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

Chapter 5

The rain began at one o’clock and did not stop, and by three the long windows of the morning parlour were running with water and the children had abandoned all pretence of drawing.

There were six of them: Nell, two of the stable boys, the gardener’s daughter, and two children of the village cobbler who had walked a mile and a half in the wet because their mother had heard the school was open again. Maren had taught in this room before. She had been told to stop, two winters ago, on the grounds that it was improper for the drawing mistress to instruct children whose families she had not been introduced to. Ottilie had said it kindly. Ottilie said everything kindly.

Adrian sat near the hearth with a steward’s report open on his knee, and he had turned precisely two pages in ninety minutes, because every time a child asked Maren a question he looked up.

Ottilie worked at an embroidery frame beside the tea table, her needle going in and out of the linen with surgical regularity.

“The schoolhouse roof requires new slate,” Adrian said, to nobody in particular. “If the children are to learn anything, their copy books ought not to swim away in a storm.”

One of the stable boys laughed, then put his hand over his mouth.

Maren looked towards Ottilie. She did not intend to; it was a habit she was trying to break. The older woman had a dried lavender stem pressed against the linen of her embroidery — some old trick for scenting a finished piece — and at the mention of the reopened school her fingers tightened until the brittle stalk snapped.

It was a small sound. It was the fourth time that week Maren had heard it.

“Do you agree, Miss Thurlow?” said Adrian.

He was waiting. He always waited. She had begun to find this the most disquieting thing about him, more disquieting than his title or his money or the way the room organised itself around the chair he sat in.

“A dry roof is useful,” Maren said. “But the children will need boots for the winter road. Otherwise the copy books may remain dry because no child reaches them.”

Adrian lowered the report.

“Boots,” he said.

“Twelve pairs. The cobbler in the village can make them. He made Nell’s.” She paused. “He made them cheap because she is a child whose sister teaches. He will not make twelve pairs cheap.”

“Of course.” He looked almost stricken. “I had thought as far as the roof and no farther than the front step.”

“You often begin with the roof,” said Maren.

“And you begin with the feet.”

His smile deepened, and there was something in it that she had to look away from, and across the room Ottilie broke a second lavender stem.

Maren returned her eyes to Nell’s page and said nothing more for a quarter of an hour, and the rain went on, and that was how it was between them then: small conversations conducted in front of witnesses, every one of them weighted with a meaning they were not permitted to name.

The following week brought dry weather. Maren moved the lesson out to the edge of the estate wood, where the children could draw plants from life instead of from her pressed specimens, and Adrian arrived carrying the heavy easel over one shoulder with cheerful disregard for the mud on his coat.

“I insist upon attempting a drawing,” he announced. “How difficult can a thistle be?”

Ten minutes later he had produced a collection of angry black strokes that resembled a frightened hedgehog, and Nell laughed so hard her paper slid off her knees onto the grass, and one of the cobbler’s children had to be sent to fetch it back.

“It is terrible,” said Maren, stepping behind his shoulder. She caught the ordinary scent of him — soap, wool, clean linen — and it unsettled her more than any costly cologne could have done, because it was the smell of a person rather than a position.

“It lacks botanical accuracy,” she continued.

“It lacks basic dignity,” he said. “How do you make three lines tell the truth?”

“I use fifty, and produce a creature fit to bite the gardener. You are drawing the idea of a thistle.” She leaned past him and pointed at the living plant, gray-green and vicious in the sunlight. “Draw what is there. The thorns first. The softness only at the crown.”

He looked up at her. The laughter stayed in his face, but something steadier came into it and settled there.

“Thorns first,” he repeated. “I shall remember.”

Maren stepped away before her pulse could betray her, and only half heard the rest of the lesson, and was extremely careful for the remainder of the afternoon.

Afterwards, when the children had gone, Adrian led them along a narrow path beyond the schoolhouse, and Maren followed without asking where, which she recognised later as the beginning of something.

A stone cottage stood there beneath two wind-bent ash trees. Its shutters were faded to grey, ivy had reached the upper windows, and smoke rose thinly from the chimney — someone was burning off the damp.

The board by the gate had been freshly painted, and Maren stopped dead when she read it.

Thurlow Cottage.

“It has our name,” said Nell, in the tone of a person stating the obvious to the slow.

“It belonged to the last schoolmaster,” said Adrian. “It falls within the trust attached to the school.”

Maren said nothing.

“I have asked the solicitor to prepare a tenancy in your name,” he went on. “Independent of any marriage. Independent of me. Nothing is signed yet — I wished you to see it first.”

She looked at him then, properly, because that sentence did something to her that she did not care to examine. He had not brought her to a finished gift. He had brought her to a house and let her look at it before anybody put a seal on it. He had understood, somehow, without being told, that a thing given without warning is a thing you cannot refuse.

Inside, the plaster was new above the parlour hearth and still drying. A carpenter was fitting shelves in the smaller chamber, working with his back to them.

“The shelves are low,” Maren observed.

“They are low.” Adrian did not pretend otherwise. “Nell should not require a ladder to reach her own books.”

Nell ran to test them at once, which is what Nell did with everything.

Adrian began to describe the rest: a second classroom, a kitchen garden, a lending shelf for the village, map-drawing lessons for older girls, a shed for drying specimens. His plans multiplied as quickly as sparks off a fire.

Maren walked to the east window and looked at the light.

“One classroom first,” she said. “Twelve pupils at most. The garden after the roof is sound. Maps only when there are rulers enough to share.”

He looked almost wounded for half a second. Then he laughed at himself — a real laugh, short and surprised — and said, “One room. Twelve pupils. Roof before maps. You see why I need you.”

Need was a dangerous word.

Yet he had used it not to make her dependent, but to admit the limits of his own judgment, and Maren, who had spent two years learning to hear the difference between those two things, heard it.

“I see why the steward needs me,” she said.

He put a hand over his heart. “A brutal distinction.”

From the small chamber, Nell called out that the third shelf was crooked, and Adrian went to inspect it with the gravity of a man considering a question of national importance.

Maren stayed by the east window. For the first time in two years she allowed herself to imagine a key in her own pocket, and Nell’s boots beside her own hearth, and a door that was hers to open.

That night, she opened her leather drawing book, and between two pages — where a sprig of heather had been lying since the afternoon on the terrace — she pressed the flowers flat and careful, still purple at the tips.