Chapter Twenty-Six
For a long moment, the Duke did not move at all. Then he turned, but not, as Clara’s foolish leaping heart had half-expected, toward her. He turned to the woman at his left hand.
“You set them at the doors,” he said. It was not a question.
The Dowager’s head came up. “Cedric, I did not know. I swear it to you, upon anything you please, I did not know what he intended by it. He told me only that he wished to make an announcement, that he wanted the right people near to hear it. I had no notion, none, that he meant to… You cannot believe that I would ever have lent my hand to such a—”
“No.” His voice was very quiet, and tired. “No, I do not think you knew his purpose. I believe you.”
A pause.
“But I think you wanted the thing he offered badly enough that you did not trouble to ask too closely how he meant to bring it about. And that is the part, Mother, that I do not know how to set down.”
“Everything I have done…” Her hands had begun to tremble where they gripped the table’s edge. “Everything, Cedric, the whole of it, I have done for you.”
“I know that you believe so.”
“I have watched you.” Her voice cracked clean across.
“For four years I have watched you shut yourself away in that cold room on the hill, punishing yourself night after night for a thing that was never your fault, burying yourself alive by inches. And I could not bear it. Do you understand me? I could not stand by and watch my only son turn himself into a ghost. I thought, if there were a marriage, the right marriage this time, a good one, that it might…That you might come back to us. I was trying to save you. From yourself, if no one else.”
“You were not trying to save me.” He said it without heat, which was somehow worse than any shouting could have been.
“You were trying to manage me. To arrange me into the life you had decided I was to live, because you could not abide the one I had chosen. You have never once in my life been able to see the difference between saving a person and governing him, and this time, it very nearly cost me everything I have left that I care for.”
She flinched.
“He did not even have to deceive you very far,” Cedric said. “He only had to point you at the thing you already wanted, and let you go.”
The Dowager Duchess had no answer to that.
Her mouth worked; her eyes filled; and she pressed her trembling fingers to her lips and looked at her son with the stricken, naked face of a woman seeing, for the first time and all at once, the precise shape of the harm in something she had always called love.
“I do not know how we mend this,” Cedric said, more gently. “I will not pretend to you that it can be done quickly, or that it can be done by luncheon, or that I am not very angry, because I am. But you are my mother, and I have no intention of losing you over it.”
He drew a breath.
“Only understand that a great many things between us are going to be different, beginning from this hour. That is all I have to say of it for now.”
And then, at last, he turned away from her and looked down the long table to the very foot of it, and his eyes found Clara.
She felt it go through her like cold water.
No, some small, frightened part of her thought, not yet. Let the room settle first. Let Lady Honoria breathe. Let your mother gather herself. Let there be one moment in which nothing more is broken open before them all.
She gripped her hands together hard in her lap and braced herself to bear whatever was coming.
He crossed the room to her.
He came the whole length of it in long unhurried strides while the entire household watched, his mother, and Lady Honoria, and the silent rank of servants against the walls, and he did not appear to care in the smallest degree that they did.
He stopped before her chair. And then the Duke of Farenwoode, who did nothing in front of anyone, who had hidden every feeling he possessed behind long years of careful cold, held out his hand to her, palm up, in front of them all.
“Clara,” he said.
She looked at the hand, and at his face above it, and could not move.
“Will you stand up, please,” he said, very low, “and let me say this properly.”
She put her trembling fingers into his. He closed his hand warm around them and drew her up out of the chair to her feet, and he did not let go.
“I have spent four years,” he said, “doing what was correct. I married because it was correct. I grieved correctly, and I shut myself away correctly, and by every measure the world keeps, I have been a perfectly correct and perfectly dead man for the whole of that time. And then you came into my house, and you were not impressed by a single correct thing about me, and you looked at my work and argued with my figures and told me the truth to my face when no one in my life had dared it in years, and you made me…” his voice caught, and he let it, and went on rougher “… you made me want to be alive again, when I had decided alive was a thing I had no further use for. And I am finished with correct. I find I do not want it. I want what is true. And the truest thing I know in all the world is that I love you.”
“Your Grace…”
The old, careful word came out of her in a whisper.
“You cannot…” she went on. “I am a companion. I have nothing. I am the sort of person people keep about because she is useful. I have spent so long being useful to people who…” She faltered. “You cannot mean to—”
“I do not want you because you are useful.” He said it fiercely, and his hand tightened on hers.
“Listen to me. I have an estate full of people who are useful. I do not lie awake thinking of any of them. I want you: your mind, and your plain, wretched honesty, and the way you look at the sky, and the whole of you, exactly as you are, for no other reason than that you are yourself. Because there is no one else in the world I would rather have beside me in it.”
He drew a breath.
“I told you, in the observatory, that I would stand for you. Do you remember? I have just done it, in this room, before all these people. And I will do it again tomorrow, and every day I am given after, for as long as you will let me, because you are worth the trouble, Clara, and it is past time somebody told you so.”
And this, somehow, was the impossible thing made plain.
Not a whispered promise in the dark. Not a fragile hope kept hidden from the world. Cedric had chosen her here, in the morning, before his mother and Lady Honoria and every watching servant, with nothing softening the cost of it and no darkness to shelter either of them.
The tears came then, not from hurt, and not from fear, but from the sudden, unbearable relief of finding that the thing she had scarcely dared believe in had not vanished with the night after all.
“Marry me,” he said. “Be my wife. Be my duchess, if you can bear the nonsense of it. Build a life with me that is founded on neither duty nor convenience nor anybody’s expectation but our own: a true partnership, you and I, for whatever years we are given. Say yes. Please.”
She was weeping openly now, and she did not care, and she could see through the blur of it that his own eyes were not dry.
“Yes,” she said.
And then, because the wall was down and there was no further use on this earth for the careful word she had hidden behind so long, she said the other one, his own name, the one she had never once let herself speak aloud in all these months. “Yes, Cedric. With all my heart. Yes.”
His face, when she said his name, was something she would remember to the end of her life.
He drew her into his arms in front of everyone present in the room, and held her as though he had been waiting years to do exactly this, and she put her wet face against his shoulder and held on.
Somewhere across the room, a small glad sound broke from Lady Honoria, half a laugh and half a sob; the sound of a girl who had just bought everyone’s freedom but her father’s and would not, looking at the two of them, have undone it for the world.
Outside the long windows, the sun had well and truly come up over Farenwoode at last, and lay in great warm bars across the floor where, an hour before, there had been only grey and cold.
And Clara Ellsworth, who had come to this house of grey stone with one travelling case and no expectation of finding a home within it, stood in the middle of all that light and let herself, for the first time in longer than she could remember, be wholly and unguardedly happy.