“I’ll Marry the First Woman Who Enters,” the Duke Declared— Then She Burst In Chasing a Bird With…

Chapter 13

The six weeks ended on a Thursday, in the middle of a rainstorm, and Clara packed her trunk.

She did it slowly because there was nothing to hurry for. The gowns the dressmaker had made hung in a wardrobe that would belong to somebody else next month. Her books were stacked on the window seat where she had read them, one finger keeping the place, watching him read his own at the other end of the library in the evening without either of them speaking. The necklace lay in its bed of winter stockings in the bottom drawer.

She had promised herself she would not cry in this house. She got as far as the third gown before she had to sit down on the bed and press the heels of her hands against her eyes and breathe like a woman in a cold river.

No pretending this is a love story. She had said that. It had sounded so sensible at the time.

Adrian found her in the bedroom at four o’clock with her trunk roped and her bonnet on.

“You are leaving,” he said.

“You said I could.”

“I did.”

He looked at the luggage. That was all — just looked, with his hands loose at his sides and his face doing nothing at all. It was the most terrible thing she had ever seen.

“That hurt,” Clara said. “Say something.”

He swallowed.

“I don’t want you to go.”

“Then ask me to stay.”

He stepped closer. The rain moved down the window in long fingers.

“I am afraid.”

“Of what?”

“That if I ask, you will think I am using the promise. That you are staying because of a sentence I said in a drawing room like a man throwing a coin into a fountain.” His voice was low and careful, the voice of a man dismantling something that could still explode. “I will not have you spend your life wondering whether you were chosen or caught.”

Clara stared at him.

“You still think,” she said, “that I would stay because of a foolish sentence?”

“No.”

“Then ask.”

He took her hands. His were warm; hers were not.

“Clara.” He stopped, breathed, began again. “I do not want a wife because Ashbourne needs an heir. I do not want a duchess because the county expects one. I do not want someone who fits beside me at dinner and says nothing that costs her anything.” His grip tightened, just slightly. “I want you. I want your arguments. I want the way you move my books to the wrong shelf on purpose so that I have to speak to you about it. I want you correcting my steward and insulting my wallpaper. I want to know what you are thinking when you go quiet at the window. I want to grow old beside the woman who chased a bird into my drawing room and did not apologize for the table.”

Clara laughed, and it came out wet and broken.

“That is a terrible proposal.”

“I know.”

“Try again.”

Adrian Sinclair went down onto one knee in a bedroom with a roped trunk in it and rain hammering the glass behind him, and asked her, properly, whether she would have him.

She covered her mouth with one hand.

“Yes,” she said.

He stood. She kissed him. Then she whispered, against his jaw, “But I am keeping the blue curtains.”

He pulled back. “They are hideous.”

“You promised. No more orders.”

“I did not promise good taste.”

She hit his shoulder. He caught her hand and did not let it go.

“I will probably annoy you daily,” he said.

“You will annoy me absolutely.”

“And we will argue without ceasing.”

“Without ceasing,” Clara agreed. “And you will still be here in the morning.”

He kissed her knuckles. “And I will still be here in the morning.”

They married in a small stone chapel at the edge of the estate, on a day so bright it seemed almost insolent.

No newspaper received an invitation. No matchmaker attended. Lady Beatrice wept from the moment the carriage stopped until ten minutes after the ceremony, at which point Theo handed her a handkerchief and she hit him with it.

“I still think the bird deserves credit,” Theo whispered, as they waited at the altar rail.

Adrian glared at him.

“I think it does,” Clara said.

The ceremony was eleven minutes long. The old vicar fumbled the Duke’s name twice. Outside, the light lay flat and gold across the yew trees and the long grass, and as they came out through the porch together, holding hands, a white shape came down off the chapel roof and landed on the low stone wall beside the gate.

Adrian stopped dead.

“No.”

Clara laughed. The bird stepped sideways along the wall, tilted its head, and opened its beak.

Something small and gold dropped into the grass at their feet.

Clara knelt and picked up the necklace, chain tangled in blades of wet green, and looked up at him.

“It approves,” she said.

“It is returning stolen property.”

“Perhaps it approves and it is returning stolen property.”

“That is not a thing that can be true.”

She fastened it around her throat and stood and took his arm. “Come, Your Grace.”

“Where?”

“Home.”

He looked at her for a moment, there in the churchyard, with the whole county waiting to find out how long it would last.

“Home,” he said.

They had nine days.

Nine days of a house that had stopped being a house and become something with a temperature of its own. Nine days in which Clara learned that her husband woke before dawn and stood at the window like a man on watch, and that he could be persuaded back to bed by argument but never by pleading, and that he laughed with his whole chest when she was cruel to him in the right tone of voice.

On the tenth day, the letter came from London.

Adrian read it standing at the breakfast table, and Clara watched his face do the thing she had seen it do once before, in a drawing room full of dead deer.

He read it twice.

“What is it?” she said. “A legal challenge?”

“A claim against the will.” He handed it over. “Filed eleven days ago in the Court of Chancery. It asserts that my father’s will was altered after his death, and that the present settlement of the estate is therefore void.”

Clara read the final paragraph.

“Who is making the claim?”

“A man named Renshaw. A distant cousin twice removed, who has never in his life been within forty miles of this house.” Adrian’s voice was flat. “His solicitor is Cranmere’s solicitor. His counsel is Cranmere’s counsel. His funds, I would wager my remaining farms, came from Cranmere’s pocket.”

“But it will not stand.”

“It might. Chancery moves like a glacier and eats everything in its path. Two years of hearings, two years of the estate’s income held in suspense, two years of every tenant on this land wondering whether their lease will be worth the paper it is written on.” He sat down slowly. “He does not need to win, Clara. He only needs me to be unable to fight.”

Clara folded the letter along its creases, once, and then again.

“Then we fight anyway.”

“With what?”

“With whatever he does not expect.” She looked at him. “He has spent thirty years preparing for you to attack him. He has lawyers and money and a name with four centuries of polish on it. What he has not prepared for is a woman with a ledger and an unreasonable amount of time on her hands.”

Adrian looked at her across the toast and the cooling coffee.

“Sometimes,” he said slowly, “I forget why I married you.”

“Because I am charming.”

“Because you are terrifying.”

She laughed.

The whispers began within a week.

At first they were nothing — a remark at a dinner table in the next county, repeated and embroidered and passed along like a bad coin. By the end of the fortnight they had shape.

The Duchess had manipulated her husband into pouring money into the estate.

The Duchess had known about the flaw in the will before the engagement and encouraged him to hide it.

The marriage itself had been arranged — the whole bird business a piece of theatre — so that a clerk’s granddaughter could get her hands on Ashbourne property.

Clara heard the last version from her own dressmaker’s apprentice, who had heard it in the village and repeated it in perfect innocence while pinning a hem, and who then burst into tears when she realized what she had said.

Clara sent her home with a shilling and a headache, and sat in the window seat for an hour without reading a word.

Adrian came in with his coat still on and his face like weather.

“I have heard it,” he said. “Three times today. The third time from a man I have known since I was eleven.”

“I know.”

“I am going to Cranmere. I am going to stand in that house and say it to his face in front of witnesses.”

“No.”

“Clara—”

“He is lying about me,” she said, “and you want to be angry, and that is exactly what he is paying for.” She stood up and took his lapels in both hands, which surprised him enough that he stopped. “Anger is his instrument. He used it on your father — Fenwick told us. He will use it on you. Do you know what he is doing right now? He is sitting in that chair by the fire, telling his solicitor that you will come. He has already written the letter to the newspapers about the scene you will make.”

Adrian’s jaw worked.

“What would you do?” he said.

“I would find out what he actually wants.”

“He wants the ledgers.”

“No, he wants silence, and he already has ours. He is not defending himself, he is buying time. So.” She let go of his coat and smoothed it flat. “What does a man who has everything spend two years of his last decade trying to acquire?”

Adrian looked at her.

“He is looking for something,” he said.

“Yes.”

“He is looking for what he is afraid of.”

“Yes.” Clara smiled. “So let us find it first.”