The Duke Married Marianne for an Heir and Paid Her Father’s Debts—Then She Collapsed Before Three Hundred Guests. When the Doctor Announced Her Pregnancy, the Man Who Never Spoke of Love Asked Only: “Will She Live?”

PART 2

He did not despise her.

That was the thing she turned over that night, and could not put down. She had prepared herself for contempt; she had been braced for it the way one braces for weather. Contempt she could have used. Contempt would have given her something to stand against.

He had been courteous and exact and better than fair. He had listened to every clause and conceded every one. He had said, this concerns you, and I would rather say it to you than about you, and he had meant it, and in eleven days she was going to marry him.

He simply did not want anything from her that she could not do.

She had been useful all her life. She had just, at last, been paid for it.

They were married in December, quietly, and went north.

Coldir sat in the county of Amberly — four days’ travel and a world away, in a fold of hills where the light came late and left early and the wind had opinions. Marianne saw it first at dusk from the top of the long drive.

A great grey house with sixty windows, and eleven of them lit.

Eleven. She counted, because counting was how she thought.

“It is larger than it needs to be,” the Duke said beside her.

It was the first thing he had volunteered in two days.

“Most things are,” said Marianne.

Inside, the house was warm where people used it and cold everywhere else — the particular chill of a great house lived in by one man. There were two dining rooms. She was shown both: the small one, where his grace took his meals, and the long one, which had not been opened since the old Duke’s time, and in which a hundred and forty candles waited in the dark for somebody to have a reason.

Mrs. Peele, the housekeeper, was sixty, and kind, and had the keys of the place on a ring at her waist. She had been at Coldir since before Marianne was born. She showed her the west wing, the gallery, the linen rooms, the still room, the room where the estate books were kept, and she was warm about all of it.

And when they came to the end of the east corridor — where a door stood at the finish of it, with the brass gone dull — Mrs. Peele walked past without slowing.

“And that’s the old part, your grace. We don’t go along there.”

She said it in exactly the voice one uses for a thing that has been said so often it has stopped being a sentence.

Marianne looked back once as they went.

There was no dust on the floor outside that door.

Somebody swept it.

Lord Ambrose Blackwood came to dine on her third night, and Marianne liked him at once — which she would think about a great deal later.

He was thirty-seven, easy, funny, and had the trick of making a stranger feel long established. He knew the name of every tenant on the estate and something true about most of them. He apologised for the north, then defended it, then apologised again. He told her that Coldir had eaten three housekeepers and a French chef, and that if she got through her first winter here she could get through anything.

He had, he said cheerfully, spent his whole life expecting to inherit the place, and was frankly relieved to be let off.

Later, when the port came round and Marianne had gone to the far end of the room to look at the pictures, she heard him say to his cousin, in the warm voice of a man being kind:

“You’ve chosen well, Nathaniel. Truly. A sensible woman is a great deal safer than one a man might actually love.”

She did not hear a reply.

She heard, instead, the small sound of a glass being set down before it had been drunk from.

Their marriage was consummated because it had been agreed to, and it was done with courtesy, and afterwards he did not stay.

He was not unkind. That would have been simpler. He was gentle in the way a man is gentle with something that belongs to someone else. And when it was over he stood at the window with his back to the room for a while, and then said good night in a voice like a door closing, and went.

Marianne lay in the dark of an unfamiliar house and understood that she had married a man who was going to be perfectly good to her forever.

And that this was going to be much harder than cruelty.

Their days took a shape within a fortnight.

They breakfasted separately. He rode out at eight. She had the household from nine. They dined at seven, in the small dining room, at a table that seated fourteen, from opposite ends of it — so that a civil remark had to be made twice, once at conversational volume and then again, louder, for the room.

After the third night, they stopped making civil remarks.

He never touched her in passing. Not once. A husband of six weeks will put a hand on his wife’s back going through a door, or take her elbow on a stair, without either of them noticing. He did not. He held doors and stood back. There was always eighteen inches of air.

He wore gloves indoors more often than he needed to.

And still — this was the thing she could not fit anywhere — he was not absent. He answered every question she put to him, fully, at once. He never made her ask twice. When she was wrong he told her she was wrong, which she found she preferred to being managed.

He was, in every measurable respect, an excellent husband.

He simply lived behind eighteen inches of air, and she could not find the door.

It was in the third week that she stopped believing in his coldness.

Mrs. Peele came in at breakfast with a small piece of good news: Sarah Bligh down at Low Fold had had her baby in the night, a boy, and both of them well. Mrs. Peele was pleased and said so, in the way of a woman who had known the family thirty years.

“Send the usual,” said the Duke, and turned a page.

That was all. It was the correct response, given in the correct tone, and Mrs. Peele went out satisfied.

Marianne sat with her tea going cold in her hand and watched her husband not read a newspaper for one minute and fifty seconds.

His hand had stopped on the page. He did not turn it again. And when at last he did, he turned two at once and did not notice.

Marianne put down her cup very quietly.

That is not a man who feels nothing, she thought. That is a man holding something shut with both hands.

It should have been a comfort, and in a way it was. She stopped being angry with him from that morning and never really started again. Whatever had been done to the Duke of Coldir had been done long before she arrived, and she was not going to punish a man for a wound she could not see.

But she was clear-eyed, and she took the second half of the thought with her too, because Marianne Ellsworth had never allowed herself the comfort of half a thought.

It has nothing to do with me.

Whatever was behind that door, and whatever was behind the man, she was not the key to it. She was the arrangement. She was the sensible choice. She was the clause in the settlement that came after the annuity.

She had a house to run, and she was very good at running houses.

And she got up and went to run it.