She Said: “I Need a Place to Stay”… He Replied: “ I Need a Wife to Give My Dying Bloodline an Heir.”
Chapter 9
The marriage became a real one somewhere in the autumn, and neither of them ever settled which week.
It was not a scene. There was no conversation about it beforehand, which Ellen thought about a great deal afterward, and decided had been the only way it could possibly have happened between two people who had signed a bargain on a Thursday in a library.
What happened first was that they began to have dinner together.
They had not, for the first two months. He ate in the estate room at seven, because he had done so for eight years, and because a man who cannot climb stairs quickly arranges his whole day around the ground floor. Ellen ate in the small dining room at eight. Neither of them had remarked on it. It was not a slight; it was simply the shape the house had.
She changed it in the ninth week by the simple method of having her dinner brought to the estate room, sitting down at the second place, and saying nothing whatever about it.
Adrian looked up. He looked at the second place. He said, “Ah.”
And went back to his letters.
They ate in that room together every night for the next thirty years.
The talking took longer.
It began with the estate, because that was what was in front of them — and Ellen discovered inside a fortnight that Adrian Vane would talk about drainage and rents and the state of the north road with a fluency and an interest that he brought to absolutely nothing else, and that he had not had one person to talk to about any of it in eight years who was not being paid.
His agent was paid. Mrs. Trant was paid. The four men he dined with twice a year in the town were pleasant and careful, and had been being pleasant and careful since about the second year.
Ellen Rooke had kept a house for nine years, could read a set of accounts, and in about the third week of those dinners asked a question about the tithe on the master land that made him put down his knife.
“Where did you get that?”
“Out of the book on the shelf behind you. And I have got about four more. And one of them is going to make you extremely cross.”
“Ask it.”
“You are letting the two farms on the low ground at the same rent as the high,” said Ellen. “And they have not been worth the same since the drainage went. I have looked at nine years of it. And you have lost about a hundred and forty pounds — by being fair to two men who have not once mentioned it to you.”
Adrian Vane looked at his wife across the estate room table.
“How long have you known that?”
“About a fortnight.”
“And you have said nothing for a fortnight?”
“I have said nothing for a fortnight because I have been married nine weeks, and I have already made you plant an orchard. And I have got some sense of how much a man can be told at once.”
He began to laugh — and then could not, because laughter was one of the things that did not go well.
He sat there with his hand on the table, getting his breath back, and his wife watched him. She did not fuss. She did not look away.
That was the other thing. It took her about a month to learn it, and about a year to be good at it.