“You Should Marry My Sister,” the Girl Told the Duke — The Duke Smiled at the Child’s Bold Proposal

Chapter 4

He announced it at supper that evening, and he announced it badly, and Maren loved him a very small amount for that, which she immediately set about not noticing.

The long table seated twenty-four. It held Ottilie Vane at the far end, three of her Selwin cousins, the steward, the chaplain, the two elderly sisters who had lived at Elmswood since before Adrian was born, and Maren — one seat down from the Duke, which was itself a sentence in a language every person at the table had been raised to read.

Adrian rose with his glass.

“I have an announcement,” he said. “Miss Thurlow and I have reached an understanding. The household will treat the matter with respect.”

That was all. He said it the way a man reads a land survey. He used none of the phrases a newly devoted man is expected to use — no happiness, no fortune, no honour — and he sat down again with his knuckles white where he gripped the back of his chair, and Maren, watching him from the corner of her eye, understood that grand declarations came to him as easily as breathing and that he was holding one back because she had required it.

He was practicing restraint. On her account. And the fact that she noticed it at all was the first crack in the wall she had spent two years building.

The silence broke in water.

“How sudden, your grace,” said Ottilie.

Her voice travelled the length of the table without effort. She had been managing Elmswood for five years — the accounts, the cellar, the servants’ wages, the invitations — and she had occupied the place of its mistress for so long that half the county had stopped distinguishing between her standing and her station.

“We had no notion,” said Ottilie, “that Miss Thurlow possessed such persuasive talents.”

Adrian’s gaze came up and went down the table like a blade drawn across a whetstone.

“My decisions are my own, Mrs. Vane.”

“Of course, your grace.”

“Miss Thurlow and her sister will move tonight to the adjoining guest chambers in the east wing.”

The ripple was audible. The east chambers had fireplaces. They had carpets. They had a connecting door, which meant a child could go from her bed to her sister’s without crossing a corridor in the dark. Maren had spent two winters in a room under the eaves where the frost silvered the inside of the wash basin and she had learned to break the ice with the handle of a hairbrush before she washed her face.

It was not comfort. It was rank made visible, and everyone at that table understood the difference perfectly.

Ottilie smiled as though she had bitten something sour.

“How generous,” she said.

“It is not generous,” said Adrian. “It is overdue.”

Maren kept her eyes on her plate and ate three bites of a fish she did not taste, and thought about the way a house tells you what it thinks of you.

The next morning she found him waiting at the threshold of the neglected library, where she had gone to sketch a sprig of yarrow from the border.

“I have a request,” he said, and then stopped, and stayed outside the room.

Maren looked up.

“The estate school has been shut for three years,” he said. “I mean to reopen it. I have asked the steward for the roof estimates and I have been told they are worse than I hoped and better than I feared. Will you teach botanical drawing to the children again — for a salary, paid quarterly from the estate, whether our arrangement lasts four weeks or four days?”

She set down her charcoal.

He had separated her bread from his proposal. Deliberately. The distinction was so exactly the one she would have asked for that she distrusted the warmth it caused in her chest and turned it over twice before she answered.

“I would be glad to,” she said. “Your grace.”

“Adrian.”

She looked up.

“At least,” he said, “when a door is open. A betrothed woman who calls me your grace at breakfast will encourage more talk than one who uses my name.”

There was mischief in his face, and hope, and something careful underneath both.

Maren tested the word the way she would test a step in the dark.

“Adrian.”

His smile arrived at once, unguarded and entirely too bright for a man who had just won an argument with himself. She looked away.

“I also noticed,” he said, “that your sister chooses the chair by the west window, but the table reaches nearly to her chin. A lower desk is being brought up from the steward’s room.”

For two years, Maren had been seen chiefly when someone needed a hand with the accounts, or a child quieted, or blame placed somewhere it would cause the least inconvenience. She had been furniture with a function. She had made her peace with that, mostly.

Adrian had been home two days and had noticed which chair Nell preferred.

“Thank you,” she said. It came out cooler than she intended.

He did not demand a warmer answer. He nodded, and left her to the yarrow, and she did not draw another line for several minutes.

That was the pattern of the first weeks. Every kindness he offered became, immediately, a public event. He asked her opinion before ordering school supplies, in front of the steward and Ottilie both. He made certain Nell walked with them through the gardens. He waited, visibly and with terrible patience, for Maren to answer questions that Ottilie had always answered for her, and when Maren answered, he said thank you as though she had given him something.

His title made these gestures look effortless. Her reputation made every response dangerous. That was the arithmetic, and she could not alter it by being careful.

On Thursday, a folded note appeared beneath her chamber door.

The paper was thick and faintly scented with lavender. The hand was a neat, sloping hand, the hand of somebody who had copied out household accounts for decades.

A prudent woman knows when to lower her eyes. Dukes do not marry disgraced tutors. Leave before the assembly.

Maren folded it twice, and put it in the pocket of her gown, and did not weep. She had wept out her allotment of tears in the first year, and by the second year she had discovered that tears cost more than they were worth in a house where every servant watched every door.

She began, instead, to watch.