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 3

Jonas Peek sat on that barrow with his hands hanging between his knees, staring at the hedge, and Alice let him sit with it for a moment before she said the rest.

“Sit down properly, Jonas, because I’m going to tell you the whole of it, and I’m not doing it in pieces over a fortnight.”

She told him about the settlement — the third of the Duke’s property that would go north if he wasn’t married by his thirty-fifth birthday in November, the hundred and forty people at Witkim who had never seen the man who was supposed to be their landlord’s cousin. She told him she had said what she’d said, about staying, about the condition, because of him and Mrs. Spark and the boy.

“You shouldn’t have,” Jonas said. “I know it, miss. You shouldn’t. I’m three and sixty. I’ve got about four year of work left in me and then I’m no good to anybody, and you’ve gone and hung a thing like that on it.”

“I haven’t hung anything on you,” Alice said, and she meant to say it once and never discuss it again. “I did not ask him to live here for your sake. I asked because if I go to that house, I stop being a person who does anything. I worked that out in about a minute and a half at that fence, and it is the whole of my reason. You and Mrs. Spark and Tom are why I cannot let this farm go — that is a different thing, and it is true, and I told him so. But the condition is mine. It is about me.”

Jonas looked at his hands for a long moment.

“Will he come back?”

“I haven’t the smallest idea,” Alice said. “What do you want, miss?”

And Alice Tullow, standing in her own field at six in the evening, realized that nobody had asked her that question in six years, and she did not have an answer ready.

“I want somebody to talk to,” she said finally, into a field with nobody in it but an old man and a boy and turnips. “I am seven and twenty and my father is dead and I have run this ground alone since I was one and twenty, and I have not had one conversation in six years with anybody who wasn’t either working for me or owed money by me. A man got out of a carriage this afternoon and told me the truth about a settlement in ninety seconds and then couldn’t answer a question I asked him, and just — stood there and said so. I don’t know whether I want him. I want that. And I’ve been standing in this field an hour finding out I haven’t the smallest idea whether those are the same thing.”

He came back on the Thursday week, alone, on a horse. Alice noticed the horse — no carriage, no coachman watching — and thought about what it meant for some time afterward.

Mrs. Spark saw him first from the dairy door and came in with her voice full of something Alice hadn’t heard from her in years. “There’s a gentleman in the yard.”

Alice put down what she was holding and went out.

“I’ve thought about it for nine days,” Robert Aldis said, standing at her gate. “And I’ve got four things to say, and I’d like to say them in the order I’ve arranged, because it’s the only prepared thing I’ve done properly in a month.”

“Then say them.”

“The first is that I’m going to do it.”

Alice stood very still in her own yard.

“The second is that I haven’t decided it because I’m charmed by it,” he said, “and I want that out of the way at the start, because I think you’re expecting a man who’s been struck by something, and I haven’t been. I’ve spent nine days doing arithmetic. I’ve got four hundred people, a hundred and forty of them go north if I don’t marry, and I’ve had ten years to find somebody the ordinary way and haven’t. You are the only woman in England who has ever said no to me about anything, and I have spent nine days discovering that this is not a compliment to you. It is a fact about me, and it is not a good one.”

“That’s honest.”

“The third is going to be difficult.” He put his hands on the gate. “I don’t believe I can do it. I want that said before either of us signs anything. I am four and thirty and I have never in my life laid a fire or fetched water or been in a house with fewer than forty people in it. I don’t know what a dairy is. I have a great deal of respect for what you’ve built here, and about nine-tenths of that respect is for a thing I don’t understand. I shall be extremely bad at this, and I shall be bad at it in front of your three people, and I’ve had nine days to get used to the idea, and I am not used to it.”

Alice leaned on the other side of the gate. “And the fourth?”

“The fourth is a condition,” he said, “the only one I shall ever put to you, and I have thought about it more than the other three together. I must have an heir.”

Alice didn’t answer right away. “Go on.”

“That’s the whole of the settlement. Marriage keeps Witkim safe while I’m alive. A son keeps it safe after. If I die without one, it goes anyway, and everything we do here is worth thirty years and then nothing. So I’m asking you plainly, on a gate, because I’d rather ask than have you find it out in a year and think I let you not think about it. And if there is not one,” he said, “then there is not one, and it will not be your fault, and I shall never once say that it is. I know exactly what happens to women in that position. But I’m not going to pretend I don’t want it. Every man in my position wants it. Half of them tell the woman it doesn’t signify. I’ve watched two of those marriages. I am not going to do that to anybody.”

Alice Tullow stood at that gate for a long moment.

“Come inside,” she said finally. “I’ll give you something to eat, and then I’ll tell you the four things I’ve got. I’ve had nine days as well, and I haven’t been idle.”

They sat at her kitchen table, and it took the better part of an hour — the farm book laid open between them, the column in her father’s hand that didn’t match her own, and the story of the worst four days of her life, the winter she was one and twenty, when she’d found out her father kept two sets of accounts and had made him watch her burn the false one. Robert listened to all of it without once looking away.

“Why now?” he asked, when she’d finished.

“Because you’ve just told me, on a gate, that you cannot lay a fire,” Alice said. “And I’ve decided that if we’re going to do this, we tell each other the worst thing first. I’ve gone first. It was my condition that brought us here.”

The second thing was Jonas Peek — how he’d have to be told, how he’d hate it, not because he’d say one word against it but because he wouldn’t say anything at all, and would go stand in the far field for two hours believing himself finished.

“I’ll tell him he’s wrong,” Robert said.

“You won’t,” said Alice. “That’s the third thing, and it’s the most important one, and I want you to hear it carefully.” She told him what she knew already, with the certainty of a woman who had watched men like him her whole life without ever having stood this close to one — that he would come here wanting to fix things, that it was simply what he was, and she didn’t hold it against him, but that if he gave one order on this ground in the first year, Jonas would start asking him instead of her, and Tom would too, and within a month she would be a woman who lived at a farm her husband ran.

“So here is my third thing,” she said. “You may work. You may do anything I ask, and a great deal I don’t. But you will not give one order on this ground for a year.”

Robert sat with that for a long time — far longer than the four seconds she’d asked of him.

“A year,” he said finally. “And at the end of it I shall very likely ask you for another, and you may refuse me.”

“And your fourth thing,” Alice said, and got up to stand at the window with her back to the room — which Robert would learn, within six months, meant she was working out how to say something she hadn’t decided how to say.

“I want to know why,” she said. “Not the settlement. I believe the settlement, and I’ve believed it since the road. Witkim. Ten years. You’ve refused nine arrangements in ten years and wouldn’t say why on the road, and you haven’t said why today, and I’m going to marry you in about six weeks, and I should like to know before I do. I shall not ask again. If you’d rather not tell me, I’ll marry you anyway and never raise it as long as I live.”

Robert Aldis sat at that kitchen table for the better part of a minute.

Then, for the first time in his life, to a living soul, he began to talk about his mother.