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 4

It took him about four minutes, and he made a poor job of it — twenty-nine years of two people being perfectly civil at breakfast, a boy of fifteen understanding what he was looking at without being told, a woman of about nine and forty in the last year of her life saying one sentence about the rector that Robert had never repeated to anyone.

Alice listened without moving.

“That is why you got out of a carriage on a public road,” she said, when he’d finished.

“Yes. And that is why I’ve agreed to live in a house with four rooms downstairs, which every person I know is going to call madness.”

“Yes.”

Alice came back to the table and sat down. “Then I’ll tell you what I’ve been frightened of for nine days,” she said. “It’s the same thing from the other end, and I haven’t been able to say it to anybody, because there’s nobody here to say it to.”

She told him what he already half-understood but had never once been forced to see plainly — that she was seven and twenty and had never been further than Marbury in six years, that she couldn’t play or draw and read four books a year and had never in her life been in a room with more than nine people in it, and that at their wedding there would be four hundred people on his ground with opinions, every one of them looking at a farm woman who had done extremely well for herself.

“And they will be right,” she said. “That is the part I haven’t been able to get past for nine days. They will be entirely right, and there is no possible way to say the true thing about it that wouldn’t sound like an excuse.”

“Then we are neither of us going to be able to explain ourselves to anybody,” Robert said.

“No.”

“May I say the only useful thing I’ve thought of in nine days?”

She looked up — and it was the first time he had said her name aloud.

“Say it.”

“We are going to be the only two people in England who know why any of this is happening,” said Robert Aldis. “And I have spent nine days discovering that this is not a difficulty. It is very nearly the whole of what I have wanted for ten years.”

Before any of that, there was a lawyer’s morning Alice never talked about much afterward, because it bored her considerably more than the wedding did. Robert had insisted on it in the second week, over her objection that it was a great deal of fuss for ninety acres of turnips. “It is not fuss,” he’d told her. “It is the only part of this I actually know how to do properly, and I am going to do it properly.” The marriage settlement his own solicitor drew up left Salow End entirely hers — a separate estate, held in trust for her own use, untouched by anything that happened at Bramber, so that whatever else changed, the farm and everything on it would answer to no one’s decisions but her own. It was that same settlement, tucked away and rarely mentioned, that let her sign her own name to a note for forty pounds at four percent the following spring, and later still, take a wage of ninety pounds a year from the Bramber estate books as a woman answerable for her own work — not as a wife spending her husband’s money, but as Alice Tullow, holder of Salow End, doing business in her own right.

They were married at the end of summer, at the small church in Marbury — Alice’s parish, not his — with forty people in attendance instead of four hundred. That had been Robert’s doing, laid out on her kitchen table in the second week: the church at Bramber, the county, the announcements in London, everything expected, everything he was going to do none of.

“If we marry at Bramber,” he told her, “then everything afterward is a thing the county watched happen. Every person on my ground will have seen a duke marry a farm woman and will have four hundred opinions about it before we’ve said a word to each other. If we marry at Marbury with forty people, it’s already happened by the time anyone at Bramber sees you at all. There will be nothing left to look at.”

He arrived at Salow End in the second week of September with two boxes and a horse. That was all — though Alice found out, four years later, that his own man had spent three days trying to talk him up to nine.

She put him in the best of the three upstairs rooms — the one with the driest corner — and told him so plainly on the first evening.

“That’s the best room in this house,” she said, “and I’ve put you in it because you’re not used to any of this. It is not a courtesy, and I don’t want it treated as one.”

“Where do you sleep?”

“The middle one. I’ve slept in it since I was nine, and I’m not moving out of it, and that’s a thing you and I shall discuss in about a fortnight, when you’ve stopped being frightened of the stairs.”

“I’m not frightened of the stairs.”

“You’ve gone up them four times today, and every single time you’ve put your hand on the wall about halfway. They’re steeper than what you’re used to and they turn at the top with no rail. Jonas has done the same thing for thirty years. I haven’t said it to embarrass you. I’ve said it because you’re going to spend four months being extremely bad at this house, and I’ve decided we say so out loud when it happens, rather than both of us pretending.”

The first morning became the thing everyone afterward wanted to hear about, though Alice always refused to make it funny. He was woken at four by Mrs. Spark in the yard with the pails — the ordinary hour, unchanged for twenty years — and came down at a quarter to five in his shirtsleeves, having found no water, no razor, and nobody at all, to stand in a kitchen with a dead fire in it, not knowing what to do.

Alice found him there. She had been up since four, out to the dairy and back for the tinderbox, and she found a duke of four and thirty standing in the middle of her kitchen with his hands hanging at his sides.

She did not laugh. She said afterward that this was the single most important decision she made in the entire first year, and that she made it in about half a second.

“The fire’s out,” she said. “It’s laid at night and lit at four, and this morning it hasn’t been because I’ve been in the dairy and there’s been nobody else. You may watch me do it. Tomorrow you may do it. It takes about four minutes and it isn’t difficult, and you’ll be bad at it for a fortnight.”

“I don’t know how to do anything,” he said flatly — and Alice understood immediately that it was the truest sentence spoken in that house in six years.

“No,” she said. “You don’t. And I don’t know how to be in a room with four hundred people, and in about six months one of us is going to have to, and it isn’t going to be me. Sit down and watch, and don’t apologize, because if you apologize every time you can’t do something in this house, you’ll apologize nine times a day for a year, and I shall lose my temper.”

She lit the fire. It took four minutes.

“That’s the last thing I’m going to teach you standing over you,” she said, without looking up from it. “Everything else you’ll learn by doing it badly with Jonas watching, because that’s how everybody on this farm has learned everything. If I make an exception for you, the whole thing is finished before it’s begun.”

Robert’s aunt came to Marbury three days before the wedding, unannounced, and asked to call. Alice read the note four times, walked out to the low field for a quarter hour, and wrote back that she would be glad to receive her — at one o’clock, when they dined.

“If she comes at four,” Alice told Mrs. Spark, “I’ll have spent the day preparing, and she’ll find a woman got up for her. If she comes at one, she’ll find the house as it is on a Wednesday. I’d rather find out now whether she can bear it than in nine years.”

Lady Aldis stayed two hours and ate boiled mutton at a kitchen table, and asked a great many questions about the ninety acres and the debt and Jonas and the boy — but not one about her nephew.

“You haven’t asked me one thing about him,” she said finally.

“No, ma’am. Because I’ve known him nine weeks and you’ve known him four and thirty years. If I ask you about him now, everything I learn will be a thing I’ve got from his family, and I’d rather find it out badly on my own.”

At the door, the old woman stopped. “I made four of the arrangements he refused. I’ve asked him about it a dozen times over ten years and got nothing. Do you know why?”

Alice had about two seconds to decide, and she decided.

“I do, ma’am. He told me at that table in the second week. It’s his and not mine, and I’m not going to tell you. But I want you to know that I know — so you understand he’s said it to somebody at last, because I think you’ve spent ten years wanting him to.”

Lady Aldis stood in that doorway a moment.

“Well,” she said. “Then I shall stop asking him.”

The first six months were better than anybody had predicted — and that, Alice said afterward, was the whole of the trouble. If it had gone badly at once, they would have dealt with it in a fortnight. What actually happened was the worst possible thing.

It worked.

He learned. Jonas told a handful of people for the rest of his life how appalling Robert Aldis was for the first two months — hoeing out an entire row of late turnips by mistake, ruining it entirely, Tom laughing and then going white with fear. Robert had simply looked at the wreckage and said, “No, you’re entirely right — I’ve just destroyed a shilling’s worth of somebody’s dinner,” and moved on to the next row. That was the moment Tom stopped being afraid of him.

Jonas took longer. Alice had told him herself, exactly as she’d predicted, in the far field, and he’d said only, “It’s not that, miss.” When she pressed him, he said, “I’ve been three and thirty year on this ground and never once been useful to a man that mattered. And he’s going to ask me how to do something inside a fortnight. I’ve been standing in this field two hours finding out I want him to.”

He asked on the fourth day. Robert had set a gatepost in crooked twice and crossed the yard to say, plainly, “Mr. Peek. I’ve done this twice and it’s wrong both times and I don’t know why. Will you show me?”

Mrs. Spark told Alice about it that evening, half-laughing, half-something else. “He called him Mr. Peek. Nobody’s called that man Mr. Peek in thirty year. Ma’am, his own mother didn’t call him Mr. Peek.”

By spring, Robert Aldis could lay a fire in ninety seconds, milk badly but adequately, set a post, and had learned the whole of the ninety acres by heart — which field flooded, which was sour at the bottom, why the far five had never done anything since before Alice was born. He remained hopeless with the animals for the rest of his life, and it became the family joke for thirty years.

And in March, sitting at that same kitchen table with Alice’s account book open between them, he asked her a question that would change the shape of everything that came after — and it began, as so many things in that house did, with money neither of them wanted to talk about, and a low field that had never been drained.