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 8

What Marianne saw was this.

She saw a husband who, from the day the physician came, ceased entirely to be the man who had passed her the salt at the near end of the table.

He cancelled the London house. He cancelled the autumn engagements. He stopped her riding, then stopped her walking to the village. Then, after a bad morning in June, stopped her going down to Low Fold at all.

He had a second physician up from York and did not tell her why. He asked Mrs. Peele twice a day what the Duchess had eaten.

He moved his own room to the one next to hers, and slept badly in it.

And he stopped touching her entirely. Not a hand on her back through a door. Not her fingers. Nothing. He would come as far as the arm of her chair and stop there, as though there were a line drawn on the carpet.

He has what he needed, said a voice in Marianne in the dark in July. That is all this is.

And she fought it, because she was not a fool, and because she had heard him in the estate room in April and had promised herself she would hold on to it whatever happened.

She held on through May. She held on through June. By the end of July she was holding on the way you hold a rope in cold water.

It broke on a Tuesday, over nothing, as these things do.

Over a shawl.

He came into the morning room and put it round her shoulders without a word — the way one covers a piece of furniture — and turned to go.

And Marianne heard herself say, “Do you know you have not looked at me since London?”

He stopped in the doorway.

“That is not true.”

“You look at the fire and ask if I am warm. You look at my plate. You look at the stairs, Nathaniel, as though they had insulted you.”

She stood up.

“You have not looked at me since a physician came out of my bedroom, and I have been telling myself a story about why for eleven weeks, and I am too tired to keep telling it. So tell me a better one.”

She was not shouting. She never shouted. It was somehow worse.

“What is behind that door?”

And the Duke of Coldir stood with his hand on the frame, and told her.

He told her that his mother had died in that room when he was six, with a baby that did not live, in the second night of it. That he had been in the corridor. That nobody had thought to move him, and he had heard all of it — and that the sound he remembered was not hers.

It was the sound his father made afterwards in the doorway.

Which was no sound at all.

He told her that his father had been the most cheerful man in Amberly, and had loved his wife with an entire lack of dignity that the county found amusing — and that on the morning after the funeral he had gone into the library and had not, in any way that mattered, come out of it for eleven years. That the man went on being a duke. Courteous. Exact. Punctual. Hollow. Until he died of nothing in particular at fifty-two.

“And when I was nine,” he said, “he took me along that corridor once. He stood me in front of that door and told me he had made one mistake in his life — and that it was not marrying her. It was letting himself need her.”

His voice was completely level.

“Never give anybody that power over you, Nathaniel. He said it kindly. He thought he was saving me a great deal of trouble.”

He was still holding the door frame.

“He was right about one thing,” said the Duke of Coldir. “It does give them the power. She never lifted a finger against him. She simply died on a Tuesday, and he was gone for eleven years. And I have spent twenty-nine of them making absolutely certain that could never be done to me.”

Marianne crossed the room.

“Nathaniel. I am not going to die.”

And he looked at her at last. Really looked, for the first time in eleven weeks.

And she saw, with horror, that he did not believe her.

“No,” he said. “Of course not.”

And he went out.

Dr. Ferris came up again in September, and Mr. Halloway came with him — because Mr. Halloway had by then spent four months quietly assembling a case against a man he dined with.

Marianne was working in the estate room most days that autumn. It was the one thing her husband had not taken away from her. He had stopped her riding and walking and travelling and lifting, and had left her the books. And she thought bitterly, on her worst afternoons, that of course he had left her the books, because the books were useful.

She came down the passage on the fourteenth of September with a box of papers on her hip, and the study door was not quite shut.

She heard four sentences. She stopped, because everybody stops.

“Then I must have it clearly, your grace, since we are altering the other provisions.”

“Halloway.”

“And if it comes to a choice, the instruction stands. You are certain.”

“It has stood since June,” said her husband, “and it will stand in January, and I do not intend to discuss it again.”

Marianne walked on down the passage very carefully, the way one walks with a box.

She got as far as the estate room, and set it down, and stood with both hands on the table.

Provisions. Instructions since June.

Since June. Since the week Ferris came. Since the day her husband stopped touching her.

She opened the box, because the box was work, and work was the last honest thing she had, and she began to sort the Sedgley papers into the order Halloway wanted them.

She found it eleven pages down.