She Was Sent to the Iron Duke as His Arranged Bride, Terrified and Knowing Nothing About Marriage — But When He Realized She Was Still a Virgin, What He Did That Wedding Night Changed Everything Between Them

PART 8

He did not put her out.

Eleanor had assumed he would, and had spent the better part of an hour after that conversation working out how to argue him out of it, and had never needed to. She thought, afterward, that this was the exact moment she stopped being able to predict her own husband. What he did instead was go to his mother’s sitting room and stay there nearly two hours. Neither of them ever told Eleanor the whole of what passed between them. What she gathered, months later, in pieces, was this — that he had told her he knew what she had said to his wife, and was not going to pretend to be grateful for it; that he had asked her one question, whether she had put the matter to Carden that summer with any intention at all of using it, and had believed her when she said no; and that his mother had said, somewhere in the second hour: “You think I came here to make trouble for that girl? I came here because you have been happy since April, and I did not believe it. I have watched you since I came, and I do believe it now, and I could not sit in this house knowing what I knew and say nothing. You are two-and-thirty. She is four-and-twenty and has nothing. One of us was going to have to tell her what she was standing on, Adrian, and you were never going to do it, because it has not once occurred to you that she was standing on anything.”

Mr. Carden came within the week. The settlement took the better part of a month to draw, more complicated than either of them had expected, because Carden — sixty years old and thirty years in the family’s service — kept finding ways a determined man might one day get at it, and would not sign a page until he had closed every one. Eleanor sat with him four afternoons and understood perhaps half of the language. What she understood entirely was the effect: two thousand a year, in her own name, held in trust by two men who were not her husband and could not be replaced by him, payable to her whether she lived at Vale House or in Northumberland or anywhere else in England, for the whole of her life.

It was signed at the end of the month. When Carden’s carriage had gone out through the gates, Adrian said one sentence to her, and went back to work.

“There is nothing now,” he said, “in this house that you are obliged to me for, and nothing that would happen to you if you went — and I want you to sit with that for as long as you need to, and I will not say one word to hurry you.”

She sat with it nine days.

The house found the whole business extraordinary and never worked out what it was looking at, which Eleanor thought, afterward, was very nearly funny. What Vale House saw was that Mr. Carden had come down from London four afternoons running and gone away again, that his grace had been in an unusually good temper about something, and that the Duchess had taken to walking the north grounds alone for an hour every morning. Mrs. Pryor, fifty years old and nineteen years in that house, worked out about half of it, and got the half she worked out entirely wrong, and told the cook in strict confidence that her grace was expecting, and was not saying so yet. Eleanor learned of this some years later, and laughed until she had to sit down.

What she was actually doing on those walks was the same arithmetic, over and over, from four different directions — the way she had done everything since she was sixteen. She was asked, once, years afterward, and never by her husband, what she had actually been doing in those nine days, and she said, “Finding out whether I had been telling the truth.” That was the whole of it, and she had been honest about it with herself the entire time. She wrote it in her book on the fourth day, in six lines: He has done exactly what I asked, and it has turned out to be a great deal harder than I expected — because now I have to find out whether the woman who wrote “I have been in love with him since the seventh week” was in love with him, or was frightened and clever. I do not think she was frightened. But she could not have known, and neither can I. There is only one way to find out, and it is to sit still for a fortnight with two thousand a year in my own name, and see what I want.

She sat still four days, and what she wanted had not changed by one particle, and she found she was extremely relieved — and also that she was going to give it more time anyway, because they had already waited six months, and neither of them would be able to stand it if there were any doubt left at all.

She went to him on the ninth day. Near nine at night, in the estate room, where she had known he would be. She came in, shut the door, and did not sit down.

“I have two thousand a year in my own name,” Eleanor said, “four brothers and sisters who are provided for, and enough money to take a house in Northumberland tomorrow. I have spent nine days finding out that I do not want any of it. I am not frightened of you, and I am not obliged to you, and there is nothing in England that would happen to me if I walked out of that door tonight. And I am telling you that I have been in love with you since the seventh week. It is the second time I have said it in this room. This time you may believe me — because there is not one thing left in this house I could possibly want it for.”

Adrian rose from behind the table.

“Eleanor. I have got something arranged, and I have had it arranged a month, and I am going to make an appalling business of it.”

“Then make an appalling business of it.”

“I have been in love with you since about the fifth week,” he said, “which is two weeks before you, and I have never said a word of it, because I gave you my word in April, and because saying it would have been the largest piece of pressure I could possibly have put on a woman with nowhere to go. So I have sat in this room six months watching you read books at the other end of it, and been extremely careful, and about four times a week very nearly said something, and stopped.”

“The fifth week. What was the fifth week?”

“You took four books off a shelf in my library and carried them upstairs and did not open one of them for two days,” Adrian said. “And I worked it out on the third day — that you had not opened them because you were waiting for someone to come and ask what you thought you were doing. I stood in that library and understood exactly what had been done to you for fifteen years, by people who were not unkind. That was the fifth week. I have not had a clear thought about anything since.”

Eleanor crossed the room. “You are going to have to say the rest of it. I have said mine twice in this room. I am not going to be the only one.”

“I know it. I have had a month.” He came round the end of his own table. “I have got about four hundred sentences arranged, and I have discovered in the last minute that every one of them is about what I have done — the settlement, and the waiting, and my mother, and the whole of it — and not one of them is about you, which is very nearly the entire trouble with me, and I have known it since April.” He stopped. “So I shall say the only one that is. I have sat at the other end of a room from you for six months, and I have not been lonely in it. I was lonely in this house eight years before you came into it, and I had entirely stopped noticing. That is what you did. You did it by reading books at a table by a window and saying almost nothing to me, and I have not the smallest idea how.”

Eleanor closed the last of the distance between them.

Their eldest was a boy, born a year and a half after the wedding. The clause in the Northumberland settlement was never mentioned again by anyone in that family for thirty years. There were four children in the end. Beatrice Vale lived to see three of them, and remained the least sentimental grandmother in England, and adored every one. She and Eleanor arrived, over some years, at something that was not quite friendship, and was a great deal better than most people’s. They had one conversation about that autumn, and only one, and Eleanor began it.

“I have never thanked you.”

“I should be extremely put out if you did,” said Beatrice Vale. “I told a girl of four-and-twenty the worst thing I knew, in her own sitting room, on purpose, because I could not think of a kinder way, and I have never once been certain I was right. I am not going to be thanked for it, and I am not going to apologize for it either. I should be obliged if we could talk about the gardens instead.”

Eleanor kept the household books at Vale House for one-and-forty years. She read some nine hundred of the six thousand books in that library, and never got any further, and remained the only person in four generations who used the room for its true purpose. Once, when her eldest daughter was seventeen and had begun to be spoken of in connection with somebody, Eleanor took her into that same library, shut the door, and told her the whole of it plainly, with nothing left out — the study, the four minutes, the aunt on the edge of the bed, the room at ten o’clock.

“I am telling you this,” she said, “because when it comes to it, you will be told about the linen by four different women, and not one of them will tell you anything else, and every one of them will believe she is being delicate. And I am going to tell you the rest of it now, whether you want it or not, and you may be as embarrassed as you like — because I stood in a room in this house at four-and-twenty knowing nothing whatever, and the only reason it came out well is that I happened to marry a man who noticed inside a minute. Happening to marry a man like that is not a plan, my love. It is luck. And I am not going to hand you out of this house on luck.”

THE END.