She Sat on a Stranger’s Lap to Hide From Her Former Love — Then Two Hundred Guests Fell Silent When Charlotte Realized the Man Beneath Her Was the Feared Duke Hosting the Ball.

PART 9

She did not answer for half a minute.

“I want a house I am not in on sufferance,” she said finally. “I have been in other people’s houses since I was fifteen. My father’s, which stopped being his about the third year and became a house I nursed him in. My godmother’s, where I was genuinely loved — I want that said, I have not one word against her — and where I understood, about the fourth day, that I was there because I was useful, and that this was the arrangement, and that it was a good one. And this house, where I am worth twenty pounds a year, and a woman of two-and-seventy spent two months finding out exactly where my patience ended.” She looked at him directly. “Twelve years, your grace, and in the whole of that time there has not been one room in England I could walk into and know that nobody was weighing me. Not one. I have been extremely good about it, and extremely useful, and I have never once complained to anybody. And I have found out in this house, in eight weeks, that being good about a thing for twelve years does not make it hurt less. It only means nobody knows.” She stopped a moment. “So that is what I want. Not to be a duchess — I do not want that at all, and I shall be very bad at it, and this county will make certain I know it. A house I am not in on sufferance. That is the whole of it, and it is the only thing I have ever wanted, and nobody has ever asked me.”

Gabriel Hail sat with his hands on his knees for a long moment.

“Then I want to say something,” he said, “and it is going to sound like a very small answer to a very large thing. Renford is forty rooms, and it has been the same since my grandfather, and there is nothing whatever I can do to make it a house that a woman coming out of a companion’s room will not feel exactly what you have described in. So I am not going to promise you it would be worth nothing — you would know it was a lie inside a fortnight. What I can promise you is this. There will not be one single day in that house when you have to be useful in order to be there. Not one. You may run the whole of it, or none of it. You may be extremely bad at it, and I shall not mind. And if you are ill for a year, I shall not begin to be kind to you in that way you have watched people be kind — and I shall not manage you. I have thought about it the whole way from Renford, and it is the only thing I have to offer that is worth anything, because everyone who has had you in a house for twelve years has managed you, and you have let them, and I have spent eight weeks managing you from three days’ distance.”

Charlotte looked at him for a long time. “That is not a small answer,” she said.

She set three terms, and set them in that front parlor within the hour, and Gabriel Hail agreed to all three, and kept every one of them for the rest of his life.

The first was that they should live at Renford and not in London — she had no intention of spending four seasons being looked at.

The second was that he should tell her, every time, the moment the leg was going, without arranging it first, and that she would not manage it for him unless he asked her to. “That is the whole of it,” she said. “You will tell me, and then you will tell me what you want. And if what you want is for me to leave the room, I shall leave the room, and I shall do it badly for about two years, because I have been managing people since I was fifteen and I do not know another way of loving anybody. But I shall do it.”

The third was Edward Rosselle. “I am not going to have him mentioned,” Charlotte said. “Not by you, and not by anybody. I do not want anything done about him — not a word, not a look at a dinner, nothing whatever. He is not a villain. He is a man of eight-and-thirty who did the arithmetic on my father’s hip and got out carefully, and perhaps four hundred men in England would have done the same, and nine of them would have been slower about it. I have spent four years arranging my whole life around never being in a room with him, and I have just found out what that cost me, and I am not going to spend the next forty doing it in a larger house.”

They married quietly in Bath four months later. Miss Adelie, disagreeable to the last, gave Charlotte away and left her nine hundred pounds when she died.

The county came round slowly, and never entirely. Lady Merchant called within the month and was so extravagantly warm that Charlotte said afterward it had been the most unpleasant quarter of an hour of her life. Lady Pru Basset came in the second month and stood in the hall unable to speak, until Charlotte crossed the floor and put her arms around her.

“You had a granddaughter of seventeen,” Charlotte said. “I should have done exactly the same, and I have told you so once, and I am not going to say it again.”