“You Should Marry My Sister,” the Girl Told the Duke — The Duke Smiled at the Child’s Bold Proposal
Chapter 15
The chapel held a hundred and six, and they had to borrow chairs from the village school for the overflow.
Tenants came. Servants came — all of them, which was not customary, and which the county noticed. The school children came in two rows, twelve of them, wearing boots of an identical make, which had been Maren’s idea and which made Adrian laugh when he first saw it and then have to look out of a window for a moment. A handful of friends came: a solicitor, two men from Adrian’s London years who looked startled to be in Yorkshire, and a woman of about sixty in a plain grey dress who sat at the front and cried quietly through the whole of it and was, Maren learned later, the wife of the man who had once followed a drawing mistress into the old conservatory. She had written to Maren a fortnight after the assembly, six lines, apologising for her husband and thanking her, and Maren had kept the letter because she had not known what else to do with it.
Maren carried wild heather and pink sea thrift. She had made a point of the heather. The florist had suggested roses, twice, and had eventually understood.
Nell wore a matching sprig in her hair and watched the ceremony with the deep satisfaction of a person whose plan had merely required correction.
Her plan. Maren thought about that more than once during the service. Four months earlier a child of eight had stood in a flower bed and thrown a bouquet at a stranger because she had overheard a threat and had reached for the only weapon she could imagine. Everything that followed — the cottage, the school, the twelve pairs of boots, the line of tenants standing across the stone floor of the oriel — had grown out of that one desperate, ridiculous, correct act.
After the vows, Nell stepped between them and handed Maren back her bouquet with a formality that was entirely her own.
Adrian bent down to her. Joy had robbed him of every attempt at ducal gravity, and he looked, for a moment, about twelve years old himself.
“Your proposal was excellent, Miss Thurlow,” he whispered. “Your timing was appalling.”
Nell smiled at him with the serenity of the completely unrepentant.
“You were very slow,” she said.
Maren’s laughter warmed the old chapel stones.
She took her husband’s arm — not because he had claimed it, but because she had chosen where to put her hand — and walked out into the cold bright afternoon, where the entire estate was waiting on the grass, and somebody had hung boughs of ash over the door, and the cobbler’s wife was already crying, and one of the stable boys had let the dogs out and was now failing to catch them.
They did go to London, the following spring.
It was, as Maren had predicted, entirely as bad as she expected and considerably more useful than she had feared. Two hostesses made it plain that a duchess who had been a drawing mistress was a curiosity rather than a guest, and one of them, who owned a great deal of property in the West Riding, discovered within the season that the Duke of Elmswood’s goodwill was worth considerably more than her opinion, and revised herself with a speed Maren found educational.
Lady Herriot, who was a Selwin cousin, never invited them. She did invite Adrian, three times, in a manner designed to be a slight, and Adrian replied each time in the same three lines, which became, in their own small way, famous: I am obliged. I am engaged. My wife and I are inseparable.
By the second year the invitations to Maren were arriving on their own account. It was, she reflected, exactly as she had told him: the story had legs, and legs take time to tire, and there was nothing to be done about it except to live in such a way that the story looked increasingly absurd next to the facts.
She kept the drawing book, and in it, on the page where the heather had lain, she wrote nothing at all for a long time.
Then, in the spring of the second year, she wrote one line.
Begin with the feet.
It was a private joke and it was also not one. It was the whole of what she had learned: that roofs come first in every plan ever drawn by a man with a title, and that the boots are what actually gets a child to a desk in January, and that the difference between a promise and a life is whether anyone has troubled to check the road.
Nell grew. She grew out of the crates and the hedgehog, into long legs and opinions, and at fifteen she announced one evening that she intended to study at the Royal Academy, which she said with the same confidence with which she had once announced a marriage. She got there. She was admitted at nineteen, on a portfolio of botanical drawings described in the catalogue of her first exhibition as ruthlessly exact, a phrase that Adrian had engraved on a small brass plate and mounted over the map cabinet, which by then existed, and which contained maps, and which he had lettered himself despite a standing prohibition.
He never learned. He was extremely happy not learning.
And on the flower terrace, where a hedge was clipped and a strip of grit and stone caught the afternoon light, the stone urns were planted with something every spring that the head gardener never entirely approved of, because it was not a formal flower, and it spread, and it refused to stay where it was put.
Heather.
It took hold along the terrace wall and crept down towards the lawn, purple and stubborn and impossible to remove, and every autumn for the rest of their lives, when the assembly candles were lit in the glass oriel and the county came up the drive in their carriages, the Duke of Elmswood and his wife could be found, before the first guest arrived, standing at the edge of the terrace where a child had once thrown flowers at a stranger.
“You should marry my sister,” Adrian would say.
“She is the best person here,” Maren would answer.
And in the lighted house behind them, ninety people were already telling each other a story about them that was mostly wrong, and would remain wrong for as long as anybody cared to tell it, and would never once, in all those years, be true enough to matter.
The End