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

Chapter 16

For eleven days after the mill, Adrian Sinclair did not leave her side.

It started as devotion and became a kind of weather. He was in the corridor when she came out of her room. He was in the library when she went in. When she rode, he rode; when she wrote letters, he sat at the far end of the table pretending to read the paper and not turning the page. On the eighth day she went down to the kitchen to ask the cook about the week’s provisions and found him standing in the yard, coatless, in the cold, having followed her down four flights and out a side door without her once hearing him.

On the eleventh day, Clara went to the garden, and he was there.

“You are following me,” she said.

“Yes.”

“I am going to the garden.”

“I know.”

“I am going to the library.”

“I know.”

“I am going to take tea.”

“I know.”

She turned around.

“Adrian.”

“Yes.”

“I am not made of glass.”

He did not answer.

“I was tied to a chair for five hours in a burnt-out mill,” Clara said, “and I fell out of a burning building with my hands tied, and I have a bruise on my jaw that the entire village has seen and been extremely tactful about. I am not asking you to pretend it did not happen. I am asking you to stop behaving as though I am the thing that broke.”

“I am afraid,” he said.

“You have been afraid before.”

“This is different.”

“How?”

He came down the path to her and stopped close enough that she could see the exhaustion standing in his face like water in a field.

“Before you,” he said, “I was afraid of losing myself. Of waking up at sixty and finding my father’s drawing room in my own house. Of becoming a man who was always right and always alone.” He took a breath. “Now I am afraid of losing you. And that fear is not like the other one. It does not sleep. It does not improve. It sits at the back of my head every hour of every day and tells me that if I stop watching the door for one minute something will come through it.”

Clara looked at him for a long moment.

“You cannot control everything,” she said.

“I know.”

“Then do not try.”

He exhaled, all at once, like a man putting down something heavy.

“I am learning,” he said.

She took his face in both hands and kissed him, and the garden was cold and smelled of wet leaves and the woodsmoke coming off the house, and somewhere behind the hedge a gardener was raking and tactfully pretending to be deaf.

“That is all I ask,” she said.

It changed them, that autumn. Not because it made them more romantic — the country was of the opinion that they had quite enough of that already, thank you. It made them more honest. It took the last of the ornament out of the way they spoke to each other, and what was left underneath was better, and warmer, and considerably more useful.

It was the honesty, in the end, that finally broke the other thing open.

It happened on a night in November, with rain on the windows, three weeks after the trial of the mill ended. They were in the library, and Clara was reading, and she looked up to find him staring at the fire with a face that meant he had gone somewhere else entirely.

“Where are you?” she asked.

“Seventeen,” he said.

She set the book down.

He did not move. He spoke to the fire, as though the fire were the only thing in the room that could not judge him.

“When I was seventeen my father and I argued at breakfast. I do not remember what about. That is the thing that has never left me — it was so small that I have genuinely forgotten it. Something about a horse. Something about a lease. Something about whether I would go to London in the spring.” He turned the glass in his hand and then put it down untouched. “And I said something to him that I had been saving up for years. I told him I hated him. I told him he had made my mother miserable and that I counted the days until he was dead, and that I would not come to the funeral.”

The rain moved along the window.

“I left the house angry. I rode out to the north farms and stayed out until dark because I wanted him to wonder where I was.” His voice was steady, and that was the worst of it. “I came back at six. He was already under a sheet in the hall. His horse had gone over a bank a mile from here, and the man who found him said he had been alive for a while.”

Clara sat very still.

“For years,” Adrian said, “I believed that my last words to my father were the ones that mattered. That I had given him the last thing he had in the world, and it was hate, and that he died carrying it. That I had made him right. He believed he was hated, and I proved it, and then he was gone, and there was no one left to correct the record.” He looked at her finally. “That is what I have been carrying since I was seventeen. I have never said it out loud to another living person.”

Clara came and knelt on the hearthrug in front of him, so that she was below him and looking up.

“What did you say to him?”

“That I hated him.”

“You said more.”

“That I counted the days.”

“Yes.” She reached up and took his hand. “And did you mean it?”

He looked at her.

“No.”

“Then your father knew that.”

“You cannot know that.”

“I know what it is to say something in anger.” She held his fingers tight. “I have done it once. In the room with my mother, ten days before she died. I told her that I wished she had gone with my father, because then at least I would have been allowed to grieve properly instead of living in the middle of her grief.” She watched his face. “I was nineteen. It is the only sentence of my life that I would take back at any price.”

Adrian was silent.

“What happened?” he said at last.

“My mother told me something.” Clara smiled, a little crookedly. “She said that people should never be judged by the sentence they regret most.”

He made a sound that was not quite a laugh.

“Your mother,” he said, “was wiser than everyone in this house.”

“She was.”

“I wish I had known that at seventeen.”

“You know it now.”

The next morning, without telling anyone, he went to the churchyard.

Clara went with him. She did not offer to; she simply put on her cloak and was standing at the door when he came down, and he looked at her for a moment and then nodded, and neither of them said anything about it for the rest of their lives.

The Sinclair plot lay at the east end of the churchyard under a stand of yew. The stone was tall and plain and gray, with the dates cut into it, and below the dates, the words his mother had chosen:

He was right more often than he was kind.

Adrian stood in front of it for a long time.

“I was angry,” he said.

The wind moved through the yew trees. Clara stayed half a step behind him.

“I was wrong.”

Nothing came back. There was no sign, no bird on the wall, no convenient wind to say that the dead had heard and forgiven him. There was a stone and a cold morning and a man of thirty-two standing in front of it with his hands at his sides.

And Clara, who had spent her childhood in a rented room being told that grief was a debt with cruel interest, understood that this was the whole of it, and that it was enough.

He did not cry. He stood there until the sun came over the trees and then moved on, and walked away, and the thing in his chest was not healed — but it was no longer locked, and that was the difference between a wound and a prison.

They walked back through the village hand in hand. The smith looked up and waved. Two children ran past with a hoop. The bell in the church tower rang the hour, badly, because the bell-ringer was eleven and took his duties very seriously.

That night, by the fire, Adrian asked her the question.

“Do you ever wonder what would have happened if the bird had never taken your necklace?”

Clara considered it, honestly.

“Frequently,” she said. “I would have gone home. I would have married a man with a shop, or a man with a farm, and had four children and grown broad, and spent my entire life wondering why nothing in it ever seemed to have been my idea.” She looked into the flames. “It would not have been a bad life. My mother had a life like that and she was loved, and I do not sneer at it.”

“Would you have been happy?”

“Possibly.” She turned to look at him. “But I would not have been chosen. I would only have been sorted.” She touched the necklace at her throat. “I prefer this one.”

“So do I,” said Adrian.

She leaned into his shoulder.

“Although,” she said, “I could have done without the bird.”

“Finally,” he said, “something we agree on.”

And Clara laughed, and the fire cracked, and eleven days later, on a bright, freezing morning in December, she sat down very suddenly at the breakfast table and put her hand flat over her stomach and said, in a voice of enormous calm:

“Adrian.”

He looked up from his paper.

“Yes?”

“Just so that you are aware,” she said, “in about seven months you are going to have to learn to be a father.”

The paper went to the floor.

She had not, in seven weeks of marriage, ever seen Adrian Sinclair at a loss for words. She saw it then, and it was magnificent: the Duke of Ashbourne, who had faced down a peer of the realm in a burning mill, sitting open-mouthed in his own breakfast room with a cup of tea going cold in front of him, entirely destroyed.

“The date,” he said finally. “I need the date.”

“What for?”

“To plan.” He was already standing, already at the bell-rope, already pulling it hard enough to bring the entire household running. “I need to write to a physician. I need to write to my aunt. Do not lift anything.”

“Adrian, I am pregnant, I am not—”

“Do not lift anything,” said the Duke of Ashbourne, “and that is final,” and Clara laughed until she had to put her head down on the table.