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

Chapter 15

The first day of March was a Sunday, and the roads were dry, and Marcus came for Eleanor in the early morning.

He drove her himself—not in the great state carriage that had been seen at the assembly, but in the smaller gig he used for estate business, with the hood folded down so that she could see everything. She sat beside him in a dress the color of pale barley, with her gloves folded in her lap and her bonnet ribbons snapping in the wind, and she looked at the countryside as though she had never been allowed to see it: the hedgerows beginning to thicken, the larks ascending, the pied haze of early green spreading over the plowland.

“Every man in the county,” she said, “will know I have been driven here alone in your gig.”

“Every man in the county already knows you are being courted by a duke who repairs your roof in secret,” he said. “The gig will hardly shock them. Although I confess the proceeding has its full complement of scandal attached.”

“Then we must give them something real to talk about,” she said, and she smiled at him in a way that made him nearly lose the reins.

Marnfeld Hall stood in its chalky crown above the sea, the pale stone catching the March light as it had caught every March light for three hundred years. It was not beautiful in any gentle sense—it was impressive, which was a different word with a different weight—and Eleanor stood in the gravel circle at the foot of the great steps and looked up at the marching windows, the towers, the vast pale acreage of roof, and felt the smallness of herself arrive properly for the first time.

“It is not possible,” she said, “to grow up ordinary and then marry this. It is like a grapevine marrying the hill.”

“The hill has been waiting a long time for the vine,” Marcus said. “It has been standing here being impressive in exactly this direction, at exactly this time of day, for the whole of my life, and I have never once had the pleasure of seeing anyone look at it the way you are looking at it now.”

“Which way is that?”

“Like it is not the point of you.”

Eleanor took his arm, and they walked up the steps together, and the great doors opened before them, and she stepped over the threshold of Marnfeld Hall for the second time in her life—first as one of eight women hoping not to hope, now as herself—and found that the threshold did not, as she had feared, change her.

The housekeeper, Mrs. Quill, was waiting in the hall with a face carefully assembled and dangerously close to tears. “Miss Linden,” she said. “Welcome home.”

“I am not home yet, Mrs. Quill.”

“You are, child. You always were. It simply took the rest of us a while to notice.” She pressed a small lavender sachet into Eleanor’s hand—the same hand, the same lavender as the autumn morning—and withdrew before the dampness in her eyes could become a matter of record.

Marcus toured her through the state rooms with a particular, gentle irreverence: here the drawing room where the chairs had carried out their long experiment in elegant cruelty; here the library, where she had stood with a book she had not been reading; here the ballroom, unopened since his father’s death, where the dust lay in gray furrows on the parquet and the chandeliers hung like frozen cascades.

“I have been thinking,” he said, in the ballroom, with the dust motes turning in the light from the tall windows, “what you said, at dinner in October, when my mother asked what each lady would bring to her marriage.”

“I said peace. I remember.”

“I have been wondering whether that is a thing a house can be taught.” He gestured at the great empty room. “This place has been run for three generations on display. My mother has always believed that the purpose of a great house is to be seen—that its beauty must be worn like armor, and its warmth kept for the privileged few. She was taught that by her mother, and her mother by hers, and I am not sure anyone in my family has ever asked whether there is a difference between the armor and the skin.” He turned to her. “When I imagined coming home to you, Eleanor, I imagined this hall with the furniture rearranged, so that people could sit in the corners and talk to each other instead of performing. I imagined fires in rooms that are never opened, and the library left in comfortable disorder, and the doors left unbolted.” He smiled. “I have begun to be a very radical thinker in my old age.”

“You are not old.”

“I am thirty-six. I have spent thirty-six years being exactly what the room required.” He looked at her. “I should like a few decades, now, of being exactly what the moment required. That is what I mean to ask you, Eleanor, in this empty ballroom, with the dust settling: whether you would be willing to live with me in the most impractical way, in the most impractical house in five counties, and let me learn—slowly, without the county watching—to stop being a duke and start being a husband.”

She was quiet for a moment, and the dust turned in the light.

“You have not asked me,” she said, “what I intend to bring.”

“I assumed you would tell me.”

“I intend to bring peace,” she said, “and I intend to install it in the chairs, and I intend to stand at the end of this hall in the evenings”—she looked at the long, empty, filthy perfection of the ballroom—”and teach the chandeliers to glow without being inspected.”

“Then we shall be a pair of radical thinkers.”

“I have been,” she said, “ever since I met a man who was tired, and let me notice it.”

They stood in the middle of the empty ballroom, in the gray March light, and the distance between them was exactly the distance a person needs in order to choose.

“Eleanor.” Marcus’s voice had gone low. “I intend to ask you properly, and soon, with all the ceremony the situation deserves. But I want you to know what I am going to ask before I ask it, so that you may have time to refuse it with dignity, without the pressure of my presence.”

“I am quite used to refusing things with dignity,” she said. “You have witnessed my technique.”

“Then let me be plain. When I ask you, it will not be as a duke asking a suitable woman to complete his establishment. It will be as a man—a tired, particular, demanding man, with a house full of chairs that have opinions”—he paused, and something in his face gave way, entirely, to the truth he had been carrying since October—”asking the only person who has ever seen him clearly, to be quiet beside him for the rest of their lives.”

She looked at him a long time, and the dust turned in the light between them.

“When you ask me,” she said, “I should like it to be here. In this room. With the dust and the chandeliers, and no one to perform for.”

“Then here is where I shall ask.”

“And I shall have the answer ready,” she said, “in the meaning of the word yes—which I believe I will have practiced, by then, a number of times, alone, in the dark, where no one can see me practicing it.”

He laughed, and the laugh echoed off the empty walls of the ballroom, and the echo was not the laugh of a duke performing for an assembly but the laugh of a man unbraced, and Eleanor thought that she had never heard a sound so expensive, and that she would know it anywhere for the rest of her life.