“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 7

She did not come down to breakfast. He went instead to his aunt, and told her the whole of it, and Lady Ottoline heard him out without interrupting once — a feat of self-command bordering on the miraculous.

“You great fool,” she said, when he had done.

“Yes.”

“You had four years to learn a wall keeps out the sun as well as the rain, and you learned nothing.” She rapped her chair arm. “That Vasy creature only lit the fuse. You are the one who sat on the powder these three days and never troubled to tell the girl what was in it.” She fixed him with her good eye. “Do you love her? Say it to me plainly. I am one-and-eighty and have not the years to waste on a man being careful.”

“Yes. I love her. I have loved her, I think, since she told me my cravat was tied like a hangman’s knot — twelve years ago — only I did not know, until three weeks past, that the child had a name.” His voice was not steady; he did not try to make it so. “I have told everything to her but that. I told her I did not want the door. I told her I could not bear to open it. I told her every true thing in the world except the one that mattered, because I am a coward in a duke’s coat, and I have been afraid since I was five-and-twenty of standing before a woman with my hands open, saying I love you, and letting her do with it what she will.”

“Well,” said his aunt, gently — which frightened him more than any scolding. “Then you had better go and be afraid where she can see you. That is the whole of it, Godric. Not the wall. The going afraid, and letting her see it. Now stop confessing to me. Go and stand in front of your wife.”

She would not come down. He did not make her. He wrote instead — no defense, no argument, three lines in his own hand.

I am in the chapel. I will be there all day. I have something to say to you that I should have said in the folly, and did not, out of cowardice. I will say it whether you come or not, but I would rather say it to your face. Come when you are ready. I will wait.

He went to the little gray Norman chapel, where the chairs already stood ready for the morrow, and sat in the front pew, and waited.

She came at noon. He heard the door and did not turn at once, giving her the room to go if she found she could not. Then her step came up the aisle, slow, and stopped. He rose. She stood in a plain morning gown, chin up, eyes weary and red at the rims.

“You said you had something to say. Say it, then. I have not come to be persuaded.”

“I have papers I could show you,” Godric said. “In the estate room. The inquiry to dissolve, dated before I ever saw your face. A settlement to make you rich and free of me for the whole of your life, dated the very morning after the folly. Every fact Mrs. Vasy strung on her wicked thread is in that box, and every date in it gives her the lie.” He took a step toward her. “I am not going to fetch it. Do you know why?”

She said nothing. Her hands were knotted at her waist, the way they had been the first hour, in this same habit of self-defense.

“Because you have had documents your whole life. Reasons. Arrangements. Everyone who ever wanted a thing of you gave you a reason for it, made you convenient, and called it kindness — and not one of them, in four-and-twenty years, ever stood before you with empty hands and no argument and told you the plain thing. I will be damned before I make my case to you out of a black box like the rest of them. So here it is, Marisel. No papers. No dates. No proof. Only me, and you, and the plain word I have been too great a coward to say to any living soul for four years, and which I am going to say to you now, whether it wins me anything at all.”

He crossed the last of the distance.

“I love you,” he said. “Not the entail, not the heir, not the convenience of a wife already stamped and sealed. Marisel Darnley, who told a lord his cravat was tied like a hangman’s knot, and did not weep when she had every cause, and knelt on a dirt floor in a gown worth more than the cottage and never knew or cared, and saw straight through four years of my careful stone in a single fortnight and was not frightened by what she found. I love the whole of you, and have from very near the beginning. And the reason I never said it in the folly is the reason I have never said it to anyone — because once a man says it plainly, he has no wall left, and I would rather have hidden behind mine forever than say the word and watch a woman decide she did not want me.”

He drew a breath that shook.

“But you told me — in the rain — you were tired of being asked to be certain before you were allowed to be happy. So I am standing here with my hands open and my wall down and nothing behind it. Afraid. I want you to see that I am afraid, because you asked me once where I was, and I lied, and I am done lying to you. I love you. That is the whole of what I came here to say. You need not answer it. But I will not have you believe one hour longer that you were ever the convenient one. You have never once in your life been that to me. You are the only thing I have ever chosen. The parson chose the marriage. I chose you.”

The chapel was very quiet. A blackbird sang in the yew outside.

Marisel’s careful composure did not so much break as dissolve, the way frost dissolves when the sun comes round to it — all at once, without a sound. Her chin came down. Her knotted hands came loose. She put both over her face and wept at last — the tears she had not wept in the library, or the folly, or the long dinner.

He did not touch her. He had learned that too. He stood with his hands open and waited.

“You said you would fetch no papers,” she said at last, furious, breaking. “And then you made the whole case better than any paper could. You dreadful, dreadful man.”

“I did not make a case. I told you the truth.”

She took her hands from her face — ruined with weeping, and never looking less dull, never more chosen.

“Say it once more. Not the whole speech. Only the word. I want to hear it now that I am listening properly. Now that I have not got my armor on.”

“I love you,” Godric said again. “I love you, Marisel. I will say it every morning of my life, if you will let me, until you are so tired of it you throw the breakfast things at me. I have four years of silence to make good, and I mean to make it good with interest.”

She laughed, wet and helpless and radiant, and crossed the last of the distance herself, and put her face against his coat, and he folded his arms around his wife in the chapel where they were to marry again the next day, and held her, and thought that he had walked forty thousand acres alone and never once guessed the whole of what he wanted would fit inside the circle of his own two arms.