“I’m Not Marrying You,” She Told the Duke After Discovering Her Name in an Old Church Register — But He Smiled and Revealed That One Forgotten Childhood Promise Had Already Made Her His Wife Twelve Years Ago.

 PART 4

They fell, over that first fortnight, into the habit of one another by slow degrees — the way two people thrown together in a great empty house must either learn to bear each other’s company or perish of the silence.

Lady Ottoline, satisfied that neither of them was a fool, applied to the task all the ruthlessness of a woman who had buried three husbands and outlived every enemy she’d ever made. She was forever discovering she needed her shawl from precisely the room the two occupied, then discovering she was too fatigued to leave it, and would just close her eyes a moment by the fire — from which vantage she snored with theatrical conviction, and did not miss a word.

Under this transparent stratagem, Godric and Marisel talked. Of neutral things at first — the estate, the tenants, the books in the library, of which she had read a startling number. He discovered a real and restless intelligence in her, one that turned things over to see how they were made. She had opinions about the draining of the low meadows, about the price of wheat, gleaned from years of quietly keeping her improvident father’s accounts because no one else in the household would.

“You love it,” she said to him once, when he had been speaking too long about the great avenue his grandfather had let fall into ruin. “The land. You speak of it the way other men speak of women.”

“I have had more success with the land.”

She laughed — more easily now, and he had begun, disgracefully, to keep a private count of it.

“Why is that? The county says you have been a stone these four years. Why?”

He was quiet long enough that she began to withdraw the question. He stopped her.

“There was a woman. When I was five-and-twenty. Beautiful, wellborn, accomplished. I asked for her. She accepted, and a month before the wedding ran off to the continent with a cavalry officer who had neither title nor income, nor any redeeming quality save that he was not me.” He said it without heat; the heat had long since gone out of it. “I concluded, wrongly, as I now begin to suspect, that wanting things is a weakness a sensible man does not permit himself. I stopped wanting. It is remarkably peaceful, not wanting anything. I recommend it.” He looked at her. “Or I did. I find lately I am less certain of the philosophy than I was.”

Marisel had gone very still.

“She was a fool,” she said quietly. “She did not want you.”

“She did me a kindness, in the end. I should have married a woman who did not want me and spent forty years pretending neither of us knew it. Instead I spent four years alone, which is at least an honest condition.” He rose, having said far more than he meant. “A stone cannot be made a fool of twice.”

“You are afraid,” Marisel said.

He stopped with his hand on the mantel.

“You have arranged your whole life so that nothing can ever hurt you again. And now a churchyard has handed you a wife you did not choose and could not prevent. And the terrible thing about it — the thing you cannot forgive — is that you are beginning to be glad of her. And you do not know how to be glad of anything without being afraid.”

“That,” he said, in a voice not quite his own, “is a very great deal to deduce from a fortnight’s acquaintance and a conversation about meadows.”

“I have had a great deal of practice watching people who do not know they are being watched. It is what the overlooked do. It is our one advantage.”

He looked at her then as he had not quite let himself before — fully, without the guard — and felt the last bolt of the door he’d shut at five-and-twenty give way, silently, absolutely.

“Yes,” he said. “I begin to think I would.”

The third week brought fever to the tenant cottages at Nether Ford. Godric rode out at first light, as his father would have. He had not expected to find the young duchess’s mare already tied at the first gate, nor Marisel herself in the low smoky room with a child’s fevered head in her lap, spooning barley water with a patience the frightened mother could not summon.

“You should not be here. You will take it.”

“Nor should you,” she said, without looking up. She gave the mother a string of instructions in a low, steady voice — cool cloths, the window opened an inch against all the wisdom of the neighborhood. “I nursed my sisters through scarlatina when the physician would not come because my father could not pay him. Sickness does not frighten me, your grace. Poverty frightens me. Pride. Rooms full of people deciding what I am worth. A sick child I know what to do with.”

Godric took off his coat. He spent that day and the next three at Nether Ford, and Marisel spent them beside him, and Lady Ottoline installed herself in the largest cottage with a hamper from the Overwald kitchens and directed the nursing of the whole hamlet like a general.

He watched her win the trust of women who had curtsied to his family for three generations and never once been looked in the eye. Watched her kneel on a dirt floor in a gown worth more than the cottage, and never seem to know or care. On the fourth morning the fever broke through the hamlet like weather clearing, and no soul was lost, and Godric, standing in a low doorway with the spring sun coming up behind him, understood with quiet finality that he was no longer in any danger of falling in love with his accidental wife.

The thing was already done.