Every Drawer but One

The advertisement said a gentleman of education and discretion, and you have spent the whole walk from the Bath coach wondering which of those you're about to be found out for lacking.

Not education. You have Cambridge, a sizar's place you scrubbed floors to keep, and enough Greek to be insufferable at dinner. Discretion is the one you worry about. You've been discreet for eleven years. It's the kind of thing that wears thin at the elbows, like your coat. Ethan Carew, discreet since sixteen. They could put it on your stone.

Ashvale House takes up most of one side of Grosvenor Street. Pale stone, black railings, windows that look down at you the way bishops do. You stand at the bottom of the steps with your hat in your hand and your father's letter of character in your pocket, and a footman in dove-gray livery opens the door before you knock, which feels like being expected and being judged at once.

"Mr. Carew," says the butler. He is thin and silver and has the face of a man who has seen every possible thing done with a fish fork. "I am Pengrave. His Grace will see you in the study. You are seven minutes early."

"Is that bad?"

"It is noted," Pengrave says, and leads you up.

The house is very quiet. Thick carpets, old portraits, a smell of beeswax and cold ashes. At the end of a long corridor Pengrave knocks once on a dark door, opens it, and says, "Mr. Carew, Your Grace," and leaves you there like a parcel.

The study is long and full of morning. Books to the ceiling. A fire nobody is sitting near. And in the middle of the room, a great mahogany partners' desk, the kind built for two men to work facing each other, with only one chair occupied.

He doesn't look up.

He's reading a letter with the expression of a man reading his own death warrant and finding the spelling poor, and the light from the long window lies across him like it's been paid to. Black hair, a little too long for fashion. A face cut so cleanly it looks unfair, all jaw and cheekbone, a mouth that has clearly been told about smiling and declined. Black coat, gray waistcoat, a cravat tied so precisely it could be used to settle disputes.

You have seen beautiful men before. Cambridge was full of them, and you learned early how to look at a wall instead. You look at the wall now. It doesn't help. The wall has a window in it, and the window has him in it.

"You're late, Mr. Carew," he says.

"I'm seven minutes early, Your Grace. Mr. Pengrave noted it."

That makes him look up.

His eyes are gray. Not blue-gray, not soft. Slate, the color of a roof in rain, and they go over you once from your unruly hair to your boots, and you feel catalogued. Shabby cuffs. Mended glove. Ink on the second finger of your right hand that no amount of pumice ever shifts.

"Sit," he says.

You sit in the empty chair across the desk. It's warm from the sun, not from anybody. You hand over your father's letter. He breaks the seal with one thumb and reads it without expression.

"Ethan Carew," he says, as if your name were a sum he's checking. "Twenty-seven."

"You were a clerk to a solicitor in Bath for four years," he says. "Before that, Cambridge, St. John's. Your father is a rector in Somerset. You were meant for the Church." He sets the letter down. "Why aren't you in it?"

Most people ask that kindly, or slyly, and you have a dozen answers ready. No vocation. Too fond of argument. My Greek was better than my faith. He asks it like a man asking the price of coal, and somehow that makes the true answer come up into your throat before you can stop it.

"I couldn't stand in a pulpit and tell people things about themselves I didn't believe," you say. "Or about myself."

Something shifts in his face. Not much. A shutter, closing.

"Take a pen," he says.

There's a stand of them by your hand, good quills, cut fresh. You take one. Paper appears, cream laid, heavy, the Ashvale crest pressed into the top: a stag beneath a crown.

"To Her Grace the Dowager Duchess of Ashvale," he says, in a voice like a door closing. "Madam. I regret that I cannot attend your dinner on Thursday. I have a prior engagement. Ashvale."

You write it. Your hand is good; it's the one thing you're vain about. Copperplate as clean as print. You let the pen rest.

"Read it back."

You don't. You say, "Does Her Grace know you don't have a prior engagement?"

The silence is long enough to hear the fire tick.

"I beg your pardon?"

"It's a Thursday in April, Your Grace. The Lords sit Thursdays. If you had a prior engagement you'd have named it, because naming it would end the argument. You didn't, so there isn't one, and your mother will know that the moment she reads it, and she'll come round in person." You turn the paper so he can see. "If you'd like her to stay away, you could say you're kept by business in the House, and that you'll call on her Sunday. Then she has a Sunday to look forward to instead of a Thursday to be angry about."

He looks at the paper. He looks at you.

"You've met my mother," he says.

"No, Your Grace. I've met mothers."

For one second, you would swear to it in any court in England, the corner of his mouth moves.

Then it's gone, and he's standing, and he's taller than you guessed, and he walks around the end of the great desk to stand at your shoulder and read what you've written. He smells of cold air and starch and something green, like crushed leaves. You keep very still.

"Write it your way," he says.

You do. He watches every stroke. When you finish he takes the page, reads it twice, and folds it with three sharp creases.

"Mr. Feltham, my last secretary, wrote what I told him," he says. "Word for word, for three years. You've been in this room nine minutes and you've already argued with me."

"I can stop."

"Don't." He says it too fast, and seems to hear that. He straightens his cuff. "The terms are these. One hundred and twenty pounds a year. A room on the third floor. You'll work at that side of this desk." He nods to where you sit. "You'll read everything that comes into this house addressed to me, and you'll write most of what goes out. You'll go where I need you to go. And you will repeat nothing. Not to my mother. Not to the servants. Not to your father in Somerset. Nothing you read or hear in this room leaves it. Can you do that, Mr. Carew?"

You think of eleven years of not saying things.

"Yes," you say. "I'm very good at it."

He looks at you a beat too long. Then he takes a ring of keys from his waistcoat pocket and works one small iron key off it, and then another, and another, laying them on the blotter in a row. Brass, iron, steel. One for each drawer on your side, and the drawers on his.

"Correspondence. Estate papers. The Lords. Wiltshire. Accounts." He touches each one. "Every drawer in this desk is yours to open."

You reach for them.

His hand comes down flat beside them, not on them, not touching you. Long fingers. A signet ring with the stag. He's looking at the bottom drawer on his own side, the one on the right, with a brass lock polished by years of one thumb.

"Except that one," he says quietly. "That one is not yours, Mr. Carew. Not ever."