She Said: “I Need a Place to Stay”… He Replied: “ I Need a Wife to Give My Dying Bloodline an Heir.”

Chapter 10

He had episodes. Not often, at first, in her experience — about four times a month, mostly at night, sometimes in cold air. And the whole of Ellingham had spent eight years having a settled way of dealing with them.

The settled way was to be extremely calm and quiet, and to look at something else.

Ellen watched that happen twice. Then she stopped doing it.

The third time was in the estate room, in the autumn, when he had got up too quickly from a chair. She put her book down and looked directly at him for the whole of it — about four minutes — and did not say one word, and did not go and fetch anybody.

Afterward he said, “You did not look away.”

“No.”

“Everybody looks away. My own man looks away. Mrs. Trant has been looking at the fire for eight years.”

“I know it,” said Ellen. “I have watched them do it since I came. And I have thought about it a good deal. And I have decided that they do it out of kindness — and that it is the unkindest thing in this house.” She closed her book properly, and set it down. “Because a man who is being looked away from is a man who has understood that what is happening to him is not to be acknowledged.”

He was silent.

“I did that to my great-aunt for four years,” she said. “I did it out of delicacy. And I have never once forgiven myself for it.”

Adrian Vane sat in that chair.

“Nobody has looked at me in eight years,” he said.

“Then I shall look at you,” said Ellen. “And you may tell me to stop, and I shall stop — and I would rather you did not. Because I think it would be worse for both of us.”

The thing she did not say to him, and did not say to anybody for about four years, was that she had begun to be frightened.

Not of the episodes. She had watched her great-aunt die over four years, and there was very little left in a sickroom that could startle Ellen Rooke. She had known exactly what she was marrying. She had made the arithmetic on a doorstep in June with four shillings in her pocket.

What frightened her was that the arithmetic had stopped working.

She wrote it down in the last week of October, at about midnight, and burned the page four days later, which she almost never did with anything.

I married a man in June because I had nowhere to go and he had a house. I told him so, and he told me the same, and it was a clean bargain, and I have not one word to say against it.

And I have sat at that table every night for two months, and I have found out that he is the cleverest and the loneliest person I have ever met. And that he has not had one honest conversation in eight years. And that he laughs about four times a week and cannot finish any of them.

All of the arrangement I signed in that library depends on his dying.

Everything I have got is his death. The house is for my life after it. The settlement begins on it. He said so, in that library, in nine minutes, and I agreed to it standing up — and I have not been able to look at that sentence for about a fortnight.

I am married to a man whose death is my entire security. And I have begun to want him to live.

And I have got no idea how a woman is supposed to hold those two things at once.

What she did instead — and it was about the fourth of November, four days before the garden room — was to go to his agent without saying anything to anybody, and ask what would happen to her if she left.

Mr. Hale was a careful man of about fifty who had been at Ellingham nine years, and he answered her exactly, because a duchess had asked him a plain question.

The settlement stood. It was hers whatever happened — on his death, on a separation, or if she walked out of that house tomorrow and went to Bath and never came back. Drawn by Adrian in the week of the wedding. Irrevocable. In her own name.

Ellen Rooke thanked him, and went upstairs, and sat on the edge of her bed for about a quarter of an hour.

Because that was the whole of it, and she had it now in a sentence she could look at.

He had made her free on the day he married her — before he knew one thing about her — and had never once mentioned it.

And she was going to stay anyway.

And there was now no possible way of proving to anybody, including herself, that she was not staying for the house.