“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 5

They rode back that afternoon under a sky that had threatened all day and made good its threat two miles from home — a wall of gray sweeping up the valley, rain cold and hard and blinding. Godric turned them toward the little domed folly his grandfather had built above the lake, open on one side, and they ran the horses the last half mile and came in under the dome, soaked to the skin and laughing.

Her hair had come down in dark ropes about her face. He thought he had never seen anything he wanted so much to keep.

The rain came down in ropes beyond the pillars. The laughter died between them into something else.

“We shall be missed,” Marisel said. Her voice was not quite steady. “It will be dark before this passes. The whole household will know we were caught out alone. Do you know what the county will make of that, your grace?”

“I know precisely what they will make of it. That we are married. That a man and his wife may be caught in a storm, and it is no scandal at all.” He heard how low his own voice had gone. He should have stepped back. He did not. “It is only a scandal, Marisel, if we are not what the parson wrote us down to be. And every day it grows harder to remember I ever meant to give you the means to unwrite it.”

She had gone very still. “You promised me a month. There are four days left.”

“I did promise that. And I will keep it.” It cost him to say the next thing; he made himself say it anyway. “If in four days you tell me to open the door, I will open it, though it should cost me more than I have ever paid for anything. I will not have you the way she — ” He stopped, steadied. “I will not touch you, Marisel. I will not ask you. I will not use a storm and a lonely place to close a door I gave you my word I would leave open. But I will not lie to you either, because you would see through it in an instant. So here is the truth, and then I will speak of the horses. I do not want to open that door. I have never in my life wanted anything as little as I want that. That is my trouble, and not yours.”

He turned to the horses, busied his hands with a wet girth strap that did not need attention.

Behind him, Marisel said, “You are the most maddening man I have ever known. You stand there being honorable at me until I could scream. Do you know what it is, your grace, to be four-and-twenty, to have spent your whole life being no one’s first choice — not your father’s, not your sisters’, not one single person’s in the whole world — and to be handed by a piece of parson’s ink the one man who looks at you as though you are the only lit window in a dark house, and then to have that same man tell you most nobly he will not keep you unless you are perfectly certain?”

He turned. He could not have done otherwise if the king had commanded it.

She was streaming and shivering and blazing, chin up, and this time she had not stopped the tears.

“I do not want the door,” she said. “I have wanted, since the second day, for you to stop offering it. I am not certain of anything in this world, Godric. I never have had that luxury. But I am as certain of you as I have ever been of anything. I am so tired of being asked to be certain before I am allowed to be happy.”

He crossed the space between them. He took her face in both his hands, cold and wet, warming under his palms, and looked at her one long moment, giving her still the room to draw back.

She turned her cheek into his hand like a thing coming home.

He kissed her then — gently, and then not gently at all — while the storm his grandfather’s folly had been built to shelter watchers from broke itself to nothing on the gray pillars around them, and neither of them heard a word of it.

“Four days,” he murmured against her hair, at last.

“You needed the four days. You are very slow for a clever man.”

“I begin to see I shall have to grow accustomed to being told so.” He kissed her again, and the rain went on, and neither of them thought at all, in that hour, of the county, or the register, or the door.

The three days that followed were, Godric thought, the first three days of his life he had lived rather than merely governed. Overwald had stood gray and ordered and silent around him these four years, a great machine that ran because he wound it. He had not known it wanted, not a better steward or a milder climate, but simply the sound of a woman laughing down a corridor.

She took up the house as though born to it, though she had not been, and that was the wonder of it — stopping to learn the name of every servant, knowing within the week which housemaid had a sweetheart at the home farm.

“You are spoiling my servants,” he told her, finding her in the still room with her sleeves turned back, flour on her cheek, laughing over a receipt two hundred years old.

“I am learning them. There is a difference, and you of all people know it. You have run this house these four years by knowing everything about the acres and nothing about the people who work them.”

“Then I am in excellent company. My grandmother did precisely the same, I am told, and terrorized three generations into thinking her the real duke.”

He showed her the land at last, all of it — not as a steward shows a survey, but as a man shows the thing he loves to the one person he wishes to love it too. By the end of those walks he had a dozen small projects begun in his mind he had not troubled to begin in four years, because there had been no one to begin them for.

“You are happy,” Lady Ottoline observed, catching him alone in the gallery, watching Marisel through the window as she plotted the resurrection of the walled roses with the head gardener.

“I believe I am. It is a most peculiar sensation. I had forgotten it entirely.”

“That is because you have something to lose again. You spent four years arranging to have nothing to lose, and called it peace. This is better. Only mind you do not do the thing you always do — be so afraid of losing a thing you never once tell it plainly that you have it.” She rapped her stick on the floor. “You have not told her. Say it. Before something says it for you. Or worse, before something unsays it.”

He did not say it. Not that day, nor the next, nor in any of the golden days that followed — because he was a proud man, and told himself the word could wait for the right hour. He was wrong on every count, and the payment for it was already being prepared, three days off, at a long table, in the smiling mouth of a woman who had lost her life’s chief project and meant to make someone pay for the losing.