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 5

Marianne thanked her, and meant it, and went upstairs, and went along the east corridor, and put her hand on the brass.

The key was on the housekeeper’s ring, and the housekeeper had gone down to the still room, and Marianne Ellsworth had been running households since she was nineteen and knew exactly where every key in every house she had ever lived in was kept.

The room was cold and clean and completely still.

There was a bed with the hangings down. There was a chair by the window at the angle a woman leaves a chair. There was a portrait over the mantel, turned to face the wall, with the cord still on the hook and the dust swept from underneath it.

And on the table by the bed, squared to the edge, there was a physician’s daybook.

Marianne opened it. The hand was neat and hurried. Her grace, second night. Times, observations she did not fully understand and understood enough.

The last entry began: At 4:00, I informed his grace — and stopped.

The pen had gone through the paper.

There was nothing after it. Twenty-nine years of nothing after it.

Marianne stood in the cold with the book in her hands and understood exactly one thing, and it was not enough, and it was more than she had had that morning.

It is not the make of them. It is not the weather. Something was done to a boy of six in this corridor, and everybody in this house has agreed to call it a temperament.

She put the book back, squared to the edge. She left the portrait facing the wall, because it was not hers to turn. She locked the door behind her and put the key back on the ring, and told nobody, and went down to dinner and sat at the far end of a table that seated fourteen, and looked at her husband, and did not ask.

Marianne found it in April, by candlelight, with a bandaged hand. Not because she was suspicious. Because she was thorough.

She had rebuilt the relief fund in February and she wanted to know what the flood had cost.

The flood had cost four hundred and twelve pounds.

The fund said six hundred and ninety.

The difference had gone out in three payments to a name she did not know.

She sat back. She did it again in the morning, with the older books, going back four years, and the shape came up out of the columns.

She took it to Ambrose, because Ambrose was the person one took things to.

He was marvellous about it. He looked at every page. He frowned in the right places. He said Sedgley was a name he half knew — some agent of the Heatherington estate, he thought — and that this had all the hallmarks of the old steward, poor devil, who had died in ’09 owing money everywhere. And that the honest answer was that Coldir’s books had been a shambles since the old Duke’s time and were only now, thanks to her, being made to behave.

“Take it to Nathaniel by all means,” he said warmly. “Only may I say one thing as a friend? Please. He will not thank you.”

Ambrose sat back.

“He is not an unkind man. He is a contained one. He has arranged his life as a set of departments, and when a thing steps out of its department, he shuts down. You have run his house better than it has been run in a century. He will be grateful. He will pay you the compliment of taking you seriously, and he will not come one inch further towards you than he has already come.”

He smiled.

“That is not a threat, my dear. It is a kindness. I have known him since he was six.”

Since he was six.

“Once you give him an heir,” said Ambrose gently, “he will have everything he required, and he is a man of his word. So he will keep every promise he made you, to the letter, for forty years.”

He said it kindly. That was the thing about Ambrose. Everything he said was kind, and nothing he said was untrue, and all of it together was a lie the size of a house.

Then he went in to his cousin, and over the port he was troubled about something and did not want to say it, and had to be pressed, and at last admitted that he had heard the Duchess speaking to the steward about the entail — about what a mother’s position at Coldir would be. That she had been thorough. Very thorough. As she was about everything.

“She is thorough,” said the Duke of Coldir.

“She is remarkable,” said Ambrose. “I only mean, one forgets sometimes what she was brought here to do.”

“She hasn’t forgotten. Why should she?”

He found her asleep over the ledgers in the estate room at one in the morning, in April, with her cheek on four years of accounts and the candle burnt to a stub.

He stood in the doorway a while. Then he took off his coat and put it over her.

And she woke. Of course she woke. Nobody has ever successfully put a coat over a sleeping woman.

And for a moment neither of them was armoured, because it was one o’clock in the morning, and there is nobody to perform for at one o’clock in the morning.

“You should be in bed,” he said.

“So should you. I don’t sleep much.”

“No,” said Marianne. “I know.”

The candle moved. She sat up with his coat round her shoulders, and it smelled of horse and cold air and him, and she thought quite clearly: I am going to ask him now, and I may not have the courage again.

“Nathaniel.”

He went very still. She had used his name perhaps four times in five months.

“Why me?”

“I beg your pardon.”

“You could have married anyone in England. There were girls of nineteen with forty thousand pounds who would have been delivered to your door by Thursday. And you got into a carriage in November and drove four days to a wet house in Berkshire to offer a settlement to a twenty-eight-year-old woman with a bankrupt father and mended gloves.”

She kept her voice level.

“You are the most exact man I have ever met. You do not do things by accident. Why me?”

And here is what the Duke of Coldir nearly said.

He nearly said: Three winters ago, at a house in Bath I did not want to be in, I watched a woman I did not know put herself between an old servant and a room full of people who outranked them both, and settle it in nine words, and go back to her seat. And she never once looked round to see who had noticed.

I have been looked at my whole life. I have never in my life been in a room with somebody who did not check.

I asked your name. I have known it for three years.

He nearly said it. She saw him nearly say it — saw the whole thing come up behind his face and stand there. Because to say it would be to admit she had mattered before the settlement. And if she had mattered before the settlement, then the settlement was not the reason. And if the settlement was not the reason, he had no defences at all — and he had spent twenty-nine years building them.

“You were suitable,” said the Duke of Coldir.

Marianne sat quite still for a moment.

Then she said, “Yes. Of course.”

And gave him back his coat, folded, and thanked him for it, and took her candle, and went up.

He stood in the estate room by himself for a long time afterwards with his hand over his mouth.