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

Chapter 13

The letter from Northumberland came in the second week of December.

It was from Gerald Vane, the cousin — the man into whose lap the whole of Ellingham would fall if Adrian died without a son. And it was, as Adrian had promised Ellen it would be, perfectly decent.

Two pages, in a clear round hand. He hoped his cousin was in better health. He had heard of his marriage with great pleasure, and sent his congratulations, and that of his wife. He understood the arrangements. He asked whether there was any particular matter concerning the Northumberland estate that his cousin wished him to turn his attention to, and offered, if it would be of any convenience, to come south in the spring and be shown the place — so that if anything were ever to happen, he would not be a stranger walking into a house he did not know.

Adrian read the whole of it aloud to Ellen at dinner and then put it down flat on the table.

“That is a decent letter,” said Ellen.

“That is an extraordinarily decent letter,” said Adrian. “And he means every word of it, and I have met him four times, and I have nothing against him, and he is going to get this house.”

“Not if there is a child.”

“Not if there is a child.”

He said it in the ordinary way — the way he might say not if it rains — and then he looked up and saw her face, and stopped.

“What?”

“Nothing,” said Ellen.

She was not certain, then. She was five days from certain, and she was doing what she had done all her life with a thing she could not yet prove: she was saying nothing and watching.

But he had seen it. He had spent eight years watching forty people be careful with him, and Adrian Vane could read a room better than anybody she had ever met, and by the end of the week he suspected there was something she had not yet told him.

He did not say anything about it.

That was the thing. That was the thing that began it. He did not say one word. And she felt the house shift, and could not find where the shift was.

He was not cold. He was never cold. He was — careful. He was the way everybody in that building had been with him for eight years. He began to look at her the way they looked at him. He stopped asking what she thought about the spring planting. He began to say when I am gone in the middle of ordinary sentences, and then to stop halfway, and then to look at the window.

And on the fourth evening, sitting across the estate room table, he said, apropos of absolutely nothing:

“I have told Hale to have the settlement read over to you properly. There are two things in it I want altered.”

Ellen put down her knife.

“Altered how?”

“There is a provision about the guardianship. If there is a son, the estate is in trust — and I had written it so that the trust is in your hands. Hale thinks I should put a man in beside you.” He said it flatly. “I think Hale is right.”

She looked at him across the table.

“You think I would be unable to manage it.”

“I think you would be managing it at six-and-twenty with a child and a house of forty people and a county looking at you. And I think a man of forty in the trust costs you nothing and protects you.” He paused. “And I have been thinking about it for four days, and I have not been able to work out whether that is for you or for me.”

“For you how?”

“Because if there is a man in the trust,” said Adrian Vane, “then it was not only my judgement. And if it were only my judgement, and it went wrong, then it would be my judgement going wrong after I was dead, and I should not be able to do anything about it.”

He met her eyes.

“You are going to tell me that I have been arranging my own death for eight years and that I am doing it again. And you are correct. And I find that I cannot stop.”