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 2

“Where,” said Alice Tullow, kneeling in her own field, a handful of weeds still in her fist, “would I be going?”

Robert told her. Forty miles that way. A house of ninety rooms. Four thousand acres. Four hundred people who worked it, and eighty rooms he had never once set foot in.

Alice looked around at her own ninety acres — the turnips, the fence that wanted mending, a cottage two hundred yards off with a man of about sixty standing outside it, watching them, and the boy who had stopped hoeing entirely to stare.

“And why,” she said, “would I leave this?”

Robert Aldis had no answer. He was honest about it, then and for the rest of his life, to her and to a handful of others. He had spent four days building a criterion and ten years refusing arrangements, and it had genuinely never occurred to him — not once, not in four days on a road, not in a decade of saying no — that a woman might simply not want to come.

“I haven’t got an answer to that,” he admitted.

“No,” she said. “I didn’t think you would.”

She stood. She wiped her hands on her apron. And instead of turning back to her row — which is what a woman refusing a man does — she walked forty feet to the fence.

“Then I’ll tell you what I’ve got,” she said, “and it’s going to take about four minutes, and you’re going to want to interrupt me, and I’d be obliged if you didn’t.”

She told him her name, and her father’s debt, and the six years she’d spent clearing it alone. She told him about Jonas Peek, three and sixty, no family living, too old for any other place to take him on. About the widow in the second cottage, and the boy at the end of the row who’d come off the parish two years back with nothing.

“If I go with you,” she said, “I cannot keep this farm. And any man who buys ninety acres in this county puts his own people on it inside a twelvemonth. He does not want a laborer of three and sixty, and I would not blame him for it. It is what I should do myself.”

She put her hands flat on the top rail.

“So here is my condition, sir, and it is not a bargaining position, and I shall not move off it. Only if you will live at my place.”

The silence on that road lasted four seconds.

“Here?” Robert Aldis said. “In a house with four rooms downstairs and one of the three above with the roof going — not for a season, not as a joke — live here?”

“You have gone forty miles and four days to find a woman who has not been arranged,” Alice said, not moving. “Then do not ask me to move inside your title, sir. That is the whole of it.”

He asked her, before he left, how long she had before the man who wanted to buy the farm ran out of patience.

“Michaelmas,” she said. “About four months.”

“Then we have both got four months,” said Robert Aldis. “I shall come back Thursday week and tell you what I’ve decided. And I want you to know — I have not the smallest idea what I am going to say.”

He got back into his carriage. Alice Tullow went back into her field, because there were four hours of light left and the row was not going to weed itself.

Jonas Peek came down from the cottage at six, having watched the whole quarter hour without moving once.

“Who was that, miss?”

Alice had about four seconds to decide what to tell him, and she decided in one.

“That was the Duke of Bramber,” she said. “And he has asked me to marry him. And I have told him I will — if he comes and lives here. He has gone away to think about it. He will be back on Thursday week.”

Jonas Peek sat down hard on a barrow in the middle of the field, and Alice realized, watching his face, that she had just told him the easy part.

The hard part — the part he would carry for the rest of the summer, the part that would sit between them like a stone in the road — was still coming.