Katie shifted the basket, which was growing heavier every step they took, to her other arm.
“But when he grew older, he turned to cards and dice. He took all of his brother’s pocket money playing, then tried to convince his cousins to play. By the time he was twenty, when we couldn’t find him, we’d just seek out the nearest game of chance. I knew he had a problem. I told him to stop. But I never, in my wildest imaginings, thought he’d be fool enough to wager Carlisle Hall on a card game. Or a dice game. Who even cares how he lost it?Idiot,” the dowager mumbled.
“I am sorry, Your Grace,” Katie said. “I feel awful living in the home that should be yours.”
“It’s not your fault, gel. And I don’t want to live in the hall anymore, at any rate. Too many memories there now that Henry—my husband Henry, that is—is gone. I like the dowager house just fine.”
The duchess had mentioned her late husband before, and always with the same sort of wistful tone. She must have loved him very much.
“We’re almost there,” she said, pointing at a small cottage in the distance.
Katie was no expert on tenant cottages. Her own family did not have a country estate—until now, that was. But even though she hadn’t seen many tenant cottages, she thought this one looked particularly decrepit and… Wasramshacklethe correct word? She was better with paints than words, but if she painted this cottage, she would use browns and purples and black to show the poverty she sensed.
“Not much to look at, is it?” the duchess said.
“It looks as though it needs repairs.”
“It does indeed. No wonder the child became ill. The roof leaks when it rains, and there are enough holes to freeze a person’s bones. But has my idiot son done anything to help these people, his own tenants? No. He squanders all his money on hazard and vingt-et-un. Where did we go wrong?”
A woman in an apron came out of the house, carrying a basket of laundry to the drooping clothesline.
“I should go back,” Katie said.
The duchess took the basket from her. “Perhaps we can walk this way again together. You can meet the tenants—your tenants now, I suppose—when you’re braver.”
Katie had been about to turn, but she paused. She glanced at the duchess, who was a tall woman, taller than her, and who looked down her regal nose with a look that appeared to hold a challenge.
Her words were a challenge, to be sure.
Katie had never thought of herself as particularly brave. For years, she had hidden her face from the world. While other young girls walked in the park or attended the theater, she stayed home. She hadn’t been lonely for much of that time. Her brothers kept her entertained with stories and, when they grew older, letters of their adventures. Shortly after her mother died,when Katie was six, her father had hired a governess. Katie had spent many hours with her and learned how to draw and paint from Miss Shaw. Painting had been enough of a passion that she could spend hours in her studio and not even notice the passage of time.
And then something had happened that altered Katie’s life forever—Miss Shaw had married. She’d fallen in love with a local shopkeeper. Katie had been sixteen by then and not really in need of a governess any longer, but the loss of Miss Shaw, who was only fourteen years Katie’s senior and had been like an older sister to her, had caused Katie to recognize that others would eventually leave her as well.
The world was turning outside her window. She was the one standing still.
She’d wanted to go out into that world and find friends, but by then she didn’t know how, and her father wouldn’t have allowed it anyway. He was far too caught up in the saga of the Carlisles by then to even notice his daughter’s distress.
Thinking about bravery now, as the duchess eyed her with raised brows, Katie realized that when she’d lost Miss Shaw, she’d forced herself to become braver. She’d begun visiting museums and art galleries—veiled, of course—and even a lecture or two on art. And then Mrs. Kretz had come, and Katie had learned of Monsieur Seydoux in Paris—and perhaps she’d been a bittoobrave.
“I see what you are doing, Your Grace,” Katie said.
“At my age, I find there is no point in subtlety,” the duchess retorted. “Now, are you coming or not?”
“I might scare the children,” Katie said.
“You might.” The duchess gave an elegant shrug. “You can always go back to your bedchamber. You are in the chamber with the peeling papers on the wall, yes?”
Oh, how Katie hated that creeping ivy.
“That was Edith’s room. She always wanted a house with ivy on the outer walls. Personally, I hated that paper. The vines looked like tentacles to me.”
Wonderful. Now Katie would have that image in her mind when she tried to go to sleep tonight.
The duchess held out a hand for the basket. “Go on, then.”
Katie looked at the duchess’s gloved hand, then down at the basket. “I’d better carry this for you.”
The duchess smiled. “I could use your assistance, my lady.”
