Chapter 24
“Did you come home for me, or did you come home and remember me?”
She had been ready to ask it sitting, and she had set her hands on the back of the chair instead of taking the chair, and she asked it standing in the middle of the morning room with her gloves still on the front hall table six paces from his front door.
“I came home for you. I came home and remembered other things. The two were not the same act and I have not, in any month since September, confused them.”
“You went to the Abbey first,” she said again.
“I went to the Abbey first because Beale told me he had been a soldier too long to put a duke down in front of his mother without warning her, and I yielded the night to Beale and the warning to my mother. I left the Abbey before breakfast the next morning. I went to your father’s house before my own steward had read the day’s letters.
That is the order of it. You may verify it from Beale, who has no incentive to be untruthful to you, and from my secretary, who would not dare, and from my mother, who has a great many incentives but will not on this point.
I went to your father’s house first because there was no other house in England I had been wanting to enter for five years and more. ”
“You wrote,” she said.
“I wrote. I shall not now defend the writing as enough, because it was not. It was the form of constancy that did not require me to stand in any drawing room. It was the form of constancy a younger son can afford and a duke cannot. I had spent my younger sonship perfecting it, and I had carried the form into the duchy without examining it, and the carrying was my failure. A man who has an attachment for a woman does not leave her name undefended in rooms where he is absent. I left yours undefended in a great many rooms. I had not heard of the rooms. The not hearing was not, in the event, an absolution. I had given my mother and her household four years and a title in which to fail to defend you, and the failure was a thing I had made possible by my own arrangement of duty over presence.”
“You did not know,” she said.
“I did not know the specifics. I did not need to know the specifics to have known the principle. I had been at war four years. I spent years placing pickets between my body and the French rifles, yet I did not station a single guard between your reputation and the malice of the drawing rooms.The not putting was the negligence. I was negligent of you, Miss Carrow. I was negligent in the only category in which I had ever been required to be vigilant, and the negligence was not the post’s. It was mine.”
She did not, for some seconds, answer. She had been looking at him while he spoke, with the steady amber attention of a woman counting the sentences before she chose which one to take up first, and she took up at last not the one he had expected.
“You have rehearsed this,” she said.
“I have. I have rehearsed it eight weeks. I shall not pretend the rehearsing was nothing. The truth of a sentence is not damaged, Miss Carrow, by a man’s having gone over it before he said it. I should have rehearsed it earlier.”
“What is the next sentence,” she said.
“There are seven. I shall not, this morning, deliver them in a list. I shall give them as you ask for them, or as the conversation calls for them. To deliver them to you in a list would be to treat you as mere hooks upon which to hang my own foregone conclusions. You are no such convenience.”
“What is the key one,” she said.
“I remembered you privately, and I let the world forget what it owed you. That was my failure. I am here to begin the remedy. The remedy is not in this room. It is in the next room and the room after that and a great many rooms I have not yet been required to enter. I shall enter them. I shall enter them with your name on my arm, if you will have me. I shall enter them without your name on my arm, if you will not.”
“You would enter into a matrimony with me where everyone could see,” she said.
“I would. I shall.”
“And if I refuse you,” she asked.
“Then I shall enter the next several rooms alone, and I shall continue to enter them, because the rooms have not changed and the work in them has not changed, and a man does not stop the work because the work has cost him the woman he loves. I shall not, in any of those rooms, allow your name to be the thing the room has at me. The room may have at me whatever else it pleases. Your name it shall not. That is the second key sentence. I am sorry I gave it to you in the same minute as the first.”
She had stopped holding the back of the chair. He had seen her hands come off it without seeing the moment they had done it.
“You want forgiveness, or a wife,” she said.
“I want a wife. Forgiveness I am not entitled to ask for and I shall not. I should be a poor husband if I asked for the second on the strength of the first. They are not the same arrangement. The second has a cost. The first is a gift. I will not put a price on a gift, Miss Carrow, by spending the gift on the cost.”
“Cole.”
“Yes.”
“Say it once more,” she said. “The matrimonial one.”
“I want you free enough to refuse me, and certain enough to accept me. I shall not press the second. The first I have already given you. I gave it to you in a note I left in Brook Street the night I left the case at your drawing room. I have not, since the night I sent the note, called on you. I shall not call until you tell me to. I have come closer to breaking the rule three times this sennight than I should care to admit. I have kept it because the keeping of it was the only thing I had to offer you that I had not already offered and failed at.”
“You will not press me.”
“I shall not. I shall be present in your hearing for as long as you wish to consider it. I shall be absent from your hearing for as long as you wish to consider it. The arrangement is yours.”
“It is half past ten,” she said.
“It is.”
“The half past ten of the day I have come into the morning room of Greenstone House without an invitation and asked you the question I asked you a quarter of an hour ago.”
“Yes.”
“You shall not,” she said, “at half past eleven offer me the same thing you have just offered me.”
“I shall not.”
“You shall offer it to me at noon.”
“At noon.”
“With my parents in the room.”
“With them, or without them, or with the King of Sweden, as you wish. The address is fixed by the asking. The audience is at your disposal.”
She did not smile. Not the slightest semblance of a smile touched her features.
The corner of her mouth moved by something that was, for a woman who had been smiling at country lanes for five years out of public discipline and had not lately smiled at anything else, the smallest acknowledgement that a man had said a sentence she had not been expecting.
She put her hand to her pelisse pocket and brought out a thing that he had supposed for half a second was a small reticule.
It was the book she had carried across the six houses down Brook Street, the book in her muff and from the muff into the pelisse and from the pelisse out into the morning room.
She set it on the small table at the window where the Dowager’s correspondence had lain a quarter of an hour ago, the dark blue board with the small ground gold on the spine he had set into her hand in the orchard in the summer of ’10 and not seen since.
“You shall remember this, Your Grace,” she said.
“I remember it.”
“You shall remember what is written inside it,” she said.
“I remember what is written inside it. I wrote it. Until I return with the right to ask properly. The right was a sentence I had not earned. I came back into the country without it. I have spent the eight weeks since trying to earn it. I do not know that I have. I have come closer this morning than I had on Tuesday, and a deal closer than I had in September. The right will not be a thing I can claim, Miss Carrow. It will be a thing you can grant. I shall not, in this room, ask for it. I shall ask for it at noon.”
“Yes.”
“You will let it sit there.”
“On the table by the window. Yes. Until noon. After noon I shall decide whether to take it home with me.”
The clock on the mantel struck the three-quarters, and the small dry sound of the chime came into the quiet between them, and for the first time in any morning of his acquaintance the place held the two of them and no other person at any door.
Beale had been sent for Sir Marcus an hour ago without his having been told to send.
The Dowager had gone, as she had gone, to the small library across the hall.
The morning correspondence sat in its untouched pile on the table where the inscribed book now sat beside it.
There was the sound of a carriage in the street, and another, and the front door of Greenstone House opened twice in three minutes and shut twice in four.
Sir Marcus came in first, with Lady Carrow at his elbow, and Sarah behind them carrying a shawl Lady Carrow had not yet been able to refuse.
Lady Carrow stopped in the doorway. Her hand went to her mouth.
Sir Marcus inclined his head to Cole with the small set jaw of a man who had spent the past forty minutes walking the six houses with his daughter’s chance under his arm and had now to set the chance down.
“Sir Marcus.”
“Your Grace.”
“You will, please, sit. Lady Carrow.”
“Cole.”
It was the Dowager from the door of the small library, where she had been standing since the second carriage.
Forty years of London carriages going by her doors had trained her ear, and it told her the precise sound of the Eversley horses come into the street.
She had been the one to invite them. She did not now ask Cole’s leave to receive them, because she had not, in the original asking, asked it either.
“Yes, madam.”
“They have come.”
“Then have them shown in.”
The Eversleys came in, with Cassandra between them.