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

Chapter 17

The child was born in the second week of October, in the west room that had been opened and aired in the seventh week of the marriage and that had, since about June, been full of nothing but sunlight and a carpenter.

It was a girl.

Adrian Vane had spent eight years arranging his own death around one item, and the item had been a son, and he had said so plainly, because he was not a man who dressed things up. And Ellen had heard that sentence in a library in June and had made her decision with it in front of her.

She sent Mrs. Trant down with the news herself, and then lay there and listened to the house, because she wanted to hear it — the actual sound of it, going through that building, room by room.

And what went through the house, from the top of the stairs to the kitchen and out to the stables beyond, was not the sound of an estate that had just lost its heir.

It was noise. Genuine, unforced, uproarious noise. Mrs. Trant’s voice, and then the two housemaids, and then the kitchen, and then somebody running across the yard, and then — from the west corridor, where she could hear it perfectly well — the sound of a man of six-and-thirty sitting down on the edge of a window seat and being told by his own housekeeper to put his head between his knees.

They brought him in at about five o’clock, when they had got her cleaned up and the room put straight, and he came in and stood at the foot of the bed, and looked at his daughter, who was small and furious and had, Ellen thought, a look about her of somebody who had already decided what she thought of the world.

“Well,” said Adrian Vane.

“Well.”

“There is a great deal I arranged in that library,” he said, “and one of the things I arranged was that Ellingham would not go to Northumberland. And I have looked at this child for about a minute and a half, and I find that I have not once thought about Northumberland.”

“No,” said Ellen.

“I have thought about the orchard,” he said. “It wants six years.”

“It wants six years.”

“Then I shall be here for them,” said Adrian Vane, and sat down in the chair by the window because he had, by then, run out of standing, and took his daughter out of his wife’s arms very carefully, and held her the way a man holds a thing he has no experience of, and did not say anything for a long time.

She was christened Rose, after his mother.

Gerald Vane wrote from Northumberland within the fortnight — two pages, in the same clear round hand — and there was not one syllable of disappointment in the whole of it, only a good deal about how glad he was to hear it, and how glad his wife was, and a small paragraph at the end about a horse he had bought that had turned out to be a great deal more horse than he wanted, which Adrian read out twice, laughing, and answered the same week.

And down in the village, and up at the two big houses on the other side of the river, and in the churchyard after the christening, the county said the other thing.