The Duke Fell in Love With His Best Friend’s Little Sister the Moment They Met—Then Promised to Be Nothing More Than Her Friend, Carrying That Secret Beside a Silver Medallion for Two Long Years

 PART 5

“I am well, Miss Vain.”

“You do not look well. You look thin.” She said it flatly, without any softness at all, which made it worse. “Nicholas said in his last letter that he was writing to me because he had had one from you and you had said nothing of yourself, and he was worried. He asked me to look at you at some point and tell him whether you were well.”

“Miss Vain —”

“It is impertinent of him, and impertinent of me. I am telling you so that you may know.” A pause. “He asked me to look at you. Do not be offended. He worries about you.”

“Miss Vain,” Ashendon said, “he always has.”

“He said in his last letter that if he did not know you better, he would think you were unhappy about something in London and were hiding it in your letters to him.” She looked into the fire. “I told him he did not know you better, and that that was probably exactly what you were doing. But that I had no way to ask you, because I had scarcely seen you in six months and had never in my life had a private word with you at any ball. And did he suppose I should apply for one by post?”

He thought about a great many possible answers to that and discarded them one by one.

“At last,” he said, “Miss Vain, I have been keeping a promise.”

“I know you have.”

She said it quietly, and it stopped him entirely.

“I want you to know I know. I want you to know I have watched you keep it. I have honoured you for keeping it.” She turned her head. “But your grace — if in the keeping of it you have made yourself so thin and so quiet that my brother writes to me from Spain to worry about you, then I think you are keeping it a little too well. And I would be obliged if you would keep it in future with rather more attention to your own dinners. Do I make myself understood?”

“You make yourself understood, Miss Vain.”

“Good.”

She looked back at the fire.

“Your grace, I am going to say one more thing this evening, and then I am going up to my aunt. I say it because there is a maid on that stool and the door is open into the taproom, and I shall not tonight, or any night while my brother is in Spain, sit with you in a room in which we could be misunderstood.” A breath. “I say it because I have decided, in the months since October, that I would rather say it and be wrong than not say it and never know.”

He did not move.

“I do not think you are unhappy in London for the reason my brother suspects.” Her hands were folded in her lap. “I think you are unhappy in London because you have made yourself a promise you did not need to make, and because you are keeping it against yourself, and because you are lonely in a great house alone. That is what I think.

“I do not require you to answer me. I have no right to require it. But I want you to know I have thought it, and that I have thought it a long while, and that I am not asking anything of you tonight, and shall not ask anything of you until my brother is home from Spain and can be asked plainly by a man who wishes to ask something of me.

“I say only that when he comes home — if he comes home — I hope you will consider whether the promise you made him is one that must be kept in the shape you have been keeping it.”

She stood.

“That is all. Good night, your grace.”

The maid rose at the door. “Susan, come.”

And she went out and up the stairs, and did not look back.

Ashendon sat by the fire in the inn parlour a long time after she had gone. He did not that night drink more than a single glass of the inn’s plain claret. He did not, in fact, drink even that.

He looked at the fire and understood, quite plainly, that his friend’s little sister — who was not little at all, and had not been little in October, and had at nineteen more honesty in her than most men of forty — had just done for him what he had not been able to do for himself.

She had said the thing aloud. She had said it in a public inn with a maid on a stool. She had said it in a way that committed her to nothing, and committed him to nothing, and had left the whole of the door open on Nicholas’s return.

He went up to his own room and wrote a letter to Nicholas that night.

He wrote it in three drafts and burned two. The third he sent in the morning. It said:

Vain — I have crossed Miss Vain and your aunt at an inn on the Sudbury road. Miss Vain observes that I have been thin and quiet in town, and that your worries have been unnecessary. She is right on both counts.

I am, as it happens, in tolerable health. I am, however, unhappy in a way I did not intend to be, and I mean to tell you honestly when you come home the shape of it. In the meantime I am keeping the promise you asked of me, and I mean to go on keeping it until you are back in England. And then, if you will hear me, I want to ask you to release me from part of it — so that I may ask you a plain question that I do not in honour feel able to ask while you are in Spain.

Do not answer this at length. Do not answer it at all, if it is easier. Only know I have written it. — A.

He rode on into Suffolk in the morning. He did not, in the whole of the ride, feel he had done a wrong thing — and this, he thought, was itself instructive.

Nicholas wrote back from Spain in the ordinary post three weeks later.

His letter was very short.

Marchant — I am not surprised. I have been half expecting it since your letter of November, which was too careful.

I do not release you from anything. Only a fool releases a friend from a promise while the friend is still in the field. Keep the promise as you have been keeping it. Come home to me when I come home. We will speak then. — V.

P.S. Do not, on any account, ask her while I am in Spain. If you do so I will shoot you myself when I land at Portsmouth. If she asks you — which she is capable of doing, she is my sister, I know her — refer her to me. V.

Ashendon read the letter twice, and then he laughed in the small quiet way a man laughs alone in his own study, and he wrote back a plain two-line note.

Understood. Come home safe. — A.

He put it into the diplomatic bag that went out at the end of the week. And then he sat down at his own desk and understood that he had, in the space of a fortnight, moved his own private life from a matter of honour into a matter of waiting.

He was, on the whole, better at waiting than at anything else, having done it in a great many wet trenches for a great many years without complaint.

He waited.