“Give Me an Heir and You’ll Be Free,” the Ruthless Duke Told the Stranger He Married — He Never Guessed She Had Loved Him for Seven Years, or That Her Ruined Physician Father’s Forbidden Knowledge Could Save His Life

 PART 5

The trouble with a reprieve, the Duke discovered, was that a man could not spend it in the estate room forever. He had ordered his affairs so thoroughly against his death that with the death now perversely declining to arrive on schedule, he found himself with time on his hands.

He took to walking. He told himself it was to test the reprieve, to catch the shadow in the act of returning. But the shadow did not return, and the walking became, against his intention, a pleasure. The March wind off the downs. The lambs in the low meadows. The smell of turned earth where his men were at the spring sowing.

He began to come upon his wife.

He found her in the walled garden one morning on her knees in the black soil, her fine skirts kilted up and pinned, a smear of dirt across her cheek, setting out seedlings from a flat with a village woman beside her. The two of them talking low and easy as old gossips.

She did not see him at first. He stood in the arch of the old brick wall and watched her—the swift, competent hands, the quiet authority with which she directed the planting, the way the hard, bright March light did nothing at all to soften her plain face, and yet made it unaccountably worth looking at.

When she saw him, she rose at once and shook down her skirts. The village woman bobbed and fled, and the easy talk was gone, and the composed stranger of the dinner table stood in its place.

“Your Grace. I did not think you walked in the garden.”

“I find I do now. What are you planting?”

A small hesitation. “Herbs, mostly. Some flowers. Things for the still room. Mrs. Harrow says the physic garden was let go after your mother died. It seemed a pity.”

“My mother’s garden.” Something in his chest turned over. He had not walked in it since her funeral. He had ordered the door kept locked. And someone—this someone, this competent stranger he had married—had had it opened and cleaned and brought back to life without troubling to ask him.

“You may plant what you please,” he heard himself say. “It is yours now.”

She looked at him then, quickly, and looked away. “Thank you.” There was something in the two words—some weight of feeling out of all proportion to a gift of a garden—that puzzled him.

He walked with her that morning, up and down the brick paths. She named for him the things she had set out—the feverfew and the tansy, the foxglove she was raising in a shaded bed against the north wall, the comfrey she called knitbone. She talked well when she talked of the garden. The composure loosened. Her eyes warmed. She forgot for whole minutes together to be careful with him.

And he forgot for whole minutes together that he had told her he wanted no companion and no conversation and no wife but a means to an end, and that he was dying, and that hope was forbidden.

He came back the next morning, and the morning after. He could not have said why. He told himself it was the exercise. But it was not the garden. It was her. It was the way she looked at him—which was like no way anyone had looked at him in twenty years. Not the fawning of those who wanted something. Not the fear of those who owed him. Not the greedy assessment of the marriage market. But a long, steady attention, patient and unafraid, as though she saw the whole of him—the ruined, difficult whole of him—and had decided, for reasons entirely her own, that it was worth the seeing.

They began to dine closer. It happened by no decision he could point to. One evening she was simply seated at his right hand instead of thirty feet away. The silence he had decreed grew porous and then gave way.

She asked him one night about the estate—not the way his aunt asked, prying after money, but with a real interest in the land and the people. He found himself telling her about the drainage of the low meadows and the new plow and the old feud between two of his tenant families. She listened and asked good questions and made him laugh once.

Actually laugh. A short, rusty sound that startled them both.

“You laughed,” she said, as though remarking on a comet.

“I am told it has been known to happen,” he said, and covered it with his wine, and was aware of the color coming up in his own face like a boy’s.

He began to tell her things. Not all at once, and never easily, but a little at a time in the candlelight after the covers were drawn, when the servants had gone and the great house was quiet around them. He told her about his father—the strong, laughing man of his boyhood who had gone gray and gasping in a single dreadful summer and had died terrified, clutching at his son’s hand and begging a nineteen-year-old boy not to let it take him too.

“So you decided to leave first,” she said softly. “Before it could be taken from you. You decided to want nothing so that nothing could be lost.”

He looked at her across the guttering candles. It was so exactly, so nakedly the truth of the last twenty years of his life, laid bare in a single quiet sentence by a woman he had bought for a settlement in a house, that for a moment he could not breathe—and it had nothing to do with any disease.

“Yes,” he said at last, very low. “That is what I decided.”

“It is a great deal of trouble to take,” she said, “to be lonely.”