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 9

It was a clerk’s fair copy, folded once, under a seal she knew as well as her own hand. It was headed: Private instruction, Coldir. Dated the ninth of June.

And the first three lines were exactly what a private instruction from her husband to his solicitor would sound like.

Then it said this.

That the safety of the child was paramount, and was to be preferred before all other considerations. That in the event of a live birth, arrangements concerning the Duchess might be settled thereafter at his grace’s discretion, without her concurrence. That a separate establishment should be prepared at Dacre House, at Wexbridge, against that eventuality. That the child should, in no circumstances, be removed from Coldir.

Marianne read it four times.

She was aware, distantly, that a person in her position was supposed to feel shock, and she waited politely for it, and it did not come.

She was not shocked at all.

She was recognised.

This was simply the shape of the thing she had known since she was nineteen. You are wanted for what you can do. When the doing is finished, so are you. Everything else is manners.

It has stood since June, said her husband’s voice through a door. And it will stand in January.

She folded the paper and put it in her pocket, and went to find him.

She put it on the table in front of him without a word.

He read it. She watched the blood go out of his face — and then she watched something else. Something she had not expected.

Rage.

“Where did you get this?”

“In the Sedgley box.”

“This is not my instruction.”

He was on his feet.

“This is my instruction with two clauses turned round. Marianne — look at me. Somebody has taken a fair copy of a paper I signed in June and reversed it, and put it where you would find it. Whoever did this knew exactly what it would do to you. Which means they know you better than I have any comfort in thinking about. And I can tell you the name in one guess.”

“Then tell me what it says.”

He stopped.

“Nathaniel,” said Marianne — and she was terribly, dangerously calm. “You say this is your paper with the clauses turned round. Very well. I believe you. I have never once known you to lie, and I do not think you are lying now. So tell me what the true one says.”

And here is the moment. Here is the whole marriage standing on the head of a pin.

All he had to say was: Ferris does not think you will come through it. I have instructed that if there is a choice in that room, they are to take you and let the child go. And I have not been able to touch you since June, because every time I do, I have to think about January. And I would rather cut off my own hand than say that sentence out loud to you.

Nine seconds. That is all it would have taken.

And the Duke of Coldir, who had been six years old in a corridor, opened his mouth to say a thing that began if it goes badly —

and could not.

He could not make the sound.

“It is a private arrangement,” he said. “And it has nothing to do with you.”

Marianne laughed. It was not a good laugh.

“Nothing to do with me. That is not what I do.”

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

“You know what you have done since June? You have taken the horses. You have taken the village. You have taken the stairs. You have taken my walking, my travelling, my visiting, and the whole county has been told the Duchess is resting. You have moved into the room next door so you can listen to me breathe. You have not touched me in eleven weeks. And when I ask you one plain question about a paper with my own future in it, you tell me it is private.”

“I am trying to keep you safe.”

“You are trying to keep yourself safe,” said Marianne. “And you have decided to do it by managing me, because managing things is the one thing you have never been frightened of.”

“Marianne, that is not protection.”

“I have been protected before. My father protected me from the state of his affairs for four years, and I found out from the housekeeper. Protection you are not permitted to see the terms of is not protection. It is a very well-appointed cage. I have lived in one my whole life, and I know the smell of it.”

And the Duke of Coldir, who had spent nine months being the most careful man in England, lost his temper for the first time in twenty-nine years.

“And you,” he said. “You have never asked me for one thing in your life. Not one. In November you sat in your father’s house and got Pharaoh House for your sister, and an unassignable annuity for a man who did not deserve it, and a chaperone you approved of. And when I asked what you wanted for yourself, you told me you would be a duchess, and that that was more than you had that morning. And you have not asked me for a single thing since. Not a gown. Not a horse. Not an hour of my time. You found six years of theft in my accounts and I offered you anything in my power, and you said nothing.”

“That is not the same.”

“It is exactly the same.”

He was white.

“You made yourself indispensable to this house in five months, so that you would never have to find out whether you were wanted in it. You built the cage, Marianne. I only paid for the ironwork.”

The clock went on in the hall.

“Yes,” said Marianne quietly. “I know.”

And that took the fight out of him faster than anything else could have — because she had never in her life defended herself against a true thing.

He came round the table.

“Ask me now,” he said. “Ask me for something. Anything. I will give you anything on this earth.”

“Tell me why you chose me.”

“I told you why I chose you in April. Every word of it was true.”

“You told me what you noticed,” said Marianne. “You have never told me why you married it.”

And the Duke of Coldir told her the last of it, standing in his own estate room in September — and it was the worst thing she ever heard.

“Because I was certain,” he said, “that I could never love you.”

The room did not move.

“You were twenty-eight. You were sensible and poor and formidable and entirely unlike anything my father ever looked at. I had watched you for three years, across a room, and admired you the way you admire a good building. And I had it perfectly worked out that a man could marry a woman like that and respect her enormously and do his duty by her, and never once be in the position my father was in on the morning after the funeral.”

He put his hand on the table, because he needed it.

“You were the safe one, Marianne. Out of every woman in England, you were the one I was sure I could survive.”

He said, “And I was wrong within a month. I have been wrong every day since. And every day of it has felt exactly like standing in that corridor. And in January they are going to take you into a room and shut the door, and I am going to be six years old on the other side of it.”

His voice gave.

“And I love you. I love you so much that I cannot breathe properly in this house. And it has not helped either of us at all.”

Marianne stood with her hand on the back of a chair.

She believed him. That was the thing that finished it. If she had thought for one moment he was lying, she could have fought him. She was extremely good at fighting.

But she looked at that ruined, honest, terrified man and believed every word — and understood, with the awful clarity that arrives about ninety seconds too late for anybody’s good, that it changed nothing at all.

“Do you know,” she said, “that this is the first time you have said any of that where anybody could hear it?”

“Marianne — there is an instruction that stands since June. You have just told me so, twice. You say the paper in my pocket is a lie, and I believe you, and you still will not tell me what the true one says.”

She was very calm.

“You love me at three in the morning in an empty study with the candle out. I have never doubted it since April. But loving me where no one can see it is not the same as choosing me. And I have been loved that way before, Nathaniel, by people who meant it just as much as you do. And I have decided — quite recently, in a ballroom, as it happens — that I am not going to spend the rest of my life being somebody’s private arrangement.”

She took her hand off the chair.

“I am going to Pharaoh House. I am not taking anything from you, and I am not taking your child anywhere. It will be born in this house in January, as you require. I am going because I will not live in a cage with a good view.”

She looked at him.

“When you are able to say a true thing in daylight, where somebody might hear it, come and find me.”

He said her name once.

She went out and up, and she was gone by six the next morning — and she did not look back at the house, because she had a great deal of practice at not looking round to see who had noticed.

Pharaoh House in September was damp, and glad to see her, and needed her within four hours.

Her father wept, and then asked, with real anxiety, whether she had brought anything for the roof. Anora — nineteen, and about to have the season Marianne had bought with her own life — held her a long time, and then said carefully that of course Marianne would go back, wouldn’t she? Because of the money.

Everybody in that house needed her by the second day.

Nobody in it asked her how she was.

Well, thought Marianne, sitting up in the cold parlour with her hand on the shelf of her own belly. Here we are again.

It was never cold. It has always been every room I have ever walked into.

And she stayed.

That is the part worth having. She stayed herself. She did not go back for the money. She did not go back because her sister was frightened. She sat in a damp house that needed her and refused to be needed into a cage — and it was the hardest thing she ever did, and nobody clapped.

On the ninth day, a man came to the door about a debt.

He was perfectly polite. He represented, he said, a Mr. Sedgley of Chancery Lane, who held certain paper of Mr. Ellsworth’s. There had been indulgence, of course, given the family’s connection. But the position could not continue indefinitely, and he was sure her grace would wish to —

“Say that name again,” said Marianne.

He said it again.

Her father, wretched, explained that the debts had never in fact gone away. That they had been moved. That he had been told in January it was only a formality, and that he was not to trouble his daughter, who had done enough.

Marianne sat down on the stairs of the house she had sold herself to save.

And in the cold, and the damp, and the ruin of everything, the Duchess of Coldir began very quietly to laugh — because she had spent five months proving that a man was stealing from Coldir, and had never once been able to prove why.

And here it was, standing in her father’s hall with a hat in its hands.

He had not stolen money. Money was incidental.

He had bought the only thing that could ever have made her go back.

And he had been holding it since January. And he had been waiting for the week she left to use it.

She did not weep, and she did not write to her husband.

She sent for paper, and wrote to Mr. Halloway.