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

Chapter 9

On Thursday morning, Alice Marbrey put on her bonnet, took the spaniel’s lead, told the kitchen maid where she was going — the library, as always — and walked out of the house in Mount Street and up across the Park.

Her heart beat the entire way as though something were chasing it. Nobody was chasing anything. That was the whole of Alice’s tragedy and her whole narrow freedom: she had lived for twenty-two years in a house where nothing happened, and had been trained, by that house, to feel terror at the mere possibility of doing one thing of her own.

The library smelled of leather and dust and rain, and the Duke of Ravensgate was standing at the far table, reading, as though he had been there all morning and might be there all day, which was exactly the impression he meant to give.

He looked up, closed the book, and inclined his head as if she were a stranger he had happened to meet — which was, Alice understood with a small shock, precisely the point: he was teaching her, without saying so, how a thing is done quietly.

She said, in a voice that came out steadier than she expected, “Your grace.”

“Miss Marbrey. Walk with me a moment by the window.”

They stood by the window with the dusty light coming through, and he said, without any preamble, “I mean to help your cousin recover what her aunt has taken. She has given me her permission to employ my mother’s solicitor on her behalf. Nothing will be done in her name that she does not know of. I tell you this because you are the only person in that house who has ever been kind to her, and I am going to ask you to be kind to her once more, at some risk to yourself.”

Alice looked at the floorboards for a moment. Then she said, “What do you need me to do?”

It was the first sentence of her life that she had ever begun with I need or I will or any of their relations. She noticed it happening and filed it away, the way she filed everything: for the long winter of being read to by nobody, in a house where nothing happened.

He said, “Miss Cranidge cannot come and go. I need a message carried to her, and I need to know — I will be frank, Miss Marbrey, I have to be frank, because this is a thing that can ruin a young woman — I need to know whether you can hold your tongue in your mother’s house. Not for my sake. For your cousin’s. If you cannot, tell me now, and nothing further will pass between us, and no one will ever know we spoke.”

Alice thought of her mother. She thought of her mother’s cap, and the particular silence her mother kept in the mornings, the silence that meant someone was about to be sorry. She had feared that silence for twenty-two years, the way a person fears weather.

And then she thought of broth carried up a back stair, and a hand closed around hers under a table, and the bleached little face of her cousin at seventeen, arriving in a black gown with one trunk; and she heard her own voice, calm, and steady, and entirely new:

“I can hold my tongue, your grace. I have been holding it since I was six.”

The Duke looked at her for a moment, and then did a thing that Alice Marbrey remembered for the rest of her life, and told to exactly one person after the wedding, late at night, half laughing, half crying: he bowed to her.

Not a nod. Not the careless half-bow a duke gives a woman between the wallflowers and the wine. He bowed to Alice Marbrey in a dusty subscription library as if she were the person who had done the bravest thing in the room, and she stood there in her plain bonnet and understood, for the very first time, that she was.

They spoke then in low voices, and he gave her a small folded paper for Diana, and told her when and how to give it — Tuesday, in the Ledger hour, when the study was empty. They parted inside a quarter hour, and Alice walked home the long way, by the canal, and watched the barges, and felt the sunlight on her face for the first time in twenty-two years, and thought, quite calmly: I have just done a thing my mother would kill me for. And I am still here.

And the sun did not fall out of the sky. Jemima’s lesson had taught her that. She was about to find out how much it cost.

She came in the front door at half past twelve and handed the lead to the boy, and began to unpin her bonnet — and Priscilla was standing at the foot of the stairs.

Priscilla had been waiting. She had been waiting, in fact, for some time, and she was standing in exactly the pose of a woman at her needlework who has simply happened to rise, and one hand held a needle, and her eyes were fixed on the fold of Alice’s bonnet where the paper was pinned inside the lining.

“You were at the library an hour and ten minutes, Alice,” she said, in a light, sweet voice, the voice she used in drawing rooms. “Since when do you read so slowly?”