Every Lady Tried to Impress the Duke—Only One Asked, “Are You Tired?”
Chapter 23
The second baby — for there was a first, a girl, born in November of the second year, to the general collapse of the household’s dignified reserve — was born in the third year of the marriage, at the end of the summer, and the county arranged itself, once again, around a Marnfeld event as if it were a local weather system.
The first child had been named Helena, after the Dowager, which the Dowager had accepted with an expression of complete composure and an unprecedented, undignified visit to the nursery at six in the morning. The second, a boy, was named Henry, after Eleanor’s father, and the old man — who had come up from Brackley for the occasion, and who was seen, by the entire household, at the window of the nursery with his hand on the glass as though he could not quite believe it — sat down at dinner that evening and was asked, by the Dowager, how it felt to have his name attached to the succession of Marnfeld Hall.
“It feels,” said Henry Linden, slowly, “like being paid in the only currency that has ever held its value.”
“What is that?”
“Being remembered,” he said, “by the people one’s daughter chose.”
The Dowager looked at him for a long moment across the table, and then she raised her glass — a gesture which, in the Marnfeld household, was understood to carry the force of a treaty — and said: “I believe you are correct, Mr. Linden. And I believe I have been coming to that conclusion for some time now.”
The boy was baptized in the church at Marnfeld in September, with the county in attendance, and the vicar of Brackley presiding over a ceremony notable chiefly for the complete failure of the baby’s uncle — Eleanor’s younger brother, Charles, home from university — to hold the infant in any posture that did not require immediate rescue, and for the Duke’s refusal, afterward, to produce the smallest portion of ceremony.
“He will learn to ride in the rain,” Marcus said, in answer to a question about the boy’s upbringing, “and he will learn to read the ends of novels first, if that is his pleasure, and he will learn that the chairs are uncomfortable only until you change them.”
“Your Grace,” said the county, “what will he learn of dukes?”
He considered this for a moment, with the whole of the county’s attention on him and the September light coming down over the churchyard.
“He will learn,” Marcus said, “that a duke is a man who is permitted to be tired, if he marries the right woman. The rest of it,” he added, “is furniture.”