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 7

The second thing is Marianne.

She had been unwell for eleven days, and told nobody, because she had put it down to the flood, and then to the travelling, and then to the heat of a London May after a northern winter.

She had been so extremely busy being happy that she had not done the one piece of arithmetic she had been doing on her own behalf, faithfully, without fail, for fifteen years.

She did it standing under nine hundred candles with a glass in her hand, while a woman she had never met said, loudly enough for the room:

“Six months, my dear. And such an old family. One does feel for him. I always say a duke who marries for a nursery should at least look at the stock.”

And Marianne stood there and counted back.

March.

She counted again, because she did not believe it.

March.

She remembered afterwards that the first thing she felt was not joy and it was not fear. It was a kind of grief, so sudden and so exact that it took her breath — because she had had, for eleven days, the only thing she had ever wanted, which was to be wanted for nothing at all.

And now she had something to give him.

And she knew exactly what a house like that does to a woman the moment she has something to give it.

He said it. She thought it before he could possibly have known. Whatever happens now, he said it first. Hold on to that.

That is the third thing.

Because when Marianne Ellsworth set down her glass on a passing tray and started across Lady Haridan’s ballroom towards her husband — through three hundred people who thought they were watching a baron’s daughter make a dignified escape from an insult — she was going to tell him.

She got nine steps.

You know the rest.

The glass turned. The room tipped. Forty feet of crowded floor in the time it took a wine glass to fall.

And he caught her, and the glass broke where she would have been.

It was the second time in six weeks that the Duke of Coldir had caught his wife. Nobody in that room knew about the first. Nobody in that room knew that this man had been on his knees in six inches of Amberly mud, saying not you to the air.

They only knew that the coldest man in England had moved like something falling, and had a woman on the floor in his arms, and that his famously uninhabited face was not uninhabited at all.

The physician knelt. He rose. He said, “Your grace, the Duchess is with child.”

And the room let out its breath and began delightedly to congratulate him.

And the Duke of Coldir looked down at his wife — white on the boards of a ballroom, in a house full of people applauding an heir — and saw a locked door at the end of a corridor, and a chair by a window at the angle a woman leaves a chair, and a physician’s daybook with the last entry stopped halfway through a word.

“Will she live?”

He said it to three hundred people, and every one of them heard the wrong question.

You have just heard the right one.

Lord Ambrose Blackwood was already at the doors, and he was not distressed and he was not delighted. He was doing arithmetic.

He had been the presumptive heir of Coldir for twenty-nine years. He had been in an unpleasant position for six months. And as of eleven o’clock that evening he was in a fatal one — because everything he had built rested on there being no child, and there was now going to be a child, and it was going to be born in January.

He had until January.

And in a drawer in a house four miles from Coldir, there was a string he had not yet pulled.

They went north within the week, at a pace that made the coachman unhappy. Dr. Ferris came up from London three days later, at a fee that would have kept the schoolroom in coal for nine years.

He examined the Duchess of Coldir for an hour and a half. Then he came down to the study and shut the door.

And Marianne, who was upstairs being told to rest by a housekeeper who had waited twenty-nine years for a baby in that house, did not hear one word of what follows.

“You will tell me,” said the Duke.

“She is a healthy woman of eight-and-twenty,” said Dr. Ferris. “And I would say every encouraging thing to you if I did not think you would rather have the truth.”

“I would rather have the truth.”

“Then I am not easy.”

The physician chose his words the way a man crosses a river on stones.

“The faintness. The way she carries. One or two things I will not trouble you with. In four cases out of five, this comes to nothing at all, and she is brought to bed in January, and you have a fine child and I look a fool. It is not the four cases that concern me, your grace. It is the fifth.”

“Say it.”

“If it goes badly, it will go badly quickly. And in that room, at that hour, there is sometimes a choice to be made — and there is no time to make it then. Whatever answer you would give me at four in the morning in January, I should like to have it now, in daylight, in writing. So that I am not standing in a doorway looking at your face.”

The Duke of Coldir did not answer for a long moment.

“There is no choice to make,” he said. “Her. Always her. If it comes to it, you will not even ask me. Do you understand? You will not come out of that room to ask me. You will save my wife.”

“Your grace. The succession. Halloway is in the house.”

“You will have it in writing before you dine,” said the Duke.

And he sent for his solicitor, and he signed it, and it went into the strong box in the estate room.

And he did not tell his wife, because he could not say the words if it goes badly out loud to her face.

And because he was thirty-five years old and six years old at the same time, standing in a corridor listening to a door.