Three Sisters Were Presented for the Duke to Marry — He Chose the Quiet Woman Pouring the Tea

Chapter 8

That evening he went to Grosvenor Square and sat by his mother’s bed.

The Dowager Duchess of Ravensgate had been worse for a fortnight. Her breath had grown loud and thin in the small hours, and the fire in her room was kept up all night now, and the room smelled of camphor and lavender water and the particular dry sweetness of medicines that have stopped pretending to cure anything. She had refused that afternoon to see the doctor. She had

said she wished to see her son.

He came in and kissed her hand, and she looked at him out of her old, keen, sunken eyes — the eyes of a woman who had been beautiful a very long time ago and had outlived nearly everyone who remembered it — and said, “Have you spoken with her?”

“Yes. In the garden, eight days ago.”

“And?”

He told her, quietly, the whole of it: the annuity, the seven years, the copy of the clause folded in a child’s book, the pinches — no, he did not tell her the pinches; he found, to his own surprise, that he could not say the word aloud — and at the end he said, “Padet is preparing the summons. I will bring the girl to him this week. He wants her word before he moves.”

His mother closed her eyes for a long moment. She said, in a voice like dry paper, “That woman.”

“Mother.”

“Cosima Marbrey sat in my drawing room when she was nineteen years old and told me my lace was out of fashion,” said the Dowager Duchess. “I have waited thirty years to be right about her.”

He almost smiled. Then he said the thing he had come to say, and he said it plainly, because she was dying and plainly was all there was time for.

“You said once that I should not raise her and then set her down.”

“I did.”

“I do not intend to set her down. I intend to marry her.”

His mother opened her eyes. There was in them a light he had not seen for a year — a bright, alive flicker, the kind that comes over a lamp when the last of the oil catches.

“Have you asked her?”

“Not yet. She has too little just now. I will not ask her to take my name before she has her own in her own hand. She does not need a proposal first, mother. She needs her paper.”

The Dowager Duchess lay back against her pillows and looked at the ceiling, and for a moment she looked like a young woman, or like the ghost of one, pleased by an unexpected piece of good work.

“Ellis,” she said softly, “you are a fine man.”

“I am your son.”

“Don’t wait too long,” she said. “I have not got a long time, and I would like to see it. Bring her to Padet. Do not let that woman keep her another quarter.”

He kissed her thin, dry hand and said he would. And on the way out he stood a moment in the corridor with his hand on the doorframe, because he had gone at twenty straight from his father’s funeral into the management of a falling estate and a frightened household and had never once been permitted to grieve anything — and his mother, on the other side of the door, lay with her eyes shut and made her own small plans, which were the last plans of her life and, therefore, the most careful.

The next morning he wrote another note.

He sent this one to Alice.

He had judged Alice correctly. At each of his calls he had noticed the one daughter nobody noticed: that the middle Miss Marbrey went out every morning to a subscription library in Kensington, alone, on foot, with the spaniel for company, and stayed the better part of an hour — the only un-watched hour of her life, he suspected, in a house where even the reading of books was managed.

The note said that if she cared for her cousin and could be trusted, he would be at that library at eleven on Thursday, and would like ten minutes of her time. It was signed with two initials, and nothing else, and it was delivered to the house in Mount Street between the butcher’s boy and the second post, so that no one thought twice about what it was.

Alice Marbrey read it standing up in the hall, and read it again sitting down, and sat very still for a long moment while the house went on around her: Cook’s voice in the depths of the kitchen, the coal boy in the area, the little ticking of the tall clock that had been in that hall since before her father died.

In twenty-two years, Alice had never done a single thing her mother had not directed.

She folded the note very small and put it inside her stocking, because she had read once in a novel that this was the safest place to keep a paper about one’s person, and Alice had spent her life taking her instructions from novels, which had never yet failed her, and which had, unlike her family, always told her the truth about the world.

Then she went up to her room and sat by the window and did not sleep very well, and looked, that whole night, at the ceiling, like a woman practicing a word.