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

Chapter 6

“I want the four rooms on the west side opened and aired,” she said. “I want the chimneys looked at. I want a man out to that orchard about the dead trees. And I should like all of it begun this week.”

Mrs. Trant put down what she was holding.

“Your grace — ”

“And I want to say something before you answer me. Because I have been six weeks in this house, and I have got a very great deal of respect for the way you run it, and I am not going to have this be a quarrel.”

Mrs. Trant stood very still.

“Then say it.”

“This house has been waiting for eight years,” said Ellen. “Not badly. Not neglectfully — I have looked at your books and I have not found one thing wrong with them. Waiting. Nothing in this building has been begun in eight years that would not be finished inside twelve months. And I do not think one person here has ever said that out loud. Including you.”

Mrs. Trant went a slow, deep red.

“That is not the sash cord,” said Ellen.

Mrs. Trant stopped.

“I have asked you twice. You are the most competent woman I have ever met. And you have had a broken sash cord in a room I sit in every single day, for six weeks. I do not believe for one instant that you forgot it.” She said it without a single note of triumph in it, which was the thing that made it land. “So I sat down last night and I worked at it. And the answer I came to is that a sash cord in the small drawing room is a thing you would mend for a house that was going on. And nobody in this building has thought of this house as going on since before you and I ever met.”

The housekeeper of Ellingham stood in that passage for a long moment.

“His grace gave the orders about the orchard,” she said at last, in a voice that had gone thin. “In the second year. He said there was no sense in it, and that it should be left. And I did not argue with him, because you cannot argue with a man about what he will be alive for.”

“No.”

“And after that — ” Mrs. Trant’s hands moved, once, and were still. “It got easier. Your grace, that is the whole of it, and I have not once looked at it until this minute. It got easier not to do things, because every single one of them wanted a decision about how long. And nobody in this house has been able to ask him that since about the third year. So nobody asked anybody anything.”

“Nobody asked anybody anything for eight years,” said Ellen.

“Nobody asked anybody anything for eight years,” said Mrs. Trant. “And it has been perfectly comfortable. And I have just this minute understood what I have been doing.” Her chin came up, and then, to her own evident horror, her eyes filled. “And I am fifty years old, and I find I should like to sit down.”

“Sit down,” said Ellen.

The rooms were opened in the seventh week.

She did it properly and slowly, and she made Mrs. Trant the mistress of the whole business — deliberately, and afterward she said it was the single most useful thing she did in her first year. Lists, orders, keys, men. Ellen Rooke had kept a house for nine years and knew exactly what she was doing, which meant she knew exactly what she was not doing, which was standing in the middle of it.

On about the fourth day, Adrian Vane came into the west corridor on his way somewhere else, and stopped.

There were four doors standing open. There was a smell of soap and wet plaster, and two housemaids on their knees with buckets, and a man on a ladder in the far room doing something to a ceiling, and the whole corridor full of that grey, cold, expectant light that a room has when it has just been let out of the dark for the first time in six years.

He stood there for about half a minute.

Then he went and found his wife, who was in the small drawing room with the household books, and said, in a voice she had not heard from him before and did not hear again for about a year:

“What are you doing?”

Ellen put down her pen.

“I am opening the west rooms.”

“Why?”

“Because they have been shut six years, and the chimneys are perished. And if they are left another two winters the plaster will go, and it will cost about four times as much then as it will now.”

She kept her voice entirely level, which took some doing.

“And because there are nine dead trees in the lower orchard. And a sash cord in this room that has been broken since the spring.” She closed the book. “Sit down, Adrian. I am going to say something, and I have been three days arranging it, and you are not going to like any of it.”

He did not sit down.

“Say it standing, then,” said Ellen Rooke, “and I shall say it anyway.”