The Duke Had Four Months to Marry or Lose Control of a Powerful Estate — So He Stopped His Carriage, Told a Woman Kneeling in Turnips, “I Need a Wife. Come With Me,” and She Gave Him One Shocking Condition.

PART 10

“Robert,” she said, into the dark, “I have been waiting two months to tell you something, and I have run out of good reasons to wait any longer.”

He turned to look at her on the wall, and something in her voice made him go very still.

“I am expecting,” Alice said. “Since about August, as near as I can work it. I did not tell you at once because I wanted to be certain, and then I did not tell you because I was frightened, and then Sarah Fenn’s byre burned down and there was no room in either of us for anything else, and now there is finally an evening with nothing burning in it, and I am telling you.”

Robert Aldis sat on that wall in the dark and, for the first time in the whole of their marriage, could not immediately find a single word to say.

“You’re not going to say anything?” Alice asked, and there was, under the steadiness of her voice, the smallest thread of the same fear she had carried at that first fence, all those months ago — the fear of a woman who had learned, at nineteen, exactly what could happen when a thing that mattered was said out loud and not received well.

“I am trying to work out,” Robert said slowly, “how to say the true thing instead of the speech, and finding, exactly as I did on that road, that the speech is useless.” He took her hand. “I am glad. I am entirely glad, and I am also, if I am honest with you the way you have always been honest with me, afraid — not of the child, but of becoming a man who wants an heir more than he wants you, the way my own father wanted a great many things more than he ever let himself want my mother. I have thought about that fear for exactly as long as it has taken you to say the sentence, and I want you to know it, and I want you to hold me to it, for the rest of my life, if you ever see me becoming that man.”

“I will,” Alice said. “I have never once doubted that you’d let me.”

“And I want to say one more thing,” Robert went on, “before we go in, because I think it matters more tonight than it has mattered on any other night since that fence. Whatever this child is — son or daughter, and whether there is ever another after — none of it changes what I told you at your gate the first week. If there is not one, it will not be your fault, and I will never once say that it is. I meant that the day I said it, standing there terrified of my own marriage, and I mean it a great deal more now, having watched you rebuild a stranger’s whole winter out of arithmetic and will. Whatever this settlement was ever supposed to protect, I have already got it. It is sitting beside me on this wall.”

Alice leaned her head against his shoulder, and for a long while neither of them said anything at all, because there was, for the first time in either of their lives, nothing left that needed saying out loud.

The child — a son, born the following May, in the room at Salow End where Alice herself had been born, exactly as she had told Robert she wanted, in nine quiet words, the night she first told him she was expecting — was the last child in that family to draw breath in a farmhouse instead of a great house, and Alice made certain of it on purpose, and never once explained why to the four people in the county who found it strange, because it was not theirs to understand.

A daughter followed two years later, and then another son, and the eldest grew up moving, exactly as his mother had planned it at that kitchen table so many years before, a week in four between Salow End and Bramber, learning to lay a fire in one house and to read an audit ledger in the other, and thinking nothing at all unusual about either.

Jonas Peek lived nine years at Bramber after Salow End, going round the small holdings three days a week until he was the most trusted man on that whole ground, and never learned to read until Alice finally taught him, four years in, and he wrote his own name, carefully, on his own will. He is buried at Bramber. Alice put up the stone herself, and wrote the nine words on it at her own kitchen table: Jonas Peek. Thirty years at Salow End. Nine at Bramber.

Mrs. Spark stayed in her cottage at Salow End until she died, and Tom had the running of the farm inside six years, exactly as Alice had predicted, and was, by every account, a great deal better at ninety acres than Alice herself had been at his age — a fact Alice repeated, with genuine pride and no false modesty at all, for the rest of her life.

Charles Aldis came to Bramber every summer after that first visit, and his children and Robert and Alice’s grew up together thinking of each other, simply, as cousins, with no shadow of a settlement anywhere between them. Margaret Hale came from Bath twice a year until she, too, died, surrounded, at the end, by a whole great-niece-and-nephew’s worth of family she had spent nine and twenty years believing she would never be permitted to know.

Robert Aldis asked his wife, once, sitting on that same low wall four years into their marriage, in the evening after a harvest, whether she had ever regretted the condition — whether making a duke live in a farmhouse with a hole in the roof, only to take him away from it inside a year and bring him back to Bramber after all, had been worth what it cost either of them.

“I have never taken it back,” Alice said. “We are at Bramber three weeks in four, yes. But you are a man who lit a fire this morning at four and could do it in ninety seconds, and knew about the low field before Mr. Fenwick did, and sat in Mrs. Ruddock’s kitchen for two hours once and never once mentioned the rent, and rode through the night to a burning farm and found your own wife already at the table with a plan drawn up. That is what the condition was for, Robert. Not the house. I have never cared about the house. I told you so on the road, and you did not believe me.”

“I did not,” he admitted. “I thought it was a bargain. I have spent four years learning it was a test.”

“It was not a test either,” Alice said. “I could not marry a man who had never once been useless in front of anybody. That is the whole of it, and I did not have the words for it in that field, and I have spent four years finding them. You had four hundred people and nineteen years of a man doing exactly what you said, and you had never in your life stood in a room where you did not know what to do next. I was not going to spend forty years married to somebody who had never once stood in my kitchen at a quarter to five in the morning and said, plainly, I do not know how to do anything. You said it once, in September, and you have never had to say it again — and everything we have built since came out of that single sentence.”

Robert Aldis sat beside his wife on the wall, in the last light of a harvest evening, with a son asleep in a farmhouse forty miles off and a daughter asleep in a great house behind them, and a settlement his father had written thirty years before, half in fear and half in hope, finally, completely, at rest.

“And if I had not come back that Thursday week,” he said quietly, “what then?”

“Then I should have gone to Michaelmas with no answer at all,” Alice said, quietly, because she had never once, in all these years, let herself finish the thought properly, and she made herself finish it now. “The man from Devizes would have come back, and I should have had to choose between him and letting my father’s debt swallow the farm outright — and either way, Jonas would have been put off by spring, and Mrs. Spark would have gone to her daughter’s crowded house, and I do not know to this day what would have become of Tom. I never arranged that, Robert. I could not let myself arrange it, because arranging it meant admitting it might happen. I sat alone in that kitchen after you rode away not knowing what you would decide, and I did not plan a future without you. I simply hoped, every day for nine days, that I would not have to find out what I would have done. I want you to know that. I have never once told you so before this evening.”

Robert took her hand in the fading light, and said nothing at all, because there was, between the two of them, on that wall, at that hour, finally nothing left that needed saying.

THE END.