SHE SANG A LULLABY TO A SICK ORPHAN—UNAWARE THE DUKE HAD BEEN STANDING THERE FOR HOURS

The library at Ashworth Hall was the coldest room in the house in winter and the warmest in summer and Miss Wren Ashby had learned the difference in her first week there. It was the middle of March now and the fire in the great stone hearth had been lit since dawn. Though the logs were the smaller ones, the ones the housekeeper allowed when the master was not in residence.

Wren had come to know these small measuring of the household the way a shepherd knows his sheep. She knew that the tea in the blue pot was for the housekeeper and the tea in the white pot was for the governess. She knew that the third stair from the top of the west staircase groaned if you put your weight on the left side.

She knew that the little kitchen cat, a thin gray thing called mouse, would only drink milk from the cracked saucer, not the whole one. She knew too that the Duke of Ashworth was not expected home for another six weeks. Wren was not the governess. She had been told this on her first day quite plainly by the housekeeper Mrs.

Pell. She had been brought to Ashworth Hall as a companion to the Duke’s ward, a small boy of six named Tobias, who had come to live at the estate after the deaths of his parents in a fever the previous autumn. The child was not the Duke’s son. He was the son of a cousin the Duke had loved as a brother. That was the sum of what Wren had been told about the boy’s history.

The rest she had learned from the boy himself slowly in pieces over the winter. She had learned for instance that Tobias did not like the color red because his mother had been wearing a red shawl the day she took ill. She had learned that he could name every bird in the hedgerows behind the kitchen garden and that he was afraid of the tall clock in the front hall because it chimed at midnight in a way that sounded like a man clearing his throat.

She had learned that he was small for his age and that his lungs were weak and that on cold mornings his breath made a rattling sound that frightened her more than she let him see. He was ill this morning. That was why she was in the library at half past six before the fires in the family rooms were properly lit, holding a book she was not reading and listening for the sound of Mrs.

Pell coming down the servants’ stair with the doctor’s letter. The doctor had been sent for the previous night. He had come, examined the boy, left a bottle of dark syrup and a paper of powders, and said what doctors always said, which was that time would tell. Ren set the book down on the arm of the chair. The leather of the chair was cold under her palm.

The library smelled of old paper and beeswax and faintly of the pipe tobacco the Duke had smoked in this room before he had gone away in November. It was a smell that had grown fainter each week, the way a person’s voice grows fainter the longer they have been gone, but it had not disappeared entirely. Mrs.

Pell said the smell lived in the curtains. The tall window behind the writing desk looked out over the east lawn, which was still white with frost at this hour. A thrush was picking at something near the yew hedge. Ren watched it for a moment because watching it was easier than thinking about the boy upstairs, whose breath had rattled in the night, and who had asked her at 3:00 in the morning whether his mother had known she was going to die.

She had not known how to answer him. She had told him the truth, which was that she did not know, and that she thought his mother had loved him very much either way. He had turned his face into the pillow and cried without sound, which was worse than any crying she had ever heard. She had stayed with him until he slept.

She had come down to the library because if she had stayed in that room another minute, she would have begun to cry herself, and that would not have helped him at all. The door opened. Mrs. Pell came in carrying a small tray with a cup of tea and a folded She set the tray on the writing desk without speaking. Mrs.

Pell was a woman of perhaps 50, thin and upright, with iron gray hair pinned tightly under a plain cap. She had not liked Wren at first. Wren had come without a proper reference, only a letter from the vicar of the village where she had lived as a girl. Mrs. Pell had thought her too young for the post and too pretty for a house without a mistress.

She had watched Wren for a month before speaking to her as if she were more than a piece of furniture. “The doctor sends word,” Mrs. Pell said now. She did not sit. Mrs. Pell did not sit in the library. “He will come again this afternoon. He says the child is to have the powders every 4 hours. He says he is not to be moved from the bed.

” Wren nodded. Her hands were folded in her lap. She had learned, in the 6 months she had been at Ashworth Hall, that Mrs. Pell did not like a great many words in the morning. “Thank you, Mrs. Pell.” Mrs. Pell did not go. She stood by the desk, her hands folded over her apron. She was looking at the tea tray as though she had forgotten what to do with it.

Then she said, in a voice quite different from her usual one, “He was awake half the night. I heard him.” “Yes,” Wren said. “He was. You stayed with him.” “Yes, Mrs.” Pell nodded slowly. She still did not look at Wren. “I have written to his grace,” she said. “I sent the letter yesterday when the doctor first came.

I thought he ought to know.” Wren felt something turn over in her chest. She had not thought of the duke, not really. He had been an absence in the house for so long that she had stopped thinking of him as a man who could be summoned. He was the portrait in the small parlor. He was the initials on the silver. He was the reason the servants moved in the way they moved.

“Will he come?” she asked. “I do not know, Mrs. Pell said. He is at his house in Kent. It is two days hard riding. If he comes at all, he will not come before tomorrow evening. She paused. Then, as though she had decided something, she added, “He loved the child’s father, Miss Ashby. He will come.” Ren looked down at her hands.

She had never heard Mrs. Pell say the word loved before in connection with the Duke. She had heard duty and honor and obligation. She had not heard love. “I see,” she said. “You will sit with the boy this morning, Mrs. Pell said. Her voice had gone back to its usual crispness. I will send Molly up with your breakfast.

Do not try to feed him solid food. Broth only, and only if he asks for it.” “Yes, Mrs. Pell.” The housekeeper turned and went out. The door shut behind her with a small, exact click. Ren sat for a moment longer in the cold library, watching the thrush in the frost. Then she got up, and she went upstairs to the boy.

Tobias was awake. His small face on the white pillow looked smaller than it had the day before. His hair, which was dark like his father’s had been, was damp at the temples. When Ren came in, he tried to smile at her, and the smile did not quite reach his eyes. “You are early,” he said. His voice was a little hoarse. “I am not early.

You are late.” She sat down on the low chair beside his bed. The chair had been carried up from the small parlor when the child had first become ill. It was upholstered in green wool that had gone thin on the arms from her hands. “How is your chest this morning?” “It hurts a little. Not so much as last night.

” He was quiet a moment. Then he said, “I dreamed about the pond.” “Which pond?” “The one at home. Where the ducks were. I dreamed my mother was there. She was feeding the ducks and she would not turn around. Ren reached out and smoothed the damp hair back from his forehead. His skin was warm, warmer than it should have been.

That is a sad dream. Yes, would you like me to read to you? No, I am tired of the book. Will you sing? Ren stilled. She had sung for him twice before, when he had been very sick just after the new year, and both times she had felt shy about it afterward. She had not been trained to sing. Her mother had sung to her when she was a small child, before her mother had died, and Ren had kept the songs the way a person keeps a locket, close and private, and not shown to anyone.

What would you like to hear? The one about the boat, he said. The one my mother sang. She did not know the one his mother had sung. She had made him a boat song the first time he had asked for one, out of pieces of a song her own mother had sung, and out of pieces she had made up. She had told him it was the same one.

It was not quite a lie. It was a kindness. All right, she said. She began softly. Her voice was not a trained voice. It was small and clear and slightly low for a woman’s voice. She sang about a boat that went out on a green sea in the morning, and about the man who steered it, and about the wife who waited for him on the shore with a lantern.

She sang about the wind that came up in the evening, and about the wife who kept the lantern lit all night, and about the boat that came home at dawn with the sails torn, but the man alive. She had made the last part up. In her mother’s version, the boat did not come home. She could not sing that part to a sick child.

Tobias closed his eyes as she sang. His breath grew a little slower. She sang the song through twice. When she was done, she sat with her hand on his hand, and she did not know how long she sat that way, because time in a sick room is not the same as time in the rest of the house. She sang another song after that.

She sang the one her mother had sung about the sheep on the hill, and the one about the girl who went to the fair and lost her ribbon. She sang the one about the moon that came in the window. She did not sing loudly. She sang as though the songs were for him alone, which they were. She did not know she was being listened to.

She did not know that at some point in the second song, the door to the boy’s bedroom, which she had left open a hand’s breadth in case Molly came up with the tray, had been pushed a little wider. She did not know that a man stood in the passage outside, still in his riding boots and his heavy dark coat, with a smell of road and cold air and horses on him.

She did not know that he had been standing there since before the boat song had ended, and that he had heard every song after it, and that he had not moved once. She sang until Tobias’s breathing evened into sleep. She sang until her voice was tired and a little rough. She sang the last song, which was the boat song again because he had asked for it, and she wanted the last thing he heard before real sleep to be the thing he had asked for.

Then, she stopped. The room was quiet. The fire in the small grate made a soft ticking sound. Somewhere in the house a door closed. She sat with her hand on the sleeping boy’s hand, and she felt, for the first time in many hours, that she might be able to weep now if she wanted to, because he could not see her.

She turned to reach for the handkerchief in her sleeve, and she saw the man in the doorway. He was tall. That was the first thing. He was not standing in the room. He was standing just outside it in the passage, and one of his hands was braced against the door frame as though he had put it there and forgotten to take it down.

He was in a heavy black coat that was still wet at the shoulders from the road, and his boots were splashed with mud to the knee. His hair was dark and disordered from riding. His face was not a young face, and it was not an old one. It was a face that had been out of doors in cold weather for a long time, and it was very still.

She knew him. She had never seen him before in her life, but she knew him. She had lived 6 months in his house. She did not stand up. She did not know if she could. Her hand was still resting on the boy’s hand, and she could feel the boy’s pulse against her fingers, which was the only reason she did not think she had gone into some other kind of dream.

“Your Grace,” she said. She did not know how loud she had said it. She thought perhaps she had only mouthed it. He did not speak. He did not move his hand from the door frame. His eyes went from her face to the sleeping boy’s face, and then back to her face. In the space between those two looks, she saw something in his eyes that she did not understand.

It was not surprise. It was something older than surprise. It was the look of a man who had walked into a room expecting one thing and had found something else, and had needed a moment to know what to do with the difference. “Forgive me,” he said. His voice was quiet. It was much quieter than she had expected it to be from a man of his size and from a face like his.

“I did not mean to interrupt.” “You have not,” she said. Her mouth was dry. “He is sleeping.” “Yes.” He looked at the boy again. He looked at him for a long time. Ren watched his face while he did this. She saw a muscle move in his jaw. She saw his hand, the one on the door frame, close slowly into a fist and then open again.

“How long has he been sleeping?” he said. “A few minutes, perhaps longer. I am not sure. He is very small.” “Yes,” she said. “He is small for his age. He always has been.” The Duke nodded. He did not come into the room. He seemed, in that moment, to be a man who did not know whether he was allowed. It was such a strange thing to see in a man in his own house that Wren felt, quite suddenly and quite without wanting to, a kind of pity for him.

“You may come in, Your Grace,” she said. “It will not wake him. I have moved about the room and it has not woken him.” He came in then. He came in slowly, as though the floor might not hold his weight, which was absurd because he was not a heavy man for his height. He stopped at the foot of the bed. He looked down at the sleeping boy.

His face did not change, but the muscle in his jaw moved again. “Mrs. Pell wrote to me,” he said. “I rode from Kent yesterday morning. I have not stopped, except to change horses. That is 2 days’ ride. It is a day and a half if the horse is good.” She did not know what to say to that. She looked down at the boy’s hand under her hand. The boy’s hand was very small.

It was warmer than it should have been, but it was not burning. “The doctor has been?” the Duke said. “He came last night. He is coming again this afternoon.” “What did he say?” “He said time would tell.” The Duke made a small sound that was not quite a laugh. “Doctors. He left powders and a syrup.

” “Have they helped?” “I do not know yet.” He nodded. He was still looking at the boy. He did not look at her while he spoke. She understood, without being told, that this was not a rudeness. It was a man who could look at only one thing at a time, and who had decided which thing. “How long have you been with him?” he asked. “Since about 3:00, Your Grace.

He woke and could not go back to sleep. I stayed with him.” “You have been up all night.” “Yes. You should go and rest.” “I will, Your Grace.” “When Mrs. Pell comes.” He nodded again. Then he did something she did not expect. He crossed to the low chair on the other side of the bed, the one no one ever sat in because it was on the side against the wall, and he sat down.

He did not take off his coat. He did not seem to know he was still wearing it. He put one hand on the edge of the bed, and he sat there, and he looked at the child. Ren watched him. She could not help it. She had lived 6 months in his house. She had eaten in his dining room, though at a small table off to one side.

She had walked in his gardens. She had slept in one of his beds. She had never in that whole time thought about him as a person. Not really. He had been the reason for the house. He had not been a man. He was a man. He was a man who had ridden a day and a half without stopping to see a sick child. He was a man who did not know what to do with his hands in a sick room.

He was a man who was tired to the bone, and who had a great deal of road dust on his coat, and who smelled faintly of the cold wind he had ridden through, and of horses, and of something under that which she thought was wood smoke, and something she did not have a word for. He looked up. She looked away.

She was too slow. Their eyes had met. “What is your name?” he said. “Ren, Your Grace.” “Ren Ashby.” “Ashby?” “Yes.” He held her name in his mouth for a moment as though it was a small thing he had picked up off a table. Then he nodded once and looked back at the boy. How long have you been at Ashworth, Miss Ashby? Since September, your grace.

Six months. Yes, and no one has thought to tell me your name. I was engaged by Mrs. Pell, your grace. On the recommendation of the vicar of my village. I do not think it was thought to be a matter of great interest. I see. He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “Where is your village?” Meldon, your grace. In Somerset.

I do not know it. There is no reason you should. He looked at her again. And this time she did not look away. Though she wanted to. She had never in her life had a man look at her the way he was looking at her, which was not with anything like admiration or interest, but simply as though he had decided he wanted to know something and would look at her until he did.

Miss Ashby. He said. How long have you been singing? She felt her face grow warm. It was the first blush she had allowed herself in six months. Since I came in this morning. That is not what I meant. I do not sing, your grace. I only sing to the boy. You sing very well. Thank you. Where did you learn those songs? My mother sang them.

Some of them. Some of them I have I made up. I have made pieces of them up. He asked for a song his mother used to sing and I did not know it. So I sang him one I made and told him it was the same. She had not meant to say that. She did not know why she had said it. She looked down at her hands. That was a kindness, the duke said.

It was a lie. It was both. She looked up at him. His face was still the same face, tired and quiet. But there was something in his voice that not been there before. She did not know what it was. She was too tired to know. “How long were you standing there?” she said. She had not meant to ask that either. He was silent.

He looked at the boy for a long moment. Then he said, “Long enough.” “How long?” “I do not know, Miss Ashby. I stopped counting. I did not know you had come.” “I know.” She did not say anything more. She could not think of anything to say. The fire ticked in the grate. The boy breathed evenly in his sleep. Outside, in the passage, she heard Mrs.

Pell’s step on the stair, and then Mrs. Pell’s voice speaking very quietly to Molly, and then the step going away again. Mrs. Pell had reached the door and seen the Duke and gone away. That was the kind of thing Mrs. Pell did. “I will send Mrs. Pell in to sit with him.” the Duke said. “You are going to rest. I am telling you, Miss Ashby, not asking.” “Yes, Your Grace.

” He stood up. He looked down at the child once more. Then he did the thing she remembered afterward, though at the time she was so tired she almost did not see it. He reached out and very carefully, with the back of one finger, he touched the boy’s cheek. He touched it once. He did not linger. Then he took his hand away and went out of the room without looking at her again.

She sat there for a long moment after he had gone. She looked at the door he had gone through. She looked down at the boy’s hand under her hand. She listened to the boy breathing. She thought, “He stood there for a long time. He stood in the doorway in a wet coat with the smell of horses on him and he listened.

He heard the boat song. He heard the sheep song. He heard the moon song. He heard me tell that child that a boat that did not come home in my mother’s song came home in mine. She thought I did not know he was there. She thought though she did not want to think it, I would have sung the same songs. Mrs. Pell came in.

Mrs. Pell said, in a voice Wren had never heard from her, that Miss Ashby was to go to her room now and sleep, and that a tray would be sent up in the afternoon, and that no one, not the Duke, and not the doctor, and not the second coming of the good Lord himself, was to disturb her before 4:00 in the afternoon.

Wren stood up. Her legs were unsteady. Mrs. Pell put a hand under her elbow and walked her to the door. At the door, Mrs. Pell said, very quietly, “He does not usually sit down in a sickroom, Miss Ashby. I have known him 30 years. He does not sit down.” Wren did not answer. She went to her small room at the end of the west corridor, and she lay down in her clothes, and she was asleep in the space of two breaths.

She did not dream. When she woke, it was after 4:00. Her small room was full of the flat gray light of a March afternoon. Someone had come in and left a tray on the little table by her washstand. The tea in the pot was cold, but the bread and the ham on the plate had been covered with a cloth. She ate without thinking.

She washed her face in cold water. She changed her dress from the gray one she had slept in to the dark blue one, which was the better of her two dresses, and she went out into the passage. Mrs. Pell was on the stair. She met Wren at the landing and told her, without ceremony, that the boy was awake and had taken broth, and that the doctor had come and gone, and had said the fever was less, and that his grace had sat with the child for 2 hours in the morning, and again for an hour after the doctor had left and had now gone down to his study

to attend to letters that had followed him from Kent. Mrs. Pell said all of this in her ordinary voice, but at the end of it she added without looking at Wren, “He asked me your name three times, Miss Ashby. I do not think he was listening the first two.” Wren did not know what to say to that. She said, “Thank you, Mrs. Pell.

” Which was not the right thing, but was all she could think of. She went to the Tobias was propped up in bed. His color was a little better. He was holding a wooden horse in his hand that Wren had not seen before. It was old and the paint was chipped and one of its ears was missing. He held it out to her when she came in.

“Look, His Grace gave it to me. It was his when he was small. He said his father made it for him. That is a fine horse. He said I might keep it. That is a great gift. His Grace sat here for a very long time. He did not talk very much. He asked me if I liked the pond at home and I said yes and he asked me if I would like to have a pond here and I said yes and he said he would see about it.

” Wren sat down in the green chair. “That is kind of him. He said you sang to me. Yes, he said your voice was pretty.” Wren felt her face grow warm again. “That was kind of him. He asked me what songs you sang. I told him about the boat song.” Tobias paused. He looked down at the horse in his hand. “He asked me if my mother had sung the boat song and I told him no, that you had made it up but told me she had sung it.

He was quiet for a little while. Was he angry?” Wren asked quietly, “No. He said it was a very good song and he was glad you had made it. He said he would like to hear it again sometime.” She did not know what to do with that. She reached out and straightened the blanket over the boy’s knees. “You must rest,” she said.

“The doctor said I have been resting all day. I am so tired of resting.” “Rest one more day. Tomorrow you may sit up in the chair by the window.” “May I have the horse in the chair with me?” “You may have the horse anywhere you like.” He smiled at her, and his smile reached his eyes this time, and she thought her heart would break with the relief of it.

She sat with him until his supper came, and she helped him with his broth, and she read to him a little from the book of hedge-row birds that he had liked all winter. When Mrs. Pell came in to sit through the evening watch, Wren went down the west stair to give her thanks to Cook for the tray. She was crossing the small hall behind the library when she heard the Duke’s voice.

He was in his study. The door was half open. He was speaking to someone, but there was no other voice answering. She thought at first he must be speaking to a servant, and she meant to go past quietly without being seen. When she realized he was reading aloud from a letter, “And it would be my earnest hope,” he was reading, in a slow flat voice as though he had read the sentence several times already, “that your grace should see fit to reconsider the terms of the boy’s guardianship, particularly with regard to the estate at Fell, which by the

terms of my late brother’s will,” the Duke stopped reading. He said, in a different voice, a much shorter voice, one very ugly word. Then he was silent. Wren stood in the hall. She should have walked on. She should not have listened to a word of it. But she stood there because the ugly word had told her something she had not known, which was that Tobias’s aunt, the sister of his dead mother, was trying to take the child’s inheritance.

Wren had known there was some family matter concerning the boy. She had not known this. She was about to move on when the study door opened wider. The Duke stood there. He had heard her. Or he had felt her, or he had simply looked up at the right moment. He did not look angry. He looked tired. Miss Ashby. Your Grace, forgive me.

I did not mean to. Come in. Your Grace, I Come in, Miss Ashby. I will not eat you. She came in. The study was warm and smelled of old leather and lamp oil and the faintest ghost of pipe tobacco, though there was no pipe on the desk. A single lamp was lit. There was a stack of letters on the desk. There was a decanter of something dark and a glass beside it, but the glass was empty and dry, as though he had set it out and then thought better of it.

Sit down, Miss Ashby. She sat down in the chair opposite the desk. He did not sit. He walked to the window and stood looking out at the dark garden with his back to her. How is the boy? Better, Your Grace. He is eating. Good. He showed me the horse. Did he? He did not turn from the window. He was very pleased with it.

It was in a box in the attic. I do not know why I kept it. He was quiet for a moment. She sat with her hands folded and waited. She had been in service six months, but before that she had been the daughter of a country clergyman with too many books and not enough coal, and she had learned young that if you sat quietly for long enough, most people would say what they meant to say without your asking.

I owe you an apology, Miss Ashby, he said, still with his back to her. Your Grace, I stood in the passage this morning for the better part of an hour. I did not make myself known. That was not honorable. You did not know you were being listened to. I ought to have knocked. Why did you not? He was silent. Then he said, I did not want to interrupt.

You could have knocked at any time. Yes, you did not. No. She waited. He did not go on. So, she said quietly, “Your Grace, I do not think it was so terrible a thing. I was singing to a child. I would have sung the same songs if the whole household had been in the room.” “I think that is true,” he said. “That is part of why I stood there.

” She did not know what to say to that. She looked at her hands. He turned then. He came back to the desk. He did not sit. He stood on the other side of it with his hand on the back of his chair. “Miss Ashby, may I ask you a question that is not any of my business?” “Yes.” “How did you come to be here?” “Mrs. Pell wrote to my vicar.

She had been told there was a lady in the village who might do. My father died last year. There was no living for me at home. My cousin has the house now. I came here.” “You have no family?” “An aunt in Bath. She has six of her own. She would have taken me. I did not want to be taken.” “You wanted to work?” “I wanted my own bread.

” He nodded slowly. “That is a thing I understand.” She looked up at him then. He was looking at her. And he was not looking at her the way he had looked at her in the sickroom, which had been the look of a man deciding to know something. He was looking at her as though he had already decided and was now considering what the knowing meant. It was too much.

She dropped her eyes. “Miss Ashby, that letter you overheard I did not mean to overhear, Your Grace.” “I know. I am telling you what it is so that you will know as well. The boy has an aunt on his mother’s side. She has not asked to see him since he came to me. She is now asking for the estate that comes to him when he is of age.

She is asking through her solicitor. She believes she has a claim. Does she? No, but she has money for lawyers, and I have been away from London too long. The matter will be a long one. I mention it because Mrs. Pell will hear of it, and the household will hear of it, and I would rather you heard it from me. Thank you, Your Grace.

The boy is not to know. No, Your Grace, of course. He is only six. Yes, he was quiet again. He looked down at the stack of letters on the desk. He put one hand on them, flat, as though holding them still. Miss Ashby, I am going to be here for some weeks. I had meant to return to Kent when I had seen the child, but I will not go back until the matter of the aunt is settled, and until the boy is well.

I hope my presence in the house will not disturb your care of him. I do not intend to interfere. You are the master of the house, Your Grace. You may do as you like in it. He looked at her. There was something in his face that was almost a smile. It was not quite a smile. That has never been true, he said. But I thank you for saying it.

She rose. She did not know why she rose, except that she felt if she sat in that chair a moment longer she would say something she could not take back. She said, Good night, Your Grace, and she went to the door. Miss Ashby. She stopped with her hand on the door. She did not turn. Thank you, he said, for sitting with him in the night.

You do not need to thank me, Your Grace. I do. She went out. She shut the door quietly. She walked up the west stair and past the tall clock in the hall, which chimed nine as she passed it and did not sound to her tonight like a man clearing his throat. It sounded like a bell. She did not sleep well. The next morning she came down at her usual hour and found the Duke already at the breakfast table.

This was a new thing. In the six months she had lived at Ashwood, he had not been there and she had eaten at the small side table alone with the newspaper propped against the sugar bowl. Today was at the head of the long table and he looked up when she came in and he said, “Good morning. Miss Ashby, please sit down.

” He did not say sit at the side table, he said sit down. There was a place laid at his right hand. She did not know if it had been laid for her or if it had been laid because he had thought she might come in and had told the footman to lay it and had not thought further about what she might feel to see it. She sat down.

They ate in silence for some minutes. He was reading a letter. She poured her tea. She did not know how to be at this table with a man in it. She had been alone at breakfasts for a long time. He put the letter down. “The boy asked to sit up today. The doctor said tomorrow. I told him tomorrow. He has agreed to be patient.

” “Thank you, Your Grace. Miss Ashby, do you ride?” She looked up. “I can, Your Grace. I am not skilled. There is a small mare in the stable that has been eating her head off since November. She wants exercise. I have been out on the roan this morning already. If you would care to take the mare out in the afternoons when the boy is resting, it would do her good.

” Ren looked at him. He was buttering a piece of toast. He was not looking at her. She had the strong impression that he was not looking at her on purpose because looking would have made the offer seem larger than he meant it to seem. “I have no habit,” she said. “There is one in the blue room press. It belonged to my sister.

She is dead these 10 years, and it will not offend her. It is not the newest fashion, but it will do for the estate.” “Your grace, I “You do not have to, Miss Ashby. The mare will be fine.” “I only thought.” She looked at her tea. “Thank you, your grace. That is kind. I will try to.” “Good.” He said nothing else about it.

He finished his toast. He got up. He said he would look in on the boy and then be in the study for most of the day, and that if the doctor came, she was to send for him. He went out. Ren sat at the long table. She looked at the place he had left. She looked at her hands. That was the beginning of it, though she did not know at the time that anything had begun.

For 3 weeks it went on. Every morning she came down, and he was at breakfast. Every morning he said good morning and asked after the boy. Every afternoon, when the boy was resting and the doctor had gone, she went down to the stable and the mare was saddled and ready, and she rode out along the west drive as far as the beech cops and back.

And each day she went a little further and rode a little better. On the fourth day, she found that the duke had ridden out ahead of her and was waiting at the cops on his big roan. And when she came up, he turned his horse without a word, and they rode back to the stable side by side, and he did not speak except to say once, at the mounting block, “You have a good seat.

” “Miss Ashby, you said you were not skilled.” “I said I was not skilled, your grace. I did not say I could not learn.” “That,” he said, “is not the same thing at all.” He rode out with her most afternoons after that. Sometimes he spoke, sometimes he did not. He was not a man who filled silences. He was a man who allowed them. The boy grew steadily better.

By the end of the second week, he was up in the chair by the window. By the end of the third, he was walking slowly in the long gallery. He carried the wooden horse everywhere. He asked the Duke a hundred questions a day about the horse and about the Duke’s father who had made the horse and about the Duke when he was small and the Duke answered every one of them patiently with the air of a man who had not known he had so many answers in him.

Ren watched them together and something in her chest did a thing she could not name and did not want to name. In the evenings, after the boy had gone to bed, the Duke sometimes asked her to sit for a while in the small parlor. He did not call it courting. He did not call it anything. He asked her once to read to him from the book of Hedgerow Birds because he had heard her read it to the child and had liked the sound of her voice.

She read it to him. He listened with his eyes closed and his head against the back of the chair and she thought he had fallen asleep and when she stopped he said without opening his eyes, “Go on, Miss Ashby. The chaffinch.” He did not touch her. He did not stand close to her. He did not do any of the things she had read about in the two novels she had been allowed as a girl.

He was in the room with her and he was not in the room with her and both of those things were true at the same time. Then, in the fourth week, the aunt came. Ren heard the carriage on the drive from the schoolroom window. She had been showing Tobias how to draw a wren which he had asked to be taught after learning her name.

She looked out and saw a black carriage with a great deal of luggage on the top and a woman in a purple traveling coat being handed down. The woman was tall and thin and looked, even from three floors up, as though she was already angry about something. “Who is that?” Tobias asked. “A visitor.” Ren said. “Come, we have not finished the wren.

But the visitor did not wait to be presented. The visitor came up the stairs. The visitor walked into the schoolroom without knocking and stood in the doorway and looked at the boy for a long moment as though he were a piece of furniture whose price she had come to fix. Tobias, she said. Her voice was very cold and very correct.

Do you know me? Tobias looked at her. He looked at Ren. Ren had risen from her chair. No, ma’am, he said quietly. I am your Aunt Maurice, your mother’s sister. I have come to see you. How do you do, ma’am? The aunt looked at Ren. And you are? Miss Ashby, ma’am. I am companion to Tobias. Companion? Yes, ma’am. The aunt’s eyes went over Ren from her plain gray dress to her plain white cap and back to her face.

Ren stood very straight. She did not drop her eyes. She had learned in 6 months at Ashworth that when Mrs. Pell was displeased with a housemaid she did not raise her voice. She only looked and the look did more than the voice would have. The aunt had that same look. It was not new to her. You are very young, the aunt said for the position.

I am nearly two and twenty, ma’am. Are you? The aunt did not make it a question. She turned to Tobias. Come, child. I am going to see his grace. You may come and sit with me. I am drawing a wren, ma’am. You may draw the wren later. Come. Tobias looked at Ren. Ren said quietly, Go with your aunt, Tobias. I will keep the drawing safe.

He got down from the chair. He picked up the wooden horse which was on the table beside the drawing and he held it in his hand. The aunt looked at the horse. What is that? His grace gave it to me. It was his when he was small. A servant’s toy, the aunt said. Give it here. You may have proper toys. I have brought you some.

Tobias’ hand closed on the horse. He did not give it to her. He looked at the floor. Give it here, Tobias. Ma’am, Wren said. She stepped forward. Her voice was very quiet. His grace gave it to him. It is not for me to say, but I do not think You are quite right, the aunt said without looking at Wren. It is not for you to say.

Tobias, the horse. Tobias did not move. His small hand was closed very tightly around the horse. The aunt’s face did something ugly. She reached out. She took the horse from Tobias’ hand. She did not have to pull hard. He was six, and he was thin, and he had been sick. She put the horse down on the table with a little bright click of wood on wood.

Now, she said, come with me. Wren said nothing. She watched them go. When the door had closed, she picked up the horse from the table, and she put it in the drawer of the schoolroom desk, and she sat down in her chair, and she found that her hands were shaking. She put them flat on the table, and she waited for them to stop.

They did not stop for a long time. She did not go down to dinner. She sent word by Molly that she had a headache. She did not have a headache. She could not sit at the table with the aunt. She had spent 6 months making a small, quiet, safe place for that child, and she could not sit at the table with the woman who had in 3 minutes taken a wooden horse out of his hand.

Mrs. Pell came up at 9:00. Mrs. Pell said the aunt would be at Ashworth a week. Mrs. Pell said the aunt had said at dinner, in front of the duke and two of the footmen and the butler that a village girl was not a suitable companion for the heir of Ashworth and that the boy’s manners were coarse and that the household was being run in a way that would not do at all and that she, the aunt, intended to speak to his grace privately about a number of matters including, she said the propriety of a young unmarried woman

being kept in a house with an unmarried man of rank without a proper chaperone. Mrs. Pell said all this in her flat voice. Then Mrs. Pell said his grace did not answer her, Miss Ashby. He ate his soup. He drank his wine. He asked the aunt whether her journey had been comfortable. That was all he said to her the whole meal. He was angry though.

I know what he looks like when he is angry. Thank you, Mrs. Pell, Miss Ashby. I have been in this house 30 years. I know what my duties are. I would not stay in a house where anything improper was done. I told him so tonight before he went in to dinner. I told him, “If she comes at you with that story, your grace, I will speak.

” He said, “Thank you, Mrs. Pell.” That was all he said. “Thank you, Mrs. Pell. You are to come down to breakfast tomorrow.” He said so. He said, “Tell Miss Ashby she is to come to breakfast.” Yes, Mrs. Pell. Mrs. Pell paused at the door. Then she said in the flat voice, “The horse is on his desk, Miss Ashby.

He asked Molly to bring it down. He put it on his desk beside the lamp. She went out.” Ren sat on her bed and she did not weep because she did not think weeping would help anything. The week that followed was the worst week Ren had known since her father had died. The aunt did not leave the house. The aunt sat in the drawing room and received the boy for an hour each morning and an hour each afternoon and during those hours Wren was not permitted to be present.

The aunt gave the boy sweets he did not eat and stories he did not want to hear and told him, in a voice Wren heard once through a door she was passing, that he was going to come and live with her in London and that he would like it very much and that he would forget all about the country and the horses and the plain-spoken young woman who was, she said, a temporary arrangement.

Wren did not tell the boy that she had heard. The duke was distant that week. He was not distant to her, precisely. He was distant to everyone. He rose early. He rode alone. He spent the days in his study with a lawyer who had come down from London. He came to dinner and was polite to the aunt. He did not ride out with Wren in the afternoons.

She rode out alone. The mare was quiet under her as though the mare knew. On the sixth day of the aunt’s visit, at breakfast, the aunt spoke. “Your Grace, I must raise a matter that troubles me. I do not think it seemly in a house of your rank that a young woman of Miss Ashby’s station and youth should be housed here without a proper chaperone.

I do not question your honor. I question the world’s readiness to think ill. For the boy’s sake and for your own, I must ask that you send her away.” The dining room went very quiet. The footman by the sideboard did not move. Mrs. Pell, who was standing by the door with the letters, did not move. Wren, who had been in the middle of picking up her cup, set the cup down without drinking from it.

She kept her eyes on her plate. She did not look at him. The duke set down his knife. He looked at the aunt. He did not look angry. He looked, Wren thought, the way he had looked in the doorway of the sickroom that first morning. A man who had walked into a room expecting one thing and had found another and had needed a moment.

Then he said, “Madam, I have been the master of this house for 11 years. In that time, no one, not my mother in her lifetime, not my sister in hers, not any of the men or women who have served in this house, has ever suggested that my honor required policing. I take your suggestion in the spirit in which it is offered.

” The aunt smiled a small tight smile. “Then you will send her.” “No,” the Duke said. The word was quiet. It was not loud at all. It fell into the room the way a stone falls into a pond, and after it fell, the whole room was still. “I beg your pardon?” “Your Grace?” “I said no.” “Your Grace, I do not think you understand.

” “Madam,” the Duke said. He picked up his knife again. He cut a piece of ham on his plate. He did not raise his voice. “Miss Ashby will not be sent from this house. Miss Ashby will remain in this house. Miss Ashby will remain in this house, moreover, in the capacity of its mistress, if she will consent to have me, which is a matter I have not yet had the honor to put to her, and which I will not put to her at a breakfast table in front of a woman who took a wooden horse out of a sick child’s hand.

” The room did not breathe. Ren did not breathe. She sat with her hands on either side of her plate, and she stared at the plate, and she felt the whole room turning to look at her, and she did not move. The aunt made a small sound. It was not quite a word. “You will find, madam,” the Duke said, evenly still cutting his ham, “that my solicitor has completed his work on the matter of my ward’s estate.

You will find that the claim you were pleased to advance through your own solicitor has no standing whatever. You will find, further, that I have written to your husband, who is a man I have known for 20 years, and who is I think a better man than he has been given credit for. I have told him what happened in the schoolroom on Tuesday of last week. I did not embellish.

I did not need to. He has written back. His letter is on my desk. I will not read it aloud at this table. You will read it in your carriage on your way to London, which is where you will be by 3:00 this afternoon. The aunt stood up. Her face was very white. She said, “Your grace 3:00.” Madam, Mrs. Pell will see to your trunks.

The aunt went out. She did not shut the door. Mrs. Pell shut it quietly behind her. Mrs. Pell then went out through the servants’ door with the letters which she had not yet put on the table still in her hand. The footman, after a moment, decided he had an errand in the pantry and went to it.

Renn sat at the table with the duke. She did not look up. She could not look up. Her whole face was hot. “Miss Ashby,” the duke said. She did not answer. “Miss Ashby, look at me.” She looked at him. He had put down his knife. He was looking at her and it was the same look, exactly the same as the look in the doorway of the sickroom that first morning.

The look of a man deciding, “I have said a thing at a table that I ought to have said in a garden. I ask your forgiveness for the manner. I do not withdraw the matter. Will you speak with me later in the small parlor at any hour that suits you?” “Yes,” she said. She did not know she was going to say it. She heard it come out of her mouth.

“Thank you.” He got up. He walked around the table. He stopped beside her chair. She thought for a moment he was going to touch her hand where it lay on the table, but he did not. He said, quietly, “The horse is on my desk. I will bring it up to the boy this morning. He went out. Ren sat at the table for a long time.

She heard the aunt’s voice raised somewhere far away in the house, and then Mrs. Pell’s voice, quieter and shorter. And then the aunt’s voice again. And then a door. She heard Molly’s step in the passage. She heard the tall clock chime the half hour, and it sounded, this time, exactly like a man clearing his throat.

Only the man was preparing to say something important, and had cleared his throat to say it well. She got up. She went upstairs. She sat with Tobias for the morning, and she read him the chaffinch and the robin and the yellowhammer, and she did not tell him that his aunt was leaving because she thought his aunt should tell him herself.

And the aunt, when she came for her hour with the boy, did not come. Mrs. Pell came instead at 11:00, and said that the aunt had had a sudden call to town, and had left already. Before the appointed 3:00, which was, said Mrs. Pell in her flat voice, perhaps for the best, the duke did not come at his usual hour to see the child.

He came at 4:00. He brought the horse. He set it on the boy’s coverlet, and he said, in a voice quite ordinary, I believe this belongs to you. Tobias took the horse. He held it. He looked at the duke. He said, Aunt Maurice said it was a servant’s toy. Aunt Maurice, said the duke, was mistaken about many things.

He sat with the boy an hour. Ren left them, and went down to the small parlor. She sat there in the chair by the fire. The chair was the one she had begun to think of as hers over the last month, though it was not hers, and had never been hers. The fire was small. The room smelled of wood smoke and beeswax, and the ghost of the tobacco he did not smoke.

The tall window looked out over the garden. The garden was showing the first small green things. It was almost spring. He came in a little after five. He shut the door. He did not sit. He stood by the fire and he looked at the fire and he said without looking at her, “Miss Ashby, I have not asked you a proper question.

I would like to ask it now if you will hear me. I will hear you. I have been a widower 11 years. I was married when I was very young. She was a good woman. She died in the second year and I have not in these 11 years seen any woman I wish to make my wife. I do not say this to flatter you. I say it because I want you to know that when I say what I am about to say, I have not said it before and I will not say it again to anyone else whatever your answer is.

He turned from the fire. He came and stood in front of her chair. He did not kneel. He did not go down on one knee. He stood very straight with his hands at his sides the way a soldier stands when he is being spoken to by his captain. I stood in the doorway of that sickroom for over an hour, Miss Ashby.

I have thought about that hour every day since. I heard you sing to a child who was afraid he would not live till morning. I heard you sing him a song you had made him and I heard you tell him it was his mother’s. And I understood in that hour what kind of a woman you are and I have not since that hour wanted to be anywhere in the world where you were not.

I understand that you have known me a month. I understand that this is very fast. I have money enough that you would never work again. That is not what I offer you. I offer you my hand and this house and the boy upstairs and my company for the rest of my life. You may have as long as you like to give me your answer. You may say no.

You may say no and stay in this house on your present terms and I will not speak of this matter again. Do you understand me, Miss Ashby? She sat in the chair. She looked at him. He was tired. There were shadows under his eyes that had not been there a week ago. His hair was disordered and there was a small mark on his collar where his pen had leaked.

His hands at his sides were not quite steady though he was standing so straight otherwise that she thought no one but she would have seen it. She thought about the six months alone in his house. She thought about her father’s grave. She thought about the aunt in Bath with six of her own. She thought about the little kitchen cat that would only drink from the cracked saucer.

She thought about the boy upstairs with the wooden horse in his hand. She thought about the first morning and the doorway and the smell of horses and cold and the way he had touched the boy’s cheek with the back of one finger and taken his hand away. Slowly very slowly she stood up out of the chair. He watched her stand. He did not move.

She was not tall. She had to look up at him a little. She looked at him. She looked at his mouth and his eyes and the tired lines beside his eyes and the color of his coat with the small ink mark and she thought, “This is the face I will see across the table in the morning and this is the face I will see across the pillow at night if I say yes.

” And she did not know how she had gotten from six months ago to now, but she was here and he was here and the fire was ticking and outside a thrush was singing in the yew hedge, exactly the same thrush she was quite sure, as the one that had been in the frost on the first morning. “How long were you standing there?” she said.

Her voice was not steady. He knew what she meant. She saw him know it. “Long enough,” he said. His voice was not steady, either. “Long enough to know.” “Yes,” she said. He did not move for a moment. He looked at her as though he was not sure he had heard her. “Yes?” “Yes.” He closed his eyes for one breath. Only one.

Then he opened them. And he lifted his hand, and he did not put it on her face or on her shoulder or on her waist. He put it out, palm up, between them. He held it there. He waited. She put her hand in his. His hand closed around hers. His hand was warm. His hand was not quite steady. She felt his thumb move once, very slowly, across the back of her hand, and then be still.

They stood like that for a long moment. Neither of them said anything. The fire ticked. The thrush went on singing. “There is a pond at the north end of the west park,” he said after a while. His voice was quiet. “I did not tell the boy. It has been dry these 10 years. I have written to have it dug out and filled.

There will be ducks by summer.” “That is a good thing.” “I did it before this morning. I did not do it because of this morning.” “I know.” “I wanted you to know.” “I know.” He lifted her hand very slightly. And he did not kiss it quite. He held it near his mouth for a moment as though thinking about it. Then he lowered it again, still held in his, and he said, “May I take you upstairs to see the boy?” “Yes.” He opened the door.

He did not let go of her hand until they reached the foot of the stair. When they came into the boy’s room, the boy was in bed with the wooden horse on his pillow, and the book of hedge-row birds open on his knees. And he looked up, and he saw them. And his small face did a thing that Wren remembered for the rest of her life.

It was not a large thing. It was only that his eyes went from her face to the Duke’s face, and back to her face. And then his mouth turned up at the corners, and he said, “Oh, yes.” The Duke said, “Oh, is Miss Ashby to stay?” “Miss Ashby is to stay.” “Forever?” “For as long as she will.” The boy looked at Wren.

Wren nodded at him. She could not speak. The boy nodded back once, the way a small serious person nods when a serious thing has been settled. Then he looked down at the book on his knees, and he said, without looking up, “May I show her the wren then? I have finished my drawing.” “You may.” The Duke said.

She went and sat on the bed beside the boy. She looked at the drawing. It was not a very good drawing, but the small brown bird on the page was recognizably a wren, with its tail up in the air the way a wren’s tail was. And the boy had written her name under it in his careful round letters, “Wren.” She put her arm around the boy’s shoulders.

He leaned against her. The Duke stood by the door and watched them both. And he did not come in. And he did not go out. And after a moment, Wren looked up at him, and she smiled. And he smiled back. Which was the first full smile she had seen on his face, and it made him look quite suddenly 10 years younger. That was in April.

A year later, in April again, Wren came into the library at Ashworth at 7:00 in the morning. She was in a dark green dress now, not gray, and there was a small gold ring on her hand. The fire was already lit, though the logs were the good ones now, not the small ones, because the master of the house was in residence.

He was in fact in the chair by the fire with a letter in his hand and a cup of tea gone cold on the table beside him. He looked up when she came in. You are up early. Tobias is at the pond. He has taken the bread for the ducks. There are six of them now. Three came from the neighbor at Easter. Ah, he wishes you to come and see them at 10.

He says the drake has learned to eat from his hand. I shall come at 10. She crossed to the fire. She stood beside his chair. He put his hand on her hand where it rested on the arm of the chair. He did this without looking up from the letter. He had been doing this for a year. She did not think she would ever get used to it. Which was perhaps the point.

“There is a letter from Mrs. Pells sister.” he said. “She is coming to stay a fortnight.” Mrs. Pell has not seen her in 11 years. That is good. “Yes.” He put down the letter. He looked up at her. He had the same face he had had a year ago. Only the shadows under his eyes were gone. And the tired lines beside his eyes had become the lines of someone who smiled more than he used to.

“How long have you been standing there?” he said. It was a small joke between them now. He said it whenever he found her in a room he had come into. She said it whenever she found him. Neither of them ever answered the question. She only smiled and said, “Long enough.” He lifted her hand from the arm of the chair.

He held it against his cheek for one long moment. He did not say I love you. He had never said it, not once in words. He did not need to. He had a house full of ways of saying it. And she had learned every one of them. And she was still learning. Outside at the pond that had been dry for 10 years, a small boy with a wooden horse in his pocket threw bread to six ducks and laughed.

And a thrush that Wren was quite sure was the same thrush sang in the U hedge. And the tall clock in the front hall chimed the quarter hour and did not anymore sound like anything at all except a clock, which was the sound a clock made in a house that was at last a home. Thank you for staying with this story until the very end.

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