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

Chapter 16

He did not die in January.

He was up in nine days, thinner and quieter, and by the middle of February he was back in the estate room at seven with the books, and there was a thaw, and the river went down, and the two flooded farms were let at last at a proper rent to a man from Devizes, and Adrian Vane took an entirely disproportionate satisfaction in it for about three weeks.

And in the last week of March, Ellen told him.

She had waited until she was certain, which was by then not a matter of arithmetic but of a body she had lived in for six-and-twenty years. She chose the evening. She chose the estate room, because it was the room where the two of them had learned to talk, and she chose to say it without any ornament at all, because that was the currency the two of them had been dealing in since a Thursday afternoon in June.

There was a great deal of noise in the house that evening — the servants were moving furniture in the west corridor, which had been got open at last, and there was a good deal of shouting and laughing, and through the door they could hear Mrs. Trant telling a housemaid not to drag the thing, and the whole house was full of that particular racket of a building doing something it had not done in eight years.

Adrian Vane put down his glass.

He looked at his wife for a long moment.

“I am going to say something,” he said, “and I would like you to let me get all the way to the end of it before you answer, because I have been arranging it for four days and I am liable to lose my place.”

“Go on.”

“Nine months ago, in a library, I offered a woman a bargain, and I told her plainly that I was not pretending it was anything else. I told her that an heir was what I wanted, and that if I had said I wanted a child I should be a liar.” He looked at the table. “That was true when I said it. I want to say that first, because it was true, and because I am not going to revise it now to make myself look better in my own house.”

“I know it was true.”

“And I am not the same man who said it,” said Adrian Vane. “I do not know when it changed.” He looked up. “I have been trying to find the week of it, and I cannot. It may have been the sash cord. It may have been the orchard. It may have been the first night you stayed in that chair in the garden room, which was the only night of my life that anybody has stayed in it. And I am aware that it is very convenient for a dying man to discover that he wants to live, and that it costs him nothing, and that it looks extremely well on him. So I have held off saying it for about eleven weeks, on the grounds that you would be entirely entitled to ask me what I thought I was doing.”

Ellen Rooke sat across the table from him and did not help him.

“I want this child,” said Adrian Vane, “because it is yours and mine. And I want it to be born in that room upstairs that I had opened in the autumn, and I want to be in this house when it is. And I want six years of orchard out of it, and I have signed the third order for the north bridge, which is a thing that will not be finished until the spring after next — and I did it on purpose, and I want you to know that I did it on purpose.”

He stopped.

“That is all of it,” he said. “And it has taken me four days to arrange and about forty seconds to say, which I find typical.”

Ellen Rooke sat there with her hands in her lap and a house full of noise going on through the door.

“Adrian.”

“Yes.”

“In January,” she said, “when Mr. Croy opened the front door to Dr. Pell’s man and the two of them stood in the hall talking in whispers, and I came down the stairs — do you know what they did?”

“I do not.”

“They stopped talking. Both of them. In the middle of a sentence.” She said it without any heat in it at all. “I have thought about it every day since. They stopped because I came down the stairs and they could not think what to say to me — a woman of six-and-twenty with a husband up there, whose whole position the county believed depended on the arithmetic, and who everybody in this county had already decided was waiting for the end of it.”

He did not say anything.

“That is what the world thinks I am. And I am going to have the child, and they will think it more than ever. And there is not one line I could ever write on a page that would convince a single one of them otherwise.” She stood up. “So I shall not try to convince them. I shall have this child in that room, and I shall be in this house in nine years and in nineteen, and I shall let them look at that instead. And I have something to say to you about it, and it is the last thing I have got to say about the whole business, and then I shall never drag it up again.”

“Say it.”

“I am not marrying you for your death and I am not staying for your life,” said Ellen Rooke. “I am staying for the man in the chair who told me the truth twice in a quarter of an hour and has not stopped since. And you can be as ill as you like for as long as you like, and I shall sit in that chair, and I shall not look away, and I am not going anywhere.”

The noise went on in the west corridor. Somebody dropped something and somebody laughed.

Adrian Vane put both hands on the table and looked up at his wife, and said:

“Then there is nothing further to be got out of this evening, and I am extremely tired, and I would like to be helped up the stairs, and I have decided that I am going to allow that now.”

“About time,” said Ellen, and gave him her arm.