Chapter Seventeen
“You are not choosing a wife, Vale, whatever you tell yourself in the dark. You are filling a vacancy.”
Elinor stopped three steps from the library door, where it stood open a hand’s width, with the wedding’s seating plan in her arms and no business at all overhearing what she was about to overhear.
“The house has wanted a duchess these seven years. The boy has wanted a mother. The county has wanted something to stop talking about, and you have found one tidy woman who answers all three difficulties at a single stroke. You have dressed the convenience up in the language of the heart, because it lies more comfortably on a gentleman’s conscience that way.
” Lady Cassandra’s voice was without any of its polish now, stripped down to the thing underneath, and the thing underneath was almost dignified in its plainness.
“I am not asking you to be ashamed of it. I am asking you to be honest with me. I gave this house two years. I learned its tenants, its accounts, the way you take your coffee and the days you cannot bear to be spoken to. I made myself into a duchess for you, brick by brick, the way she made herself into a governess. The only difference between us is that I aimed higher and you punished me for the ambition.”
“Cassandra. Stop.”
“I will not stop. I have stopped for two years. I have been gracious, patient, useful and discreet. I have sat at the foot of your table and pretended the head of it was not the thing I was sitting there to earn, and I have watched you hand the head of it to a girl who came in out of the rain with one box and no people. I think I have earned the right to say the rest of a sentence in my own cousin’s interest.”
“Say it, then, and be done with it.”
“Marry me, and the title is safe, the county nods, and no marchioness writes you letters, because no one ever questioned a duke who married inside his own rank. Marry her, and you spend the next thirty years explaining her at dinners, and the boy grows up the child of a scandal however well you bury it. Then one morning she shall wake up and understand that she was a convenience that learned to call itself love, and it shall kill something in her, and you watch it die the way you watched the last one die, from the window, being sensible.” Her voice cracked once, cleanly, and she did not hide the crack, which was the most honest thing she had done in two years.
“I am the sensible end of this, Vale. I always was. You have only confused sensible with cold, because the one warm thing you ever did is buried in the churchyard, and you have been frightened of warmth from that day to this. I am offering you a marriage that asks none of you. That is a kindness. She will ask everything of you. You are not built to survive being asked everything.”
There was a silence, and Elinor stood inside it with her arms full of paper and her heart gone strangely loud.
“You have said a great deal, Cassandra, and some of it is even true, which is precisely what makes the rest of it dangerous.”
“Then you concede it.”
“I concede that you have been useful, and patient, and that I was never kind about either, and that you have read me more accurately than anyone under this roof but the one person you are asking me to turn out of it. I concede the whole of it. And it alters nothing, because in two years of making no error you have at last made one.”
“Name it.”
“You spent two years making yourself into the thing you believed I required. It was a great labour, and I am sorry for the waste of it. But a requirement is the one thing on this earth I have decided I will not marry, having been a requirement myself to a great many people and found it a cold office.”
“And is she not a requirement? The girl who answers the nursery, the talk and the vacancy all at one stroke.”
“I am not looking for a second duchess,” Nathaniel said.
A footman came round the turn of the corridor with a coal scuttle and nearly saw her, but she could not be discovered at a cracked door listening to her own marriage weighed like a horse at a fair, and so she moved at once, away, down the passage toward the stairs, her slippers quick and traitorous on the boards.
Behind her, into the room she had already left, the duke’s voice finished the sentence it had begun.
“I am choosing a wife.” The four words went out across the library to a woman who was no longer in the doorway to receive them.
They reached Elinor at the turn of the corridor as a sound only, a man’s voice making shapes she was past parsing over the roar of her own blood.
She did not catch them, and she did not go back for them.
The one sentence that would have undone the whole of her grief lay on the library floor behind her, unheard, while she carried the wrong half of the conversation up the stairs.
She had the part that mattered, or so she believed.
The phrase sat in her like a stone in a shoe.
A second duchess was a thing chosen the way one chooses the more suitable of two carriages, and now she had the measure of what she was to him, and the measure was the one she had worn her whole life and had let herself, for three foolish weeks, forget.
***
She found him that evening in the gallery, because the gallery had always been where the true things were said, and she meant to say a true thing, and she meant to say it on her feet.
“You have arranged everything,” she said.
“I have been thinking about it all afternoon, and I wanted to be sure I had it right before I came to you, and I have it right. You have arranged the church, the licence and the settlements. You have arranged a modiste, through Mrs Garnett, so that I need not be looked at by a stranger who would value my origins by my wrists. You have arranged Theo’s coat and the wedding breakfast and which relations are to be seated where they can do the least harm.
You have arranged the whole of it, Nathaniel, beautifully, the way you arrange everything, and there is one thing in the entire business you have not arranged, and I find I cannot marry you on Thursday without it. ”
“Name it, and it is done. I have not stinted you in anything. I do not mean to begin three days before the wedding.”
“That is the trouble. You hear me say there is a thing missing and you reach for your pen. You think I am asking for a settlement you forgot, a clause, a carriage, a sum. I am not asking you for a thing you can arrange.” Holding his eyes was the hardest part of it, because they had become dear to her over these months, and dear things are the worst to face when a person is braced to be hurt by them.
“You have told me a great deal. You have told me that you want me, that I am not a rescue, and that the house is too small without me, and you have given me an empty book and the use of your name. You have told me everything except where your heart is. You have shown me the whole of the estate and kept one room locked, the way you kept the Tour room locked. I have married locked rooms in my imagination my whole life, and I find I do not want to marry a real one.”
“I unlocked the Tour room. You were there.”
“You unlocked a room with maps in it. You have not unlocked the one with you in it.” Her voice did the thing she hated, and she pressed on past it.
“Tell me I am not a vacancy you are filling, Nathaniel. Tell me in a sentence that is about me, and not about the house, or the boy, or the talk, or the sensible disposal of a difficulty. One sentence with no use in it anywhere. You managed it once, in the schoolroom, and it was the only thing you have ever said to me that I have been able to keep. I am asking you to manage it again, tonight, because on Thursday it stops being a choice you are making and becomes a fact that I am standing inside.”
“What has happened? Three days ago, you said yes in a gallery and meant it. I would stake my life you meant it, and now you stand in the same room asking me to prove a thing I thought we had settled. Something has reached you. Tell me what it was and I will answer it.”
“I am asking you to answer it without my having to hand you the question. That is the whole of the test. Do you not see it? If I tell you the words that frightened me, you will mend the exact words. You are a brilliant mender of exact words, and I will never afterwards know whether you mended them because they were true or only because I had handed you the pattern to copy.”
“You are asking me to read your mind and to call the reading love.”
“I am asking you to know me well enough that you need not read it. That is what the thing is, Nathaniel. It is not a sentence produced to order. It is a man who stands across a locked room from a woman and discovers the key has been in his own pocket for months, and that the only thing wanting was the courage to put his hand in and take it out. I do not want you to find the words tonight. I want you to have wanted to, long before I ever asked.”
He met her eyes then, and she watched him reach for it, and watched him not find it, the way a man pats every pocket for the one thing he was certain he had packed.
“I have said these things to you already,” he said. “I do not understand why saying them once is arranging and saying them twice would be the heart. I am not a man who says things twice. I have always believed that to be a virtue.”
“It is not a virtue tonight,” she said, very quietly.
“But I see that it is the best you have, and I have decided to marry you anyway, with the room locked, because I would rather have you with the room locked than not have you at all. This is the most foolish sentence I have ever spoken aloud, and I would thank you not to make me repeat it. You see, I can say a thing twice. It costs more the second time. That was rather my point.”