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

Chapter 14

“You have not asked me,” said Ellen.

“Asked you what?”

“You have not asked me whether I want the child.”

The room was very quiet.

Adrian Vane sat back. She watched him understand — watched the whole sentence arrive, and watched him understand that in six months of marriage, in that particular matter, he had never once said the word want to her. Not once. He had spoken of an heir, of the estate, of the deed, of the trust. He had spoken of it as a piece of business, because he had offered it to her as a piece of business on a doorstep with four shillings in her pocket.

He had never, in eight months, asked her what she wanted.

“I do want it,” she said.

“Ellen — ”

“I want it. And I have not told you, and I am telling you now, and you are going to hear the rest of it before you say anything, because you have spent a week being careful at me and I would rather be shouted at.” She put both hands flat on the table. “You have been giving me the arrangement. The deed, the trust, the guardianship, the man you want in beside me. You have been handing it over to me piece by piece for a week in that voice you use for the agent. And I know exactly what you are doing, and I am going to say it out loud.”

“Say it.”

“You are putting me in the position of a woman who is pleased that the end has arrived.”

He did not move.

“Because it has, hasn’t it,” she said. “A child is the last item. You said so in a library. Nine minutes, standing up. If there is a son, Ellingham does not go to Northumberland, and I shall have done the last thing I have got to do. And here it is, six months later, and it has happened — and now you are sitting across a table from me, doing arithmetic, and what that arithmetic says is that I have got everything I came for.”

“That is not what I think.”

“Then what do you think?”

He did not say anything for a long moment.

“I think,” he said at last, “that in June I gave a woman a list of everything she would receive upon my death, and that in November she wrote a page at midnight that I was not supposed to see, and that I have not been able to stop thinking about it since.”

Ellen went still.

“The fire did not take the corner of it,” said Adrian Vane. “It was under the grate. I found it in the morning. I read two lines and I put it back.”

She stared at him.

“You never said.”

“No.” He looked at his hands. “I have been sitting with those two lines for five weeks. Everything I have got is his death. And I have not known one single minute of the day since, what to do with the fact that a woman wrote that about me, and meant it as a grief, and that if I said one word about those lines to her I should be——” He stopped. There was a small silence. “I should be asking her to comfort me about my own death. And I have never once done that, and I do not intend to begin.”

Ellen Rooke got up out of her chair.

She came around the table and stood over him, and put her hand flat on the back of his chair, and said:

“Get up.”

“Ellen — ”

“Get up, Adrian.”

He got up. It cost him something; the chair was low and it had been a long dinner. He stood in front of her, a little shorter than he was when he was resting, and she looked up at him and said:

“If you die, I shall have a house and an income and a child, and a great many people will be extremely kind to me, and I shall have to sit in a room with all of it and know that the only person who ever told me the truth is in the ground.” Her voice did not shake, which she was proud of later. “That is what I have got to lose. And a house is not worth the losing of it. I have had no money, and I have had no character, and I have had no home, and I have been on a road for three weeks with four shillings and I know, precisely, down to the last penny, what those things are worth.”

She took hold of the front of his coat.

“And I have been sitting at this table for five months finding out what you are worth. Do not you dare do the arithmetic for me.”

He put his hand over hers, on his coat, and did not say anything at all.

Then he said, “You will ruin the coat.”

“It is a bad coat.”

“It is a very good coat.”

“It is a melancholy coat,” said Ellen, “and I have been wanting to say so since June,” and Adrian Vane began to laugh, and this time he had to sit back down to do it, and she stood over him and let him, and did not fuss, and did not look away.