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 5

“May I say something about the low field?” Robert asked. “Or is that an order?”

“It isn’t an order if you ask me a question.”

“Then here’s a question. Why have you never drained below five?”

“Because it wants about forty pounds, and I’ve never had forty pounds at one time in six years. What would it give you?”

“About nine a year,” Alice said, “every year, for as long as the tiles last. I did the sum when I was three and twenty and I’ve done it again four times since. I know exactly what it’s worth and exactly why I can’t do it, and I’d rather you didn’t ask me about it.”

“I’ve got forty pounds,” he said. “I’ve got a great deal more than forty pounds, and we’ve both been extremely careful not to mention it since September. I want to say now that I’ve been careful on purpose, and that it’s been the hardest thing in six months. So I’m going to ask you a question, and it isn’t an order, and you may refuse it and I’ll never raise it again. Will you let me lend you forty pounds at four percent, on a note to be paid back out of the drainage over five years — which is what any bank in England would do if a bank in England lent money to a woman, which it doesn’t.”

Alice sat with that for a long moment. “On a note.”

“On a note drawn properly, with the interest, and I shall hold it, and you shall pay it, and if you miss a payment I shall be extremely disagreeable about it.”

“Why?”

“Because you’ve spent six years not being lent anything by anybody,” Robert said, “and I’ve watched you do arithmetic about nine pounds a year for six months, and I understood at about four this morning that the thing I want to give you isn’t the money. It’s being a woman who can borrow.”

She signed the note in April and paid it back over four years without missing a payment, and kept it afterward in the same box as her father’s book.

There was one thing that first winter she did not tell him about for four years. It came from Mrs. Spark, in the dairy, in December.

“Ma’am, may I say a thing that’s none of my business? They’re talking, in Marbury. Not unkindly, most of them. But there’s a good deal of it, and it’s been going since the wedding, and I’ve not told you because I couldn’t see the use — until a woman said a thing at the market Saturday I haven’t been able to shake.”

“What did she say?”

“‘Poor gentleman. He’ll get tired of it.'” Mrs. Spark did not stop what she was doing. “Not that you’ve done well for yourself — that’s said too, and you don’t mind it. The other one. That he’s playing at it. That a duke will do anything for a twelvemonth, and be gone by the second winter, and then you’ll have had a duke in this house for a year and it’ll be a great deal worse than never having had one at all.”

Alice stood in her own dairy a moment. “Is that what you think, Mrs. Spark?”

“No, ma’am. I’ve watched him lay a fire at four in the morning ninety times, and there’s no man alive who plays at that. I think they’re wrong, and I think they’ll go on saying it for three years whatever he does, and I think you’ve got to know it, because you’re going to hear it one day from somebody being kind to you, and it’s a great deal better to hear it in a dairy from me.”

Alice wrote four lines about it that night in the back of the farm book, and didn’t show them to anyone for four years. I have never once minded being talked about, and I have been sitting here an hour finding out that I mind this. And the reason I mind it is that I have thought it myself, four times since September, always at about two in the morning.

Bramber began to go wrong in January, and nobody noticed for four months. It was not anyone’s fault, exactly. Robert wrote — four days a week, sometimes three hours at a stretch by candlelight, and Fenwick answered inside two days, and Robert went over twice in the first six months, once for four days, once for a week, and both times he came home to Salow End quiet for a day afterward. Alice noticed the quiet in November and said nothing about it — a decision she later called the single largest mistake of that marriage.

The first crack was a tenancy. A man named Ruddock died at Witkim in January, leaving two hundred acres, a widow of nine and forty, and a son of nineteen. It was not a difficult case. Fenwick had handled forty like it. What ordinarily happened was that the Duke saw the widow himself, in her own kitchen, inside a fortnight. Robert wrote instead — a letter Fenwick called the best answer any duke had ever given him: the tenancy to continue, the son to be taken on at one and twenty, the rent to stand two years.

The widow Ruddock had it read to her in her kitchen by a steward, four days after burying her husband, and understood that the Duke of Bramber had not come.

She did not complain. Nobody complained. That was the entire difficulty, and it took Robert four months to see it — that a hundred and forty people at Witkim did not write letters or send deputations. What they did was talk to each other, and by March, the settled understanding at Witkim was that his grace had married a farmer’s daughter forty miles off and gone to live on her ground, and that Witkim was now a place that got letters.

The second crack was a drainage scheme on the low ground, four years in the arranging, nine hundred pounds, four farms, nine agreements needed. Fenwick had seven by autumn. The last two men wanted the Duke himself to stand in the field and say the thing meant something. Robert wrote to both, twice. Neither answered — not from rudeness, he realized on a Tuesday in April with the second unanswered letter in his hand, but because a scheme that old and that expensive had simply stopped being real to men who had never once seen the man who owned the ground stand in it.

Fenwick came to Salow End in the last week of April — a thing he had never done, in eight months of four hundred pages of correspondence. He was five and fifty, extremely polite, and Alice liked him within four minutes, which she had not expected at all.

It took an hour and a half at that kitchen table for him to lay it all out, without raising his voice, without the word neglect once passing his lips: the Ruddock tenancy, correct and resented. The drainage, stalled at seven of nine. Four disputes between tenants gone unsettled since autumn, because a steward may recommend but only a landlord may decide, and men waiting on a decision stop bringing their business after the fourth month. The rent audit missed in November. The magistrate’s bench — Robert’s own bench, which he had not sat on in eight months, alongside two colleagues both past seventy — unfilled, so that a great many small matters in that neighborhood were simply not being dealt with at all.

“How bad is it?” Robert asked.

“It is not bad, your grace, and that is exactly why I have been eight months not writing about it,” said Fenwick. “There is no disaster. Nobody is hungry. The rents are coming in and the books are exact. It is that a place with a landlord in it is a different place from a place with a landlord’s letters in it. And it takes about a year for the difference to be visible. We are eight months in.”

Nobody spoke for four seconds.

Then Alice said, “Mr. Fenwick, may I ask you something, and will you answer it exactly? If it goes on as it is — where is Bramber in four years?”

Fenwick looked at her a long moment, and Alice understood afterward that he had come forty miles specifically hoping somebody would ask him that, and had not expected it to be her.

“The tenancies will be let by me, not by him,” he said, “which means correctly, and without any judgment about the people in them. The two magistrates will be dead, and the bench will go to Marbury, and every small matter in that neighborhood will be heard nine miles off by men who don’t know anybody. The drainage won’t be done. Four farms will be worth a third less than they are now. And there will be a generation on that ground — the children who are nine now — who will grow up on Bramber land having never once seen the Duke of Bramber. That is the whole of it, ma’am. And it does not go into any book I keep.”

He would not stay the night. He left at six, and Robert Aldis and Alice Tullow sat at that kitchen table until midnight — not quarreling, Alice was always clear about that, but going round the same impossible arithmetic nine times and arriving, every time, at the same place.

“I shall go back properly,” Robert said, near the second hour. “Four days a week has never been enough, and I have known it since February. I’ll go for the audit and stay a month, and sit in summer, and then — and then I’ll come back here.”

“For how long, Robert?”

He didn’t answer.

“You cannot,” Alice said finally. “That’s what we’ve been circling for two hours, and one of us has to say it. You cannot be at Bramber enough to run Bramber and be here at all. It is forty miles, not four. A man cannot be a landlord to four hundred people three days a week.”

“Then I’ll break it,” Robert said. “I’ll break the settlement. I’m married — Witkim is safe while I’m alive. I’m four and thirty. I can give the whole of Bramber to Fenwick tomorrow, put it in trust, appoint him, and live here. In thirty years it goes wherever it goes, and I won’t be here to see it.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“I’m telling you I would.”

“You’re telling me that you would,” Alice said, “and you wouldn’t, and I’ve known you eight months, and I know precisely what you are. If you did it, you’d be a different man inside four years, and I should be married to him. You came out onto a public road because a hundred and forty people were about to get a landlord in Northumberland. That is the whole of what you are, and it is the entire reason I said yes to you in a turnip field. I am not going to sit at this table and let you hand four hundred people to a steward — a good man, who has just driven forty miles to tell you the truth — so that you can go on lighting my fire.”

Robert put his hands over his face. “Then what? I’ve been at this since April and I’ve got nothing. Every road out of this ends with you leaving this house. I know it.”

“Then say it.”

“No,” said Alice. She stood and went to the window, her back to the room, and Robert waited, because he had learned in eight months exactly what that meant.

“I’m not going to say it,” she said finally, “because it isn’t true, and I’ve been letting us both believe it is for four hours. There are two things in this, and I’ve been treating them as one all evening. Mr. Fenwick told me the difference at about five o’clock this afternoon, and I didn’t hear it until about a minute ago.”

“What difference?”

She turned around. “He didn’t say Bramber wants a duke. I’ve gone over it four times in the last minute and he never once said it. He said the tenancies want somebody who’ll make a judgment about the people in them. He said the small matters want a bench that knows anybody. He said the drainage wants a man to stand in a field and be seen to mean it. That is not a duke, Robert. That is somebody who knows what two hundred acres looks like from the inside, who can sit in a widow’s kitchen four days after a funeral and know what to say to her, who has been three hundred pounds down on ninety acres and got herself out of it — and there is not one such person on that whole ground. Fenwick is a very good steward and has never in his life farmed anything. And you have been four and thirty years a duke and have known what a low field is worth for about six months.”

Robert took his hands away from his face. “Alice —”

“I am not saying I could do it,” she said quickly. “I have ninety acres and I have never in my life seen four hundred people, and I should be frightened out of my wits in that house. I am saying we have spent four hours asking how much of you can be in two places, and that this is the wrong question, and I have only just this minute seen it. I want a fortnight before I say one word more, and I’d be obliged if you asked me nothing in the meantime, because I have the beginning of something and not the middle of it, and if you push me now I’ll lose it.”