“I Never Should Have Married You,” the Duke Told His Steward — But When His Wife Smiled and Replied, “Good News, You No Longer Have To,” He Had Only Five Weeks to Stop Her Leaving and Confess the Love He Had Hidden for Nearly a Year

 PART 10 — THE END 

The fever came to Thornwick within days of the flood, as fevers so often followed hard on the heels of cold and wet and crowded rooms. It moved through the low cottages with a speed that frightened even old Tam Fenwick, who had seen three such visitations in his lifetime and said this one had the look of the worst of them.

Odelina rode out every day of it, rain or no rain, with baskets of broth and willow bark and the plain linen bandages she had learned to prepare at her father’s side during a lesser outbreak years before. Ketrick let her go each morning with a knot of worry in his chest that he did not entirely understand until the second day — when he understood it perfectly well and simply had no name ready for it that did not terrify him more than the fever itself.

He rode with her when his own duties permitted. There were accounts to settle, a physician from the county town to arrange and pay for, the dam’s repair still wanting oversight. On the days he could not go himself, he found his attention wandering from ledgers and letters alike, straining toward the window, toward the drive, toward the moment her horse would appear again and he could stop imagining the dozen small disasters that might have befallen her among the sick and the dying.

It was on one such afternoon, while he waited with poor grace for her return, that Lady Margarite Selwin found him alone in the small parlor and delivered, with the particular gentle cruelty of a woman who has decided that honesty is the last weapon left to her, the piece of news that would very nearly undo everything the flood and the dance and the long, slow turning of eleven cold months had built between them.

“I only tell you because I think you ought to know before it is too late to matter,” Margarite said, seating herself uninvited and folding her gloved hands with an air of great regret. “Mr. Paraga dined with my father last evening. He mentioned, in confidence of course — though I do not imagine he meant it to remain so — that he has already drawn up the petition papers for the eleventh, at your instruction, before the flood. Before any of this display of devotion.”

She waved her hand, taking in with faint distaste the mud still drying on the hem of Ketrick’s coat.

“I thought you would wish to know. So that you are not made a fool of twice.”

It was not true, not in the way she meant it. Ketrick had given Paraga no such instruction. Paraga, as a matter of standing professional caution, always drew up the dissolution papers well in advance of any deadline of this kind, ready for signature should either party require them at the last hour — a bare formality of his office, and no evidence at all of what Ketrick himself intended. Margarite had simply woven that ordinary caution into something crueler, and had judged, correctly, that Ketrick would not think to question it in the moment she offered it. He had in fact written to the solicitor only that week to ask, obliquely, what steps were required to formalize a marriage settlement’s continuance rather than its dissolution — a letter he had not yet shown Odelina because he had wanted the answer settled before he raised her hopes with an uncertain one. But in the moment Margarite delivered her poisoned little confidence, he knew only that it landed like a blow, and that his face, schooled for thirty years to give away nothing, must have shown something of the blow’s force — because Margarite’s smile deepened with quiet satisfaction before she rose and left him alone with it.

He meant to write to Paraga at once and settle the matter. He meant more urgently to find Odelina the moment she returned and tell her plainly that whatever she had heard or might hear was false. But the day overtook him — a tenant dispute requiring his presence, a letter from London that could not wait, the small, relentless business of a duke that had never once in his life permitted him the luxury of attending first to his own heart. And it was evening before he thought of it again.

By evening, it was too late.

Odelina had returned from Thornwick pale, and shivering, and unable to hide any longer, when Mrs. Burch helped her from her wet cloak, that the fever she had spent days nursing in others had found its way at last into her. She collapsed by the fire in her own chamber not an hour later. The physician, summoned at a gallop, pronounced it a bad case — though not, he believed, the worst kind. She was young and strong and had not been unwell above a day, which gave better odds than most of the cottages had enjoyed. But the next two nights would tell the truth of it.

Ketrick did not leave her chamber for those two nights. He told himself the first evening that it was merely his duty as her husband to see her properly attended, and sat in the chair Mrs. Burch had drawn up beside the bed with the stiff, dutiful posture of a man performing an obligation. By midnight, the pretense had worn through entirely. He sat with her hand — too warm, fever-hot, her fingers curling weakly around his own even in her restless sleep — held in both of his. And found himself speaking to her in the low hours when the house was silent and no one but the banked fire could overhear, saying aloud all the things eleven months of pride and grief and duty had kept locked behind his teeth.

“I have been a coward,” he told her, while she slept and could not hear him — or perhaps, in the strange half-world of fever, heard him better than she ever had while waking. “I told myself it was restraint. My father called it strength — the not saying of things. And I believed him for thirty years, because I had not known any better. And because saying nothing had never once cost me anything I valued enough to notice the loss.”

He smoothed the damp hair back from her forehead with a tenderness that would have shocked every dowager who had ever called him cold.

“It is costing me now. I have watched you ride into a flooded village and make it safe with nothing but soup and stubbornness. I have watched you correct my steward’s arithmetic and defend yourself against Margarite Selwin’s cruelty without once raising your voice. And I have fallen in love with you so entirely and so belatedly that I do not know how to say it to your face without sounding like the greatest fool in the county.”

She stirred, murmured something unintelligible, and quieted again. He sat through the rest of the night with her hand in his, watching the fire burn low, refusing to leave her side for anything short of the physician’s insistence.

The fever broke on the third morning, in the gray hour just before dawn. Ketrick, who had not slept properly in two days and would not have admitted the exhaustion to anyone living, was the first to feel the change in her hand — the fever’s heat receding into ordinary warmth. He watched her eyes open, clouded with sleep and weakness, but clear at last of the delirium that had frightened him more than he had words for.

“Ketrick,” she said, her voice a thread of its usual self, but recognizably, wonderfully her own. “You look terrible.”

“I have been informed of that already by no fewer than three servants and my own reflection.” He could not stop the sound that came out of him then — half a laugh, half something closer to a sob. The relief of it nearly undoing the composure he had guarded so carefully for thirty years.

“You frightened me. I do not think I have ever in my life been so afraid of anything as I was afraid these past two nights.”

“I am difficult to be rid of,” she said, with a ghost of her old dry humor, though the effort of it clearly cost her. “You ought to have known that before you married me.”

“I am beginning to be very glad of it.”

He lifted her hand — still weak in his — and pressed his lips to her knuckles. A gesture he had never once permitted himself before, too intimate for the cold arrangement their marriage had begun as. But that felt now like the truest thing he had done in months.

The six days that followed were, by any honest accounting, the finest of his life. He confronted Margarite Selwin before she had finished her chocolate the morning after Odelina’s fever broke, in a manner that left no room for the graceful evasions she had practiced so long and so well. She left within the day. And on the eleventh of the month, when Paraga arrived with his leather case of papers, Ketrick took the petition in both hands and tore it cleanly in half.

“I do not require this document,” he said, setting the torn halves aside. “What I require — if you would be so good as to draw it up instead — is a settlement of an entirely different character. One that makes plain before every witness this county cares to gather that the Duchess of Fossborough is my wife by choice as thoroughly as she has ever been my wife by contract. And that I intend to spend the whole of my life proving myself worthy of a woman who married a stranger’s obligation and made of it, entirely on her own merit, a marriage I would not trade for any other on this earth.”

He turned to Odelina then. And reached into his coat for the small velvet box he had carried there for three days, waiting for the courage to produce it. His grandmother’s ring, reset that week by the county jeweler at his own careful instruction — the old stones cleaned and set in a band Odelina would not have to remove for household work, because he had thought, with an attention to her that would have astonished the man he had been a year ago, that she would want a ring built for a woman who used her hands rather than merely displayed them.

“I never should have married you the way I did,” he said, echoing deliberately the words that had broken everything between them. “Coldly, carelessly, as though you were an obligation to be discharged rather than a woman to be chosen. I am asking you now, properly, in front of witnesses who will hold me to it for the rest of my life, to marry me again. Not because my father’s debt requires it. Because I cannot imagine a single day of my future that does not have you correcting my steward’s arithmetic, and racing me along the river, and telling me plainly exactly when I have been a fool.”

She laughed, unsteady and bright and entirely her own. And the sound of it undid the last of his fear completely.

“You are a very great fool, Ketrick,” she said, “to think a ring and a torn-up petition are apology enough for five weeks of terror.” But she was already holding out her hand, already smiling at him with the whole of her unguarded heart in her face. “I will have you, Your Grace. On one condition.”

“Anything.”

“That the torn petition is burnt rather than filed. So that no clerk of Mr. Paraga’s ever mistakes it, fifty years hence, for a marriage that was ever truly in doubt.”

She looked down at the ring on her finger, then back up at him.

“Beyond that, I ask nothing further. I have everything I want already — sitting in this ridiculous freezing office in front of your poor mother, who I believe is now weeping quite openly into her chocolate.”

“I am doing nothing of the sort,” the Dowager Duchess said, dabbing at her eyes with a lace handkerchief that gave the lie to her words entirely. “I have simply taken a chill. Paraga — be a dear and fetch the good sherry. I believe this office has earned a toast.”

Ketrick did not hear whatever dry reply the solicitor made to that. He was no longer attending to anyone in the room but his wife — his wife by contract, by choice, by every measure that had ever mattered. And when he kissed her there, in front of his mother and his steward and his solicitor and the torn halves of the paper that might have ended everything, it was without a shred of the old caution that had governed every gesture of his life — until the moment she had walked into it, and refused, from the very first evening, to let him remain unchanged.

That evening, when the house had gone quiet and the last of the spring light had faded from the long windows of the library, Ketrick found her there. Curled in the deep chair with her stocking feet tucked beneath her and a book open in her lap — though this time she was not reading alone by a single candle in a house that had not yet learned to love her. She was waiting quite plainly for him to join her, a second cup of tea already poured and cooling on the table at his usual chair.

He sat. She leaned into his shoulder without a word. And for a long while, neither of them spoke at all — content simply to sit together in the comfortable, unguarded silence of two people who no longer had anything left to prove to one another.

“Do you ever think of that first night?” Odelina asked eventually, her voice drowsy and warm against his shoulder. “When you tore up the petition instead of signing it, I confess I think of it often. I was so certain, standing at that window, that I had already lost.”

“I think of it constantly,” Ketrick admitted. “Chiefly because I cannot decide, even now, whether I am more grateful to my father for writing that wretched clause, or more furious with him for very nearly costing me the courage to tear it up before it cost me you entirely.”

“Both, I think,” Odelina said. “Most true things generally are.”

She tilted her face up to his, and the firelight caught the particular warmth in her eyes that he had come, over the long turning of a single remarkable year, to think of as the whole center of his world.

“I never should have loved you, you know,” she said, with all the old mischief fully restored and none of the old fear left in it at all. “A woman with any sense would have guarded her heart considerably better against a cold, brooding duke who told his steward within her hearing that he regretted marrying her.”

“And yet,” Ketrick said, drawing her closer.

“And yet,” Odelina agreed, smiling against his shoulder. “Here I am, regardless. Loving you, Your Grace, quite thoroughly. And not the least bit sorry for it.”

She said nothing further, because nothing further needed saying. And the Duke of Fossborough sat with his wife in the quiet hush of the library that had once been a stranger’s house — and was now, at last, and for the whole of both their lives, simply Home.

THE END