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 6

She took him the books anyway.

She thought about Ambrose’s kindness for two days and then put it aside, because Marianne Ellsworth had never been able to know a true thing and sit on it.

She went into the estate room on the last Friday in April with four years of accounts under her arm and said:

“Nathaniel. Somebody has been stealing from you, and I can prove it, and you are not going to like where it goes.”

He did not laugh at her. He did not send for the steward to check her. He did not say are you quite sure?

He said, “Show me.”

And cleared the table with his forearm.

They were there until three in the morning.

He was fast — faster than her on the law of it, slower on the arithmetic — and by midnight he had stopped asking her to explain and started thinking out loud in front of her, which is a thing a man like that does for perhaps four people in his life.

By two he had gone very quiet.

By three he had the three Sedgley payments in front of him in a row, and his hands flat on the table on either side of them, and he was looking at the wall.

“You knew,” said Marianne. “Before tonight. You knew something.”

“No.” A muscle moved in his jaw. “I trusted the wrong man for nine years and called it family. That’s a different thing. And it’s worse.”

He straightened.

“Halloway comes north tomorrow. Nobody else hears this. Not Peele, not the steward, not anyone. Do you understand what I am asking you to do? To say nothing, to a man I like, and dine with him, and be pleasant.”

“Yes.”

“Then yes,” said Marianne.

And began putting the books straight, because it was three in the morning and there was nothing else useful to be done.

And the Duke of Coldir said, “What do you want?”

She looked up.

“For this. You have just found something in my house that four men were paid to find and did not name. It is not a small thing, and I would rather not be in your debt.”

And Marianne, because she was tired, and because it was three in the morning, and because it was the only answer she had ever had, said:

“Nothing. It’s my house, too. You said so in the settlement.”

Something went across his face that she had never seen there before. It was not gratitude, and it was not surprise.

It looked absurdly like grief.

“No,” he said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“No. Not this time.”

He came round the table.

“Sit down, Marianne. I am going to say several things badly, and I would like to get to the end of them.”

She sat down.

“You have run this house better in five months than it has been run in a hundred years. You know the name of every soul on this land. You put a stove in a schoolroom that four stewards left cold. You opened a room in this house that has been dark since my father’s time and filled it with tenants at three in the morning. You went back up a hill for a deaf woman nobody in my employ had troubled to learn was deaf.”

He stopped.

“Tonight you have very likely saved this estate. And I want you to understand that not one moment of any of it is the reason.”

Marianne did not move.

“Three winters ago I was in Bath, at a house I did not wish to be in, waiting for a man who was late. There was a woman in the next room who was not important, and an old servant who had done something clumsy, and a great deal of laughter about it. And a woman I had never seen got up and stood in front of him and settled the whole thing in nine words and sent him out with his dignity in one piece, and sat back down.”

He stopped again.

“And she did not look round.”

The candle moved on the table between them.

“I have never been able to put that down. Everybody looks round. I have been looked at since I was six years old. Every room I enter arranges itself around me, and I have never once been in a room with a person who did not check to see who was watching. You did not check. You did not know I was there. You have never known I was there.”

His voice was not quite steady.

“I asked what your name was before I left the house. I have known it for three years.”

The candle guttered.

“You asked me why you,” said the Duke of Coldir. “And I told you that you were suitable. And that is the single most cowardly thing I have ever said to another human being. And I have been standing in that room ever since.”

He looked at her.

“You were not suitable. You were the only one.”

Marianne discovered that she could not see very well.

“So no. Not nothing. Not from you. Not anymore.”

He put both hands flat on the table, as though he needed them.

“And I will tell you the rest of it, because you should have it. If you never lifted another ledger. If you never saved this estate a penny. If you never gave this house one more thing as long as you live. I would still want you at that table in the morning. That is not payment for services. There is nothing to pay for. It is simply the case. And it has been the case for some time. And I have been extremely careful not to say so.”

“Why?” said Marianne.

And he said, “I cannot tell you yet.”

And she let him have it. That was the extraordinary thing. She thought about it a great deal afterwards — that she looked at a man who had just said the only words she had wanted since she was nineteen, and who was plainly terrified, and she did not press him.

“Then don’t,” she said. “Not tonight.”

The next evening they dined at seven in the small dining room, at the table that seated fourteen, and Marianne came in and walked past her own chair at the far end and sat down at the place on his right.

Neither of them said one word about it.

The Duke of Coldir passed his wife the salt and asked her opinion of the roof at Low Fold, and they talked until the candles were low. If anyone had come in, they would have seen two people at the near end of a very long table, close enough that neither of them had to raise their voice.

That was the twenty-ninth of April.

The invitation to Lady Haridan’s ball had come from London a week before, and Marianne had accepted it, because a Duchess of Coldir who never went south would be a story — and Marianne had had enough of being a story.

They left on the eleventh of May.

There are three things in that ballroom you could not have seen the first time.

The first is Ambrose, who had come south with them, and who spent the first hour of Lady Haridan’s ball being enormously good company to a woman called Lady Ottoline Vane.

Lady Ottoline was sixty-one, and immaculate, and celebrated for it. She had made and unmade eleven reputations in that room over thirty years, and she did it for sport, the way other people did cards.

Ambrose did not tell her anything. He never told anyone anything. He simply mentioned, in the middle of an entirely different story, that his cousin had been married rather more than six months now — and let the sentence lie there like a coin on a table.

Lady Ottoline picked it up within the minute.

Because that is what she was for.