Every Lady Tried to Impress the Duke—Only One Asked, “Are You Tired?”

Chapter 14

The winter ended, but the courtship’s autumn, so to speak, had only begun to change color.

Marcus had returned from the assembly with the county’s mythology revised in his favor, and with something far more delicate in his keeping: the knowledge that she had told him the truth of her history in the middle of a waltz, unprompted and unprotected, and that the telling had cost her more than the keeping would have. He did not mention it. He did not bring it up in the carriage, or the small front room, or at any of the winter walks that followed, because he understood that the gift he had been given was not a confidence to be examined but a door to be left open.

Instead, he attended to the small machinery of devotion.

He saw that the roof of the Linden house was repaired before the February rains—through the agency of the vicar, whose offer to “undertake parish maintenance” no one thought to question. He saw that the woodpile at the back of the white house was never empty, and that the larder, in the lean weeks of late winter, had a way of acquiring joints of meat and sacks of flour whose origins the family politely declined to investigate. He did not do these things in silence—the county would have found them out within a week regardless—but he did them without fanfare, in the way of a man who has decided that a beloved’s comfort is the most natural form of attention, and therefore needs no authorship.

Eleanor found him out.

It was her mother who told her, in the end, with the particular pride of a woman who has spent her life teaching her daughter the language of men and must now admit that she was outbid by a pupil. “A duke who repairs your roof, Eleanor, and does not tell you about it, is a duke who intends to stay. I should have liked to have been consulted—the vicar is a gossip and the wood merchants are worse—but I am not entirely a fool, and I have been watching his boots for signs of wear since November.”

Eleanor did not confront him directly. She was learning his dialect, the same way he was learning hers, and confrontation was not in it. Instead, one cold afternoon in February, she walked with him down the lane to the church, and in the shelter of the yew tree, she said: “You do not have to purchase my comfort with your silence, Marcus. I have noticed. I have noticed the roof, and the wood, and the fact that the vicar suddenly has strong opinions about parish maintenance.”

“Mrs. Quill tells me I overdo it,” he said, mildly. “She says a gentleman should not mow a parish’s lawns in his own person, however inconspicuous the mower.”

“Mrs. Quill is an excellent adviser, and you have not answered me.”

He walked a few paces before answering, and when he did, it was with the particular care of a man who had been rehearsing the answer for some time.

“I come from a world,” he said, “in which generosity is a transaction. I was raised to understand that the kind of giving that counts is the kind that can be shown at dinner parties. And then I met a woman who told me, in a freezing garden, at the turn of the year, that she would rather be poor in a cold house than rich in a dishonest one. It was the most expensive sentence I have ever heard anyone say, and it taught me a thing I had not previously known: that the giving which matters cannot be itemized.” He stopped, and turned to her. “You will ask me, I think, why I did not simply tell you about the roof and the wood.”

“I will not,” she said. “I have already worked it out.”

“Ah.”

“You did not tell me because telling turns a gift into a claim. And I have told you, in the middle of a waltz, that I was tired of being claimed. You have been learning the difference all winter, very patiently, and I thought I should tell you that I have noticed that, too.”

They stood a moment in the cold, under the yew, and the world was very quiet.

“Your father,” Marcus said at last, “has not asked me once about my intentions. Every man in the county has asked me about my intentions, including men I have never met at dinner parties. Your father asks me about drainage, and the price of feed, and whether I have read the book you have recommended, and I find it”—he looked at her—”impossible to describe how restful that is.”

“My father knows what it is to be worth nothing, and to be loved anyway,” Eleanor said. “He does not need to ask what anybody intends, because he does not intend anything himself, and he has found that the love he receives from that position is the only love worth having.”

“Then I shall endeavor to deserve it.”

She looked at him, and there was something in her face he had never seen before—not the careful attention of autumn, not the wary pleasure of winter, but something altogether less defended: the look of a woman who was beginning, at last, to believe her own judgment.

“Marcus,” she said.

“Yes?”

“When the spring comes,” she said, “and the roads dry, and the world remembers how to be kind, I should like you to take me to Marnfeld. I should like to see the chairs.”

He was quiet so long that she thought she had misheard herself, and then he laughed—a full, startled, unpracticed laugh that scattered the rooks from the church roof—and he said: “They are still there, Eleanor. They have been there all winter, painful and beautiful and entirely unchanged, waiting for a woman who appreciates them in exactly the right degree.”

“Then I shall be exact,” she said.

And she took his arm, and they walked back down the lane in the falling dusk, and the county, which had watched them all winter from every window in Brackley, noted that the duke’s stride, which had carried his thirty-six years with the particular tightness of a man perpetually braced against something, had loosened, and loosened, until he walked beside the girl in the pale blue dress the way other men walked—as if the world were not a purchase to be transacted, but simply a road, and they were on it, together.