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 8

He asked her in the morning, in the small parlour, without Corbett in the passage.

He asked her plainly, as a man asks a woman he has known properly for a week and has honoured at a distance for a great many months. And she said yes again, plainly, as she had said it in the parlour with Corbett in the passage.

And then she did what she had not, on the earlier night, done.

She came the six feet across the Turkey carpet and put her hand up to his cheek and let him at last put his arms around her — quite properly, the way a man in his own drawing room may put his arms around the woman who has that morning agreed to be his wife.

“Harriet,” he said, into her hair.

“Yes, my love.”

“I want you to know I have kept a small thing in an inner pocket for six years.”

“I know. I have known since I saw you put your hand to it in the drawing room the second afternoon.”

“I know you told me. I want you to know now what it is.”

He drew it out. He set it in the flat of her palm.

It was a small round silver medallion, no bigger than a shilling, worn smooth at the edges from six years against his ribs.

“Your brother gave it to me outside Salamanca. He said it was for luck. He said his mother had given it to him when he sailed.” He looked at it lying in her hand. “I have carried it for six years. I put my hand to it in that drawing room in October, two years ago, an hour after I met you. When I first understood I was in trouble. I have kept it in the pocket ever since. I want you to know it is yours now, in the sense that everything in that pocket is yours — but that I mean to go on carrying it. I do not want to move it to a drawer.”

She closed her hand around it.

“Keep it, my love,” she said. “Keep it always. I do not want you to move it either. It has been the first thing you ever did about me. Let it be the last.”

They were married quietly in the parish church at Havering in the late autumn, on a Wednesday, with Nicholas at Ashendon’s shoulder as best man, and the aunt from Bath in the front pew with her handkerchief, and Corbett — Corbett, in a new coat.

The only concession Corbett had ever made to any occasion of any kind.

He stood at the back with his hat in his hands and a look on his face that Nicholas, catching sight of it as he came out of the vestry, called afterwards the look of a man who has finished a piece of work he has been at for a great many years.

Harriet wore a plain gown the colour of good tea, because Ashendon had said once, weeks earlier, that the first thing he had ever seen about her was her hair, and that her hair was the colour of good tea — and she had decided quietly, and without telling him, that she would give him that colour back on her wedding morning.

He saw it as she came up the aisle. He did not quite keep his face.

“Steady, Marchant,” Nicholas said, very low, at his shoulder.

“I am steady, Vain.”

“You are not. I know steady when I see it.”

By the time the vicar had begun to read the service, Ashendon had recovered.

They did not go away. They took the London house for the winter, and Havering was left, at Harriet’s insistence, to Nicholas — who was, as she said, a good landlord and would take care of the tenants. They took Corbett with them, because Ashendon had said to Nicholas that a man about to run a duke’s household in town wanted a Corbett, and Nicholas had said, “For God’s sake, take him, Marchant. He has been telling me for a fortnight that I am too soft on the yard boy.”

Corbett went.

Harriet packed her mother’s small writing desk herself. She left the Broadwood. She said she would come back to it.

She did — in every year of the marriage, for a fortnight or a month, always in the summer, and always with her husband, and eventually with the children. And Nicholas, who married in his own turn some years later, a good sensible girl from the neighbouring county who mothered him admirably, was in every summer glad of them.

Their first child came in the deep of the following winter, and it was an easy birth.

Ashendon, who had been in a great many worse rooms in his life, sat in his own study with a book on his knee, and Corbett — in London for the season and quietly, secretly missing Havering — brought him coffee at intervals.

Harriet upstairs delivered a small dark-haired son at four in the morning without any great fuss, and sent word down that his grace might come up, and might bring the coffee, because she was tired.

He went up. He sat on the edge of the bed. He looked at his son — a small, furious red creature with a good voice — and at his wife, who was pale but her own self, and he could not, for a moment, speak.

Harriet reached her free hand out and put it, quite deliberately, over the inner pocket of the dressing gown he had thrown over his shirt.

“Still there,” she said softly.

“Still there.”

“Good. Do not move it.”

“I will not move it.”

They named the boy Nicholas for her brother.

And it was accepted by all parties, though not stated aloud in any drawing room, that the boy would in due course spend as much of his growing at Havering as at Ashendon — because Nicholas the elder had a house and, as things then stood, no son of his own to fill it, and it seemed to Harriet quite plain, in the way she saw such things, that a family with two houses ought not to let one of them stand empty of boys for want of arranging. Ashendon agreed to it privately, in the fullness of time, when the boys were grown.

That was what was done.