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

Chapter 18

The wedding breakfast was held at Marnfeld Hall, in the reopened ballroom.

The chandeliers had been cleaned; the parquet had been polished until it gleamed like still water; the chairs — the famous chairs, the enemy furniture, the entire casus belli of the winter — had been reupholstered in pale blue velvet, and the Dowager Duchess, inspecting them that morning with the particular eye she reserved for surrenders, had said only: “They will do,” which the household understood to mean that she approved completely and would hear no further discussion of the matter.

The county came. They came in their best carriages and their second-best opinions, and they stood about the great ballroom in the May light talking about the weather, and the wedding, and the astonishing fact that the Duke of Marnfeld had married a wine merchant’s daughter from Brackley, and that she had asked him if he was tired at his own mother’s table, and that he had let her.

Lady Amara Colthurst came. She had written to Eleanor first — a short, precise note that took Eleanor two readings to understand — and she came in a gown of pale sea-green, and she bowed to the new Duchess with the same exact courtesy she had once spent on her own campaign, and she said, quietly, so that no one else could hear: “I came to tell you, in front of the entire county, that the best marriage I witnessed this season was made by the only woman who asked a single honest question. I have danced at seventeen weddings, Duchess. This is the first one I intend to remember.”

“You are kind to say so,” Eleanor said.

“I am not kind,” said Amara. “I am accurate. It is a different thing, and has cost me more.”

And she moved on into the crowd with her head high, and Eleanor watched her go, and thought that the winter had been good to them both in unequal measure.

Frederick Ashcombe did not come. His name appeared nowhere on the guest list, and his absence was remarked upon by no one with any consequence, and the velvet box in his waistcoat, which had traveled to Brampton and back, remained where it had been: carried, like a small wound, to every dinner party he attended for the next several months, and shown to no one. The county, which had kept his story for two years in its collective mouth, dropped it the way it drops all stale wares, and by midsummer he had begun to appear in the society papers attached to a different, newer, smaller fortune, and to the young woman who owned it, and to the announcement of an engagement which no one, himself included, wearied himself into believing.

The elderly Marquess of Fenwick, who had known every Duke of Marnfeld for sixty years, and who had drilled himself in the careful avoidance of weddings the way other men drilled themselves in gout, had been lured to this one by the Dowager with the promise of a private table and the particular bottle she kept for him, and he found himself, late in the afternoon, standing beside the newly married couple at the door of the ballroom, holding a glass of something excellent, surveying the room.

“A remarkable gathering, Your Grace,” he said to Marcus. “I have been to a great many of these proceedings, and I must say — you have been remarkably fortunate in your selection.”

“I have,” Marcus said. “Remarkably fortunate.”

“Eight women, I am told, at the autumn gathering.” Lord Fenwick gestured with his glass. “You have chosen well from a most impressive field.”

There was a small pause.

“That is not quite what happened,” Marcus said.

The Marquess lowered his glass, puzzled. “What happened, then?”

Marcus looked down the length of the ballroom to where his wife was standing among her mother and the vicar and the servants who had been kind to her in October, laughing at something Mrs. Quill had said, and he said: “She was the only woman in the room who noticed I was tired.”

Lord Fenwick considered this for a long moment, and then he laughed — a wheezy, appreciative, ancient laugh that startled the nearest footmen.

“Yes,” he said. “I see. Well, my boy, I hope you will not find this an impertinence — but I have been watching you all week, and I believe she is still the only one.” He raised his glass. “It is the only thing, in my experience, that has ever made a marriage.”

He wandered off toward the Dowager, who had been watching the exchange from across the room with the particular attention of a woman who has spent a lifetime reading the room she is in, and who said, as he reached her: “He chose well, in the end, and I am told by everyone who matters that so did she. I feel I should apologize to you, Fenwick, for the autumn. I spent months assembling silks and forgot to ask whether anyone might actually prefer wool.”

“I have always preferred wool myself,” said the Marquess. “The chairs here are notable offenders.” And he touched her arm, which was the sum of what the county could offer a Dowager who had confessed a miscalculation, and she accepted it, which was the sum of what she was willing to take.