Every Lady Tried to Impress the Duke—Only One Asked, “Are You Tired?”
Chapter 22
The village of Brackley had never seen anything like the spring of the following year.
The new Duchess — who had, by then, occupied the position for nearly a year and had never once been observed to perform a ducal duty she did not actually mean — gave the village a new roof for the schoolhouse, a new wing for the almshouses, and, most remarkably, a standing order of the sort that villages never forget: that Marnfeld Hall was to be open for the summer, on the first Thursday of every month, to the families of the parish, so that children could run in the corridors where dukes had been running for three centuries, and sit in chairs that no longer pinched, and be told, by the Duke and Duchess themselves, the story of how the furniture came to be comfortable again.
It was on the first of these afternoons, in May, that the story arrived full circle.
Eleanor stood in the great hall with a cup of lemonade and a lapful of inquiries, watching her husband explain the mechanism of a grandfather clock to a boy of seven whose father had driven the delivery cart at the house for forty years. The boy was pulling at Marcus’s sleeve, asking whether the clock could tell the time underwater, and Marcus was kneeling beside him in his shirt sleeves, in the middle of the oldest hall in the county, taking the question with complete seriousness.
“Let us examine the evidence together,” he said. “Clocks have been known to swim —”
“Marcus.” Eleanor’s voice carried across the hall, and he looked up. “I believe the cook would like to speak to you about the quantity of the trifle, and the answer is whichever quantity you believe correct, and I am delegating it to you because I have a line of children waiting to know whether the fish in the lake have names.”
The cook, standing behind her with a tray, raised an eyebrow at the Duke.
“Some of them do,” Marcus said, to the general assembly of children. “The large red one is called Your Grace, because I am too large for the lake, and it is the only title I have ever properly deserved.” And he went off toward the kitchens, pursued by a pack of children, leaving Eleanor with the pair of almshouse widows and the entire apparatus of the county’s affection arranged, temporarily, at her feet.
“He is a wonder, your husband,” said one of the widows. “How did you come to meet him, if you don’t mind the question?”
“He was at a dinner,” Eleanor said. “There were eight of us women, and I was the only one who asked whether the Duke of Marnfeld was tired. It was the most astonishing breach of etiquette I had ever committed. I have been living with the consequences ever since, and I have found that sometimes one honest question, asked at exactly the right time, can reach a man who has been waiting his whole life to hear it.”
The widow looked after the Duke, who was now demonstrating the correct skipping technique for the benefit of a little girl in a blue pinafore, and said: “It was the right question, then? The one you asked?”
“It was,” said Eleanor. “It is the only question I have ever asked that cost me nothing but an evening and gave me a life.”