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 7

He came. He came to the mantelpiece.

He did not yet touch her. She put her hand up to his lapel — not on it, above it, near it, in the way of a woman who has decided a thing and wants the man to know she has decided it before she touches him.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, of course, yes. I have loved you since you told me at breakfast the first morning that you would not allow me to be a duty to you. I did not know it then. I have known it perhaps a year. I have not been able to say so, because you were being so careful, and I could not in honour ask a man to break a promise to my brother by post. I have loved you all this while. I love you now. Yes.”

He put his hand over hers, at last, at the lapel. He did not draw her closer.

“Miss Vain. Harriet. Please — Harriet.” His voice was not quite his own. “I want you to know I have carried a thing in that pocket under my hand since your brother gave it to me outside Salamanca, four years before we ever met. I want you to know I put my hand to it in the yard when I saw you at the door today. I want you to know I have put my hand to it every day since, in every drawing room in London. I have not sought you in.”

“I know.”

“You know?”

“I saw you do it in the drawing room at Havering the second afternoon.” She did not smile, quite. “I did not know what was in the pocket. I only knew that a man puts his hand to a pocket only if there is a thing in it he is minding. I have watched for the gesture at every ball since. I have counted it as a private thing. I am glad to hear it plainly at last.”

“Harriet.”

“Yes, my love.”

“I am going to speak to your brother in the morning,” he said. “And then, with his permission at last spoken aloud in this house, I am going to ask you again, in a room without Corbett in the passage.”

“Yes, your grace. That is agreeable to me.”

He raised her hand from his lapel, quite briefly, and put his mouth to the back of it — the single small formal courtesy a man was permitted a woman at such a moment and no more.

She smiled, small and surprised.

And Corbett, in the passage, cleared his throat once, quite gently.

Ashendon went out past him. “Good night, your grace,” said Corbett, without expression.

Ashendon went upstairs and did not sleep until nearly dawn, and was, in the whole of that not sleeping, happier than he had been in a great many years.

It should not have been a turn.

It should have been a plain smooth road from a small parlour with Corbett in the passage to a spring wedding at the parish church, and it very nearly was. But Nicholas Vain, for all that he had written from Spain that he was not surprised, was not, when it came to it, quite ready in his own person for the matter to be settled the morning after his return home from a bad campaign.

He was tired. He was tired in the bones, in a way he had not been tired at Salamanca. He had lost, in the last months of the war, two friends he had loved almost as well as he loved Ashendon. And he had come home to a sister who had been running his house for two years without him, and to a small green Suffolk in early summer, and to the plain shocking softness of his own bed — and he was, in the first days at Havering, not fit to be asked anything of at all.

Ashendon saw it. Ashendon, who had come home from Spain himself some years earlier, knew the look.

He did not, on the morning after the parlour, go to Nicholas as he had said he would.

He waited.

He said to Harriet at breakfast, in front of Nicholas: “Miss Vain, I mean to stay a fortnight at Havering, if I may. I have not had a proper sight of your brother in two years, and I do not mean to lose him in a week.”

And Harriet, who understood at once, said, “You are welcome for the fortnight, your grace.”

Nicholas, over his coffee, said, “Good God, Ashendon. I did not know you had learned to stay anywhere a fortnight.”

“I have not, Vain. But I have decided I mean to try it here.”

Nicholas laughed and did not, at the time, understand.

He came to understand.

Ashendon let a full week go.

He rode out with Nicholas over the home farm. He sat up with Nicholas one bad night, when Nicholas dreamed the campaign and came down at three in the morning white and shaking, and Ashendon gave him a brandy in the library and did not, in the whole of the two hours they sat by the guttering fire, ask him about anything at all.

He watched Nicholas grow, in the course of that first week, gradually less thin about the eyes. And Nicholas, in the course of the same week, watched Ashendon very carefully at Harriet’s end of the table — and did not remark on it, though Ashendon knew he was being watched.

At the end of the seventh day, Nicholas said at supper, quite mildly:

“Ashendon. Come to the library after Harriet goes up. I want to speak to you.”

They went to the library. Harriet, who had known this was coming, kissed her brother on the temple in the passage and gave Ashendon a small, steady, grey-eyed look — not a nervous one, only a courageous one — and went up.

Nicholas closed the library door. He did not sit down. Neither did Ashendon.

“Marchant,” Nicholas said. “I have watched you a week. I know you have been better than I asked.”

“I have tried to be.”

“You have not put yourself at her elbow. You have not looked at her at supper above what a man in your position would look at any pretty woman across a table. You have been extremely fair. I want that said. I want you to hear that I have seen it.”

“Thank you, Vain.”

Nicholas walked to the fire and put his hand on the mantelpiece.

“Now I am going to say a plain thing, and I want you to hear it plainly. I gave you leave from Spain to ask her. I have been thinking since I came home whether I meant it. I mean it. I meant it in Spain and I mean it here. I love my sister better than I love anything in the world — my own life not excepted. And there is no man in England I would rather she had than you. Is that clear?”

“Yes.”

“Then one more thing. I want to say it once and not again.” Nicholas turned. “I do not want you to think later that I gave her to you in some fit of soldier’s sentiment, on the strength of your letter from an inn. I have thought about this a great deal. She was nineteen when you met. She is one-and-twenty now. You are thirty-four. That is not nothing. She has been running a house since our mother died, and that has made her older than she is — but she is one-and-twenty, Marchant, and she has been in society two seasons and has not been asked before.

“And I want to know from you, plainly, in this room — that you will not be impatient with her for being young. I want you to promise me that you will let her have the years she needs to grow into a wife of yours, and that you will not rush her, in your own house, out of that growing.”

His hand tightened on the mantel.

“She is going to be a great lady in twenty years. She is going to be worth ten of most of them. I know it and you know it. She is not one yet. Do you promise me that?”

Ashendon said, quite quietly: “I promise you that, Vain, on my honour. I have thought about it more than you know. I have been thinking about it for two years.”

“Good.” Nicholas turned round from the fire. “Then go and ask her in the morning, in this house, with my permission aloud. I shall not sit in the passage. I trust you both. Corbett will be in the hall if you want a witness — which you will not.”

“Vain.”

“What?”

“Thank you.”

“Do not thank me, Marchant.” Nicholas walked past him to the door. “You have kept two years of a bad promise for a good friend. Thank yourself. Good night.”