assume it is arranged, as I asked you."

"It is. She travels in six days — a day behind us, so that the house is warm and there is somebody in it before she arrives, and I shall meet her at the road myself."

"Good." Claire nodded once. "She will want company between London and Ashcombe. Do not lose patience with her. It is not obstinacy, it is that she does not yet believe she is really wanted, and she will go on not believing it until she is in the house."

Thomas looked at her.

"Yes, Your Grace," he said.

"Very well." The Duchess drew her shawl closer, and turned to go, and then paused. "One other thing."

"Your Grace."

"Those bags at the end of the walk are a great deal too heavy for Alice and she will not say so, and she will do herself an injury inside a quarter of an hour attempting it." Claire said it to the middle distance. "Go and help her."

"At once, Your Grace."

He went.

Claire stood where she was for a while, in her grey shawl, with her hands folded, and watched him cross the lawn and take the first of the bags out of the girl's hands before she had got it properly off the ground.

Then she went back up to the house, and did not mention the matter to her husband.

◆◆◆

Ashcombe on Christmas Eve was a great deal smaller than his mother had prepared herself for, and Thomas watched her abandon about four separate expectations in the first ten minutes.

She had thought she would be put somewhere quiet with a tray. What she got was a long room with a fire at both ends, a table laid for four, and the Duchess of Beaumont crossing it with both hands out before the door had shut behind her.

Then the food began arriving, and his mother looked at the implements laid beside her plate and counted them and came to the end of the counting, and her hands went into her lap.

"That," the Duchess said, picking up entirely the wrong fork, "is the one I always use, and I am reliably informed it is wrong, and I have decided not to care."

"It is wrong," said the Duke.

"It is my table."

His mother looked at the fork in the Duchess's hand, and then at her own, and picked up its twin, and Thomas had to look at the fire for a moment.

Nobody said anything about it. Nobody ever did, in that family.

She got through the soup and half the goose before she gave in.

"Your Grace — if it is not impertinent. The girl. Alice Petch. Are you satisfied with her?"

"It is not in the least impertinent." Anthony set his glass down. "She is a considerable success, and I say that as a man who expected to be disappointed. Mrs. Rowe has stopped complaining. It has not happened in that kitchen in the whole of my married life."

"More than a success," Claire said. "She has become necessary. I could not tell you when it happened. But if she went tomorrow, four things in that house would stop working within the week and I do not know which four."

His mother put her fork down, and did not say anything for a moment, and Thomas — who had known her his whole life — kept his eyes on his plate and let her have it.

"That will please her mother," she said at last, "a great deal more than you know."

"So Thomas told me," Claire said, and let it go at that.

"And our son is entirely devoted to her, which will come out at some point this evening in any case."

"Captain Drooling," Anthony said, "had a considerable success with a spoon this afternoon. There is still some of it on the ceiling."

His mother laughed before she could stop herself, and then looked mortified.

"Forgive me, Your Grace. Captain?"

"My husband gives ranks to everything," Claire said, without looking up from her plate. "The gardener is a sergeant. The kitchen cat was promoted twice last year for services nobody has ever explained to me. There is a horse in that stable with a commission."

"There is not."

"There is, and Thomas knows there is, and he is sitting there saying nothing because he is loyal."

Thomas kept his eyes on his plate with great care.

"Coward," said the Duke.

It was after the goose that his mother said the other thing.

"I should like to see her before I go, if it is allowed. I have not laid eyes on the girl since the summer, and her mother will want every particular, and I shall be asked whether she is eating."

"Thomas." Anthony did not look up. "Fetch her."

"Oh — no." His mother's hands came up at once. "Not tonight, Your Grace. She will be at work, and I would not have anybody called out of a kitchen on my account on Christmas Eve. I shall see her tomorrow." She shook her head. "It is already a very great deal that you have had me here at all. I did not expect a room. I certainly did not expect to sit at your own table, and I am aware of what that is, and I would not push it."

Claire set down her glass.

"Mrs. Miller. I shall say one thing, and then I should like never to hear the other kind of thing said in this house again."

His mother went still.

"You are at this table because you are Thomas’s mother. That is the whole of the reason, and in this family it has always been sufficient, and it was sufficient before I married into it." Claire's chin came up very slightly. "Nobody has done you a kindness this evening. You were asked to dinner."

Anthony was looking at his wife with an expression Thomas had seen perhaps a dozen times in four years and had never once been able to describe afterward.

"Well," the Duke said. "I think nobody should spend Christmas Eve inside a kitchen."

"I agree and she is not in the kitchen." Claire turned back to her plate. "She finished at seven. She is upstairs with my son, as she is every evening, and has been for an hour and a half, and I have been pretending I cannot hear either of them." She glanced up. "Thomas. Go and save her from my little menace."

Thomas rose.

He went out along the passage with the fire and his mother's voice behind him, and up the back stairs, and stopped at the top.

The nursery door was ajar. There was a light in it, and a woman's voice going on quietly about something, and every few words a small sound of enormous agreement from somebody who could not yet form a word.

Thomas stood there a moment longer than he needed to.

Then he knocked.

◆◆◆

The door opened about a foot and Alice Petch looked out at him with a child on her hip.

"Mr. Miller."

"Miss Petch."

"You will want to come in or go away," she said, "because he has only just stopped taking notice of the door, and if it stays open he will start again."

Thomas came in.

The nursery was warm and badly tidied and there were toys down the whole length of the floor in a line, arranged by some principle he could not identify and which was evidently very important. Benjamin Russell, aged two now, regarded him from his perch with the expression of a man who has been interrupted in the middle of something.

"Her Grace sent me," Thomas said. "You are wanted downstairs. My mother is at the table and she has been asking after you all evening."

"Then I shall come down when he is asleep."

"She sent me to fetch you now."

"And I shall come down when he is asleep." Alice shifted the boy on her hip without looking at Thomas at all. "Her Grace will understand perfectly. She has stood in this room at half past nine with her own shoes in her hand. She knows precisely what happens to this house if he goes down badly, and so does everybody else in it, and so shall you in about twenty minutes."

Thomas considered the situation.

Then he took his coat off, and sat down on the floor with his back against the foot of the cot, which put him on the wrong side of the line of toys and was immediately pointed out to him by its owner.

"I am not going back to that table without you," he said. "So I shall wait."

Alice looked down at him for a moment.

"You have put your leg through the parade," she said.

"I beg your pardon?"

"The parade. That is what it is." She came and sat down on the floor opposite him, which took some managing with the boy in her arms, and set Benjamin between them. "They are in order and there is a system and it took us the better part of an hour, and now there is a boot in the middle of it."

Thomas moved his boot.

"Better," said Alice.

The child climbed directly onto Thomas's knee and began, with total concentration, to try to remove one of his coat buttons.

"How was the dinner, Mr. Miller?"

"Very good."

"Mm." She straightened a wooden horse that had been knocked out of alignment. "It must be pleasant, being at a table where somebody has already decided what you are worth before you sit down at it."

Thomas absorbed that.

"I deserved that," he said.

"You did."

"May I say something in my own defense?"

"You may try."

"I have no defense." He worked the button gently out of the boy's fist and gave him a different one. "I came into that house with an errand in my head and I did it badly, and my mother has told me so twice since, and one of the times was in front of the fire at some length."

Something moved at the corner of Alice's mouth.

"Your mother," she said, "is a formidable woman."

"She is fifty-one and she has an opinion about everybody in that street."

"She has an opinion about me. I have had it in three letters."

"God help us both," said Thomas, and Alice laughed — properly, before she could catch it, and then put a hand over her mouth and looked at the boy, who had not noticed.

After that it was easier.

They stayed on the floor with the parade between them and the child going back and forth from one of them to the other, and Alice told him about Mrs. Rowe and the tradesman's book and the four minutes of silence that had followed when she pointed out the error, and Thomas told her about the chestnut and the shoe and Whitmore, and neither of them noticed the candle going down.

Benjamin brought Thomas a wooden dog, three times, and was praised for it, three times, with increasing conviction.

"You are very good with him," Thomas said.

"He is easy to be good with."

"No — I mean it. I have watched a good many people with children and most of them are performing the art of patience." He shook his head. "You are not doing anything at all. You are simply with him." He smiled. "You will make a fine mother one day."

Alice did not answer.

Thomas looked up.

Whatever had been in her face a moment before had gone entirely, and what was there instead was something very quiet and very carefully held, and her eyes had gone bright in a way she clearly had no intention of letting go any further.

"Have I said something wrong?" he said. "Forgive me — I did not mean—"

"No." She smiled at him. It was not much of a smile. "You have said something impossible. That is all. It is not the same thing and you were not to know."

Thomas opened his mouth.

Then he shut it again, because he understood, about a second and a half later than he would have liked, that there was nothing in the world he could say next that would not be worse.

"The dog toy," he said instead, "wants a name."

Alice looked at him.

"He is called Duke," she said. "Obviously."

"That is treason."

"It is not treason, it is a compliment, and if you tell His Grace I shall deny every word."

So they named the rest of them, and then, because the child had begun the long slow slide into the state before sleep and had to be talked down rather than put down, they told him a story.

It was not a good story. It started as a horse who could not find his own stable, because that was what Thomas knew, and then Alice put a cook in it who was angry about a stolen pie, and Thomas gave the horse a rank, and Alice said the horse could not have a rank until he had done something to earn it, and Thomas said the horse had carried a message through a flood, and Alice said the message was about the pie.

It went on considerably longer than it needed to.

It made almost no sense by the end.

Neither of them stopped, because every time one of them put something in, the other picked it up and did something with it, and Thomas found that he could not remember the last time he had talked to anybody like that — one thing on top of another, no pauses to be got through, nothing in it that had to be managed.

They came to the end of it and looked at each other across the parade, both of them smiling, with the last line of the story still in the air between them.

Then they looked down.

Benjamin had gone, entirely and without warning, in the way that children do — face down on Alice's arm with one fist closed round the wooden dog and the whole of him heavy as a sack of grain.

"There," she whispered.

She got him up. She got him into the cot. She did it the way a person does a thing they have done a hundred times, and Thomas got up off the floor and stood back out of the way, and neither of them breathed very much for about thirty seconds.

Then Alice turned round, and stepped back, and put her foot squarely on the wooden horse.

She went sideways.

Thomas had her before he had thought about it — one hand under her arm and the other at her back, and the two of them stood perfectly still for a moment in the middle of the ruined parade, listening.

The cot did not stir.

"The horse," Alice said, "was not part of the plan."

"Sit down."

"I am perfectly—"

"Sit down, Miss Petch."

She sat on the edge of the nurse's chair, and Thomas went down on one knee in front of her and took hold of her foot, and Alice made a sound of pure indignation.

"Mr. Miller."

"Stay still."

"I am not a horse."

"No. A horse would have more sense than to put its weight on a wooden one in the dark." He had the shoe off. His thumb went along the outside of the foot, once, with a good deal of professional detachment and no particular gentleness. "Does that hurt?"

"No."

"That?"

"No. Slightly. No."

"Then it is nothing." He put the shoe back on and did up the buckle, and got to his feet. "It will be stiff in the morning and it will be gone by the evening and you are not to stand on it any more tonight than you have to."

"I have a kitchen to be in at five."

"Then you will be standing on it at five, and there is nothing to be done about that either, and I shall be aware of it the whole time."

Alice looked up at him.

Thomas heard what he had said about half a second after he had said it, and elected to go on as though he had not.

"The stairs are dark," he said, and held his hand out. "Take my arm, and put your weight on it going down, and I shall not tell anybody at that table that you turned your ankle over a toy horse called Duke."

Alice took his arm.

"That is not his name," she said. "That is the dog’s."

"Then what is the horse’s name?"

"The horse is Thomas."

They went down two steps before she said anything.

"For what it is worth," she said, "I am grateful. For the letter of recommendation."

"You need not be."

"I am aware that I need not be. I am telling you that I am." She went down another step. "It was a good letter. Mrs. Rowe read it out to me on my first morning, which I do not believe you intended, and then she read out the part about the still-room book a second time in front of the whole kitchen, and I have not been troubled by anybody in that house since."

"I did not write it to be read out."

"No. You wrote it because your mother looked at you." Alice glanced sideways at him in the dark of the stair. "You are not nearly so composed a man as you imagine yourself, Mr. Miller."

"That is a very great deal of opinion from a woman leaning on my arm."

"It is the only arm available," Alice said. "I am making the best of a bad situation."

Thomas laughed before he could stop it, and then remembered the nursery behind them and stopped rather quickly, and Alice did not stop at all, and had to put her free hand over her mouth on the landing.

They stood there a moment.

"The dog," Thomas said. "I shall not tell anybody."

"You had better not."

"Nobody in that house will ever hear from me that His Grace has been named after a wooden dog by a girl out of his own kitchen." He said it entirely evenly. "It shall be our secret."

Alice looked up at him.

There was very little light on that landing, and what there was came from the long room below, and Thomas discovered that he could see the whole of her face by it, and that she was in no particular hurry to look away.

"Very well," she said. "Our secret."

And she went down the last of the stairs ahead of him, with her hand still on his arm, and did not take it off until they had reached the door.

P.S. Thomas and Alice were married the following autumn. They never did have children of their own.

Eleven years later the Duke of Beaumont was hanged for a treason he never committed, and the boy in that nursery was taken out of his bed at dawn and did not come back for twenty-three years.

When he did, there were two people left in England who had never once called his father a traitor. Their story continues in The Banished Duke — available now on Amazon.