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

Chapter 12

He came to her three days later in the small drawing room, in the afternoon, with the door shut.

“I owe you an answer to the third question,” he said.

“You said you would rather do it sitting down.”

“I am sitting down.” He took the chair opposite her. “And I said not today. It has been four months. That is as much as I can shave off the word today.”

Ellen put her pen down.

“Nine years ago,” said Adrian Vane, “I was seven-and-twenty, and I was going to marry a woman called Constance Rye.”

He said it evenly, as a man reads a page he has read many times.

“She was the daughter of a neighbour. I had known her since we were children. There was no arrangement between the families, which in this county was nearly scandalous. I asked her because I wanted to, and she said yes because she wanted to, and it was — ” he stopped, and chose his words ” — it was the only thing in my life that I had ever done for no reason at all. Everything else in this house is duty. That was not.”

Ellen said nothing.

“We were to be married in the spring. In the January, my mother, who had been ill, took a turn, and a physician came down from Bath — the same one. Dr. Pell. He had been attending her. He examined me while he was in the house, because my mother asked him to. I was twenty-eight. And he sat me in this room, as it happens, in this chair, and told me what I have told you.”

He looked at the window.

“I sat here for about an hour. And then I went out and rode to Constance Rye’s house, and I told her that I had changed my mind, and that I was sorry, and that I would not give her a reason, and that she could say anything about me in this county that she liked and I would not contradict one word of it.”

Ellen had her hands still in her lap.

“She asked me whether there was somebody else. I said no. She asked me whether her father had spoken to me. I said no. And then she asked me — she was nineteen — whether I was ill. And I said no.”

“Adrian — ”

“I want you to hear the next part,” he said, “because it is the whole reason I am telling you this.”

He went on.

“She married in the autumn. A man called Fenton, a decent man, one of the two who dines with me twice a year. And she is alive, and she is well, and she has four children, and I have shaken her husband’s hand in the town nine times since, and she has curtsied to me, and I have raised my hat, and neither of us has ever said one word more than that to each other in nine years.”

He stopped.

“You told me a lie,” said Ellen.

“I told her a lie. To her face. In her father’s hall.”

“And you have been paying for it for nine years.”

“I have been paying for it for nine years,” said Adrian Vane, “and I would do it again tomorrow, and I want you to understand exactly what kind of man that makes me, because you are married to him.” He looked at her. “I took four months of her life and threw them in the fire to spare her three years of watching me die. That was my judgement. I was seven-and-twenty and I had been told I had three years. And I have sat in this house for eight years and watched the arithmetic of that decision turn to nonsense — because I did not die, Ellen, I have not died, and every single year I do not die, the thing I did to that woman gets more stupid.”

“It was not stupid.”

“It was a decision made by a frightened young man who has never once been able to admit that he was frightened.”

“It was a decision made by a man who was told he had three years,” said Ellen Rooke, “and who did not want to be watched. And I have been in this house five months, and I have watched forty people not watch you, and I know exactly what you were trying to spare her, because you have got it now, instead, in a worse form, from everybody you have ever met.”

He did not answer.

“You did not tell her to be cruel,” she said. “You told her to be kind. It was the wrong kind, and it was nine years ago, and you were seven-and-twenty.” She stood up. “And I would like to say something else, and then I shall not raise it again.”

“Say it.”

“Constance Rye is not the reason you have refused forty arrangements in eight years. She is the first one. You have been refusing because you decided at eight-and-twenty that you were a thing that ought not to be attached to anybody — and you have spent eight years being extraordinarily careful, and being called brave for it, and not one soul in this county has ever told you that it was the silliest thing a man ever did.”

Adrian Vane sat in the chair.

“You have,” he said.

“Yes.”

“And I asked you to marry me in nine minutes.”

“You did,” said Ellen. “Which was the first sensible thing you have done in eight years, and I would be obliged if you would not make me say so twice, because I have no intention of becoming a woman who flatters her husband.”

He laughed — carefully, briefly, and this time he got to the end of it.