She Was Having Tea Alone—Until Duke’s Quadruplet Boys Whispered Pretend You’re Our Mother…

Chapter 16

It was the following winter, the second of her marriage, when the letter came that Eleanor had always known, without knowing it, would come.

She found it on the writing desk in her own sitting room, a letter that had not come through the normal course, but had been left by a servant who had, at the last moment, wanted no part in delivering it. It was not from Lady Aldous. Lady Aldous had been reliably, comfortably silent since Bath, and Eleanor’s one act of quiet ferocity in the whole affair — the burning, unread, of the letter that had come the autumn before — had made it clear that the door, if it had ever been open, was now closed.

No. The letter was from a woman Eleanor had never met, and who had, in the course of her marriage, become something that Eleanor had never imagined she would need to meet.

It was from the Countess’s mother.

Eleanor knew of the old woman, of course, in the way that one knows of a distant storm — from the accounts of others, and from the weather that preceded it. The Countess’s mother was a Marquess’s widow of formidable age and small, exact opinions, and she had, for some years, been the most vociferous of her late daughter’s advocates. She had never once visited Hartfield since the Duke’s remarriage. She had, in fact, made it known, through the careful channels of the aristocracy, that she did not consider the Duke’s second marriage to be a marriage in the proper sense, and that she did not intend to confer upon it the recognition of her presence.

And now a letter. The handwriting was fine and old-fashioned, and the letter was short, and the short letters of people in that world are the ones that cost the most.

To Eleanor, Duchess of Harwick,

I write to you not because I wish to, but because I have learned that I must. I have been ill this autumn, and I have had cause to reflect on a number of things that I had, for many years, declined to reflect upon.

I knew my daughter. I knew her well, and I knew that she was not the sort of woman to have been loved by anyone who had not known her. She was a difficult woman, and I say that with no disloyalty, because she was my daughter, and she was difficult, and I loved her, and I could not pretend otherwise.

You have taken her place. I do not say this to be cruel; I say it because it is true, and because the world is full of women who have taken the place of a dead woman and have been resented for it and have deserved to be resented for it, and I have always assumed you were one of them.

I have been told, by those I trust, that you are not. I have been told that you have been patient with my daughter’s sons, and that the school in the village is, in some part, the work of your hands, though I have been told, too, that you have taken pains that no one should know it. I have been told that my daughter’s sons are happy.

That last thing is the thing I cannot let rest. My daughter was not able, in the life she was given, to be either happy herself or the cause of happiness in her sons, and I have spent four years telling myself that this was the fault of my son-in-law, whom I have never liked, and who was, I am forced to conclude, no more to blame than she was.

I do not ask to see you. I do not ask to know you. I ask only that you not resent my daughter, and that you allow her memory to remain, in the hearts of her sons, the memory of a mother who loved them as she was able.

If you can do that, I will be content to continue not knowing you.

I remain, though I am not sure it matters,

Your grandmother-by-marriage,

Mary, Dowager Marchioness of Halloway

Eleanor read the letter three times. And when she had finished, she did not burn it, and she did not set it aside to forget. She sat by the fire a long time, and she thought about a woman she had never met, who had loved a daughter who had been difficult, and who had lost her, and who had had had four years to resent the woman who had taken her place, and who had, at the last, in the face of her own mortality, chosen to say a thing that cost her more than her pride could begin to measure.

And she understood, sitting there, that this was what it was to be married into a story that had been going on long before she had arrived. That the love she had for the Duke, and the love the boys had for her, was built upon a foundation that had been laid by someone else, in grief, and that the grief was not a thing to be won over, but to be honored.