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 9

There were other weathers, as there are in any marriage, and I will not itemize them.

There was a summer he was thrown from a horse in the park at Havering and lay senseless a full quarter of an hour, and Harriet came out to him in her light gown with her hair coming down and did not scream at all. She knelt beside him in the grass and told the groom quite steadily:

“Ride for the doctor. Do not gallop the mare — she is in foal. Ride steadily. We have time.”

Ashendon woke two minutes later with his head in her lap.

“Harriet.”

“Do not speak. The doctor is coming. I have told him to come steadily.”

“You are the coolest hand I have ever known in a bad hour.”

“I have had practice. Be quiet, my love.”

There was a winter their small second daughter took a fever, and it was Ashendon who sat up with her three nights, and Harriet who sat up too — and by the fourth night Corbett had, without asking, put himself on the fifth watch and refused to leave, and the child came round toward morning.

Afterward, in the small hours, Harriet said to her husband: “You have been better with her than I have. I did not know you would be so good at a sick child.”

“I have been with a great many sick men, Harriet. It is not so different.” He smoothed the blanket. “One only holds their hand and does not let them see one is frightened.”

Harriet was quiet for a moment.

“I want that written down,” she said. “I want it written down and taught to fathers.”

And she wrote it in her own hand, in a small book she kept, for Nicholas the younger to find one day as a grown man with children of his own.

They grew into their marriage the way Nicholas said once, at a Christmas at Havering, that one grew into a good coat — tight at first in one or two places, easy in the rest, and after a while one forgot which places had been tight and the coat was one’s own.

They had London in the winter and Havering in the summer. The children grew.

Nicholas the younger was his uncle’s boy from the beginning, and went to his uncle’s house in the school holidays and rode his uncle’s horses, and in due course took the little estate at Havering from his uncle when his uncle’s own son — born some years after, a small, delicate boy — proved to want a smaller place of his own rather than the running of Havering.

The elder daughter, Anne, married a naval officer she had met at a summer visit to the coast. The younger daughter, Mary, married nobody, because she had opinions and was interested in the church schools in the town, and had — in her mother’s phrase — made up her mind about her own life. Ashendon was proud of her for it, and left her a small independent income out of Ashendon itself in his will, so that she should never be dependent on her brother.

The second son, named for Ashendon’s own father, went into the army in his own turn. His father tried mildly to talk him out of it, gave up when he saw the boy meant it, and the boy served decently and came home in one piece.

Nicholas the elder — the brother, the friend outside Salamanca — lived to a good age. He was there for every christening, every wedding, and every graveside in Ashendon’s life for nearly forty years. He grew a little grey and a little slower and a great deal fonder. And he was, in the plain full sense of the word, Ashendon’s brother, in a way that Ashendon’s own brother, who had died at fourteen and whom Ashendon had scarcely known, had never been able to be.

He died first of the two of them, quietly in his sleep at Havering one autumn, of nothing in particular.

Ashendon and Harriet went down to bury him. Ashendon stood at the grave with his wife’s hand under his elbow and his own son on the other side of the open ground.

And Ashendon said, quite low, to the earth of the grave:

“Vain. Thank you for the medallion.”

Harriet heard it. She pressed his arm and said nothing.

They grew old.

Ashendon’s hair went grey at the temples first — very early, in fact; the war had begun it and then all through. Harriet’s more slowly, and hers held its tea colour at the crown for a long time and was the last part of her to change. His hands, which had commanded troops and in later life written a great many letters about drainage, grew a little slower. Hers, which had once folded quite still in front of her in a drawing room in October, grew thin at the knuckles and warm to the touch.

They read to each other in the evenings, in later years, at Havering more often than in London. They had by then decided that Havering was their real house.

They walked on fine afternoons down to the churchyard where the Vain graves were, and looked at the grass, and did not speak much, and came back for tea.

And she would still sometimes, in the small parlour in the middle of a plain evening, put her hand up to his lapel near the inner pocket — not on it — and say:

“Still there.”

And he would say: “Always, still there, Harriet.”

And she would smile the small, quiet smile of a woman who had been married a long time to a man who had kept, for all of it, a small round silver thing in an inner pocket for her sake.

He went first.

It was a slow going. He had had a bad chest for the last two winters, and this winter it caught him worse, and the young doctor from the town — the grand-nephew of the old Halwell of his war years, who had come down after the peace and stayed — could not in the end turn it.

He knew he was dying. He was not afraid. He said so to Harriet in the small parlour. On the last afternoon he was well enough to sit downstairs, and she took his hand and said:

“I know, my love. Do not tell me I am to be brave. I am going to be brave. Tell me only what you would like arranged, and I will arrange it. I have arranged worse for you than a good going.”

He said, “You have Salamanca.”

“Not Salamanca. You went to Salamanca before I met you. I have arranged worse for you than the horse in the park. Do you remember?”

“I remember.”

“Then tell me.”

He told her what he wanted. He wanted to be at Havering, if it could be arranged. He wanted the children fetched, but not made a great fuss of. He wanted Corbett — Corbett, over eighty by then, still living in the small cottage on the home farm that Ashendon had given him in his old age — sent for.

And he wanted, at the last, the medallion in his hand.

She arranged all of it.