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“I would never hurt him,” Phillipa said immediately.

The Dowager only smiled. “See to it that you don’t.”

She swept out before Phillipa could formulate any reply at all, leaving her standing in the drawing room with a great deal to think about and a strange, unexpected warmth in her chest at having, apparently, passed some manner of test she had not known she was sitting.

“You handled the Dowager rather better than most,” Mrs. Glenn observed, some while later.

“You think so?”

“Well, I see that you’re not reduced to tears, or don’t appear disheveled. So I believe that the exchange must have gone rather smoothly.”

Phillipa looked down at her hands, “She was not so very fearsome, once one stopped being afraid of her.”

“That is precisely what makes her fearsome, Your Grace, though I shall not repeat that observation to her directly.” Mrs. Glenn set down a fresh pot of tea. “You are settling well. I did not expect it to happen quite so quickly, if I am honest, and I do not offer that as faint praise. I have seen a great many young ladies come into houses like this one and founder rather badly on the particulars.”

“I have had a great deal of help. Yours, not least.”

“I do what is required of me.”

“You do a great deal more than that, Mrs. Glenn, and I think we both know it.” Phillipa looked up from her ledger. “I know I am not the mistress you might have chosen for this house, had the choosing been left to you. I hope I have not been too great a disappointment.”

Something flickered across the housekeeper’s carefully composed face. Surprise, Phillipa thought, and beneath it something warmer perhaps.

“You have not been a disappointment in the smallest particular, Your Grace,” she said, after a moment, with the particular gravity of a woman who did not offer such statements lightly. “I confess I was uncertain, at the start, what manner of Duchess a scandal such as yours might produce. I have been uncertain a great many times in thirty years of service, and I have learned not to judge too quickly. I find I need not have worried in your case.”

The household accounts, Phillipa was slowly coming to understand, were considerably more complicated than she had anticipated, and considerably more interesting besides.

She had expected, going in, a straightforward matter of columns and sums, the sort of thing she had managed passably well for St. Anthony’s small budget for the better part of a year.

What she had not expected was the sheer scope of a great house’s workings: the tenant farms scattered across three counties, each with its own particular needs and grievances that arrived by post with startling regularity; the London household itself, with its dozens of servants each drawing wages and requiring management; the charitable obligations the Welby name had apparently maintained for generations, quietly, without any particular fanfare, to a scattering of causes Phillipa had not even known existed until she found them itemized in the ledgers.

“His late Grace never troubled himself with the details,” Mrs. Glenn explained, laying out the quarterly reports with the brisk efficiency of a woman who had clearly been waiting some while for a mistress willing to actually learn them. “He signed what was put before him and asked no questions, which suited the estate manager well enough, though I do not think it always served the tenants as well as it might have. His Grace takes rather more interest, when he can be persuaded to sit still long enough for it, but a house runs better with two sets of eyes on it than one, Your Grace, whatever anyone tells you to the contrary.”

Phillipa found, somewhat to her own surprise, that she enjoyed it. There was a particular satisfaction in tracing a complaint about a leaking cottage roof through to its resolution, in seeing a tenant’s request for seed corn approved and dispatched within the week rather than left to molder in a drawer for a season, in understanding, gradually, the full shape of the responsibility she had taken on when she agreed to become a duchess rather than merely enjoying its privileges.

“You have a good head for figures, Your Grace,” Mrs. Glenn observed, one afternoon, watching Phillipa work through a particularly tangled dispute between two tenant farmers over a shared boundary wall with more patience and clearer thinking than the housekeeper had, by her own admission, expected from a young lady raised primarily for the ballroom. “I do not say that to flatter you. I say it because it is true, and because I think you do not hear it said of yourself nearly often enough.”

“I was not raised to be told such things,” Phillipa admitted. “I was raised to be told I danced well, and dressed well, and spoke pleasantly to gentlemen at dinner. No one troubled themselves overmuch with whether I had a head for figures.”

“Then it is a great waste that no one troubled themselves,” said Mrs. Glenn, with the particular bluntness she reserved for matters she felt strongly about, “and I am glad this house has found some use for what was wasted elsewhere.”

It was, Phillipa thought, turning the compliment over later as she made her way up to the nursery for the evening, exactly the kind of thing she had once been taught to deflect quickly, with a laugh and a change of subject, because a young lady did not accept praise for anything beyond her looks or her manners without seeming immodest. She found, this time, that she did not want to deflect it at all. She wanted, rather badly, to sit with it a moment longer, and let herself believe it might be true.

CHAPTER 13

“Joan, if you eat that whole bun before the others have theirs, I shall have to have a very serious word with you.”

“I am saving them the crusts,” said Joan, with the wounded dignity of the deeply unrepentant, and continued to eat.

Phillipa had laughed despite herself, and lost the thread of her intended scolding entirely, which she suspected had been precisely Joan’s design. The little girl was five years old and had lived at St. Anthony’s for very nearly four of them, and she had the particular sturdiness of a child who has learned early that affection, once secured, must be defended with both hands.

The orphanage looked better than Phillipa had ever seen it. That much was plain the moment she came through the gate. The roof, patched at last with good slate, no longer sagged over the girls’ dormitory. There was fresh whitewash on the front of the house, and in the yard a new woodpile stood higher than the fence, and from the kitchen came a smell that was unmistakably, gloriously, meat.

“The donation came through within the week, Your Grace,” Mrs. Fairley, the matron, had told her that morning, with something close to tears in her eyes. “We have had medicine for the whole house, and a proper doctor twice now, and a butcher who does not skimp the bone. And toys.” She had gestured to a battered wooden box in the corner of the common room, from which several small heads were, at that moment, extracting a set of tin soldiers with the reverence of pilgrims uncovering a relic. “We have never had toys before, Your Grace. Not new ones.”

Phillipa had gone quite still for a moment, looking at the box, and then had to look away and busy herself with her gloves.

“There was a man came by, Your Grace,” said Mrs. Fairley, lowering her voice as she gathered up the tea things. “Asking after you, particularly. Would not leave a card.”