Chapter Twenty
“Sit where I can see you. Both of you.” The old duke had no voice left worth the name, only the shape of one.
“I have spent the better part of my life unable to see the people in my own rooms, and I should like to break the habit before I go, if a man is permitted to break a habit on the last day he is given to do it in.”
“You are not going anywhere this morning,” Declan said firmly, from the chair he had not left in two days.
“I am going precisely where you tell me I am not, and at my own hour, which has always annoyed you.” The ruined eyes moved to Renae. “He told you the thing I charged him with. Has he told you yet, or has he done the cowardly sum and decided there is time.”
She could not practice deceit upon a man preparing to depart this world, having never acquired the art of disguise when meeting the direct gaze of another.
“Not yet.”
“Then he is a simpleton, and I have raised a simpleton, the one accomplishment of mine I had hoped to spare him.” A thread of the old asperity, and under it something gentler.
“Do not let him do it the slow way, my dear. I did it the slow way. It takes thirty years, and it costs everything, and it buys a man a deathbed full of regret and a son who learned the trick by watching him. Stand in the door and do not let him past until he has said it.”
“I will stand in the door.” She took the thin hand. “You have my word, and I keep the words I give to men in their deathbed. I have so few of them left to give that I have grown careful with the spending.”
“Not Your Grace, mind. Not from you, and not yet.” The faintest pressure of his fingers.
“I am the only duke in this house another hour yet, and I find I would rather be plain Greene to the two of you for the last of it, as I never once managed to be plain anything to anyone while it might have done some good. Sit closer. The light is going, and you are both a long way off.”
“I am here, and I have been here two days, and I am not going anywhere.”
“You are here in the chair. There is a difference between the chair and the man, and you have spent your whole life trusting the chair to do the man’s work.
It cannot, and you are about to learn it in the worst possible order, after I am gone and before you have said the thing.
” A breath that cost him. “She is right to make you say it in a doorway. A doorway is where I ought to have said it to your mother. I said it instead to the back of the carriage that took her coffin to the church, where it was a great deal safer and did precisely no one any good.”
“He will say it, Greene.” Renae had not let go of the thin hand. “I will see to it myself. You may go and tell her so, wherever she is waiting, that the boy turned out warmer than the house that raised him.”
“Did he?” Something that was nearly a smile. “Then the house failed at the one thing, and I am glad of it. Glad to be wrong, here at the end, about the only matter I ever truly wished to be wrong about.”
His hand was in his son’s when he went, near noon, with the light full in the window, and the title came down onto Declan’s shoulders in the same quiet hour, clean, Alaric newly in a stranger’s grave abroad and no one left to take it up but the spare who had never thought to carry it.
She watched her husband become a duke between one breath and the next, and watched, with a cold she had no name for yet, the door begin to close behind his eyes.
It began as nothing. He was busy, which a new duke must be, and met the papers and the funeral and the thousand small claims a death makes on the living with a tireless competence that would have been admirable in a stranger.
His courtesy did not once fail, and he asked after her comfort each morning and arranged it before she had finished answering.
In a single grieving fortnight he had become the most attentive and entirely absent husband a woman could be cursed with, and the shape of it reached her as a smell from childhood does, before the name for it arrives.
“You were not at dinner again,” she said, in the doorway of the study where the lamp had burned past midnight all that week.
“There was much to settle. I had a tray sent up so you need not wait on me.”
“You have sent a tray up eleven nights running. I have come to know the maid who carries it better than I know my own husband. Her name is Sarah, and she has a sister wedded in Bath, and a fear of the back stairs after dark. These are things I have learned across eleven dinners eaten alone, in a marriage I entered for the express purpose of not eating alone.”
“A tray was not what I wanted. I wanted you across the table, being tired at me in person rather than considerately from another room.” She kept her voice level, because the alternative was not level in the least. “Declan. Set the quill down a moment and attend to me. Properly.”
“I am attending to you.” He was not. His attention stayed on the column of figures under his hand, as a drowning man’s stays on the one solid thing in reach. “I will be up shortly. Do not wait.”
“You said that on Tuesday.”
“And I came up.”
“You came up at two and were gone by six, and you have said do not wait so many times this fortnight that I have begun to think it is the only instruction you have left for me.” She came into the room.
“I know this grief. I do not mean I merely sympathise with it, though I do. What I mean is that I have lived inside the exact house you are building around yourself, brick by considerate brick, and I know the inside of it, because I served nine years there, and it was you who taught me there was a door.”
“I am not your first husband, Renae.”
“No. You are doing a remarkable impression of him, and you have not even noticed you learned the part.” That landed, and she watched it land and did not soften it.
“He was never cruel either. I have told you so. He provided, and he was unfailingly polite, and he managed my comfort from the next room for nine years while I starved standing up in a warm house with a full larder, and he would have been astonished, on his own deathbed, to hear he had done me the smallest harm.”
“You are comparing me to him again.”
She kept to the chair. “I am comparing you to him because you have handed me the very same view. The same closed door, the same considerate tray, the same warm house with no one at all in the room with me. I did not think I should ever stand on this side of that door a second time, and I find it is worse the second time, because the first time I did not know what I was being kept from, and this time you taught me. That is the cruelty of it, Declan. You showed me the warm version of the house, and then carried it three rooms off to keep it safe from your wife.”
“I do not know how to grieve and be present in the same hour. I have only ever managed one thing at a time, and the grief has taken the entire room, with nothing left over for the man you want at your table.”
“Then grieve at the table. Be sad in the same room as me. I am not asking you to be pleasant over the soup, Declan. I had a husband who was pleasant over the soup and I starved underneath the pleasantness.” Her hands had closed on the back of the chair.
“I am asking you to let me see you do a hard thing instead of carrying it three rooms away so it will not trouble me. That is the whole of the request. It is the smallest thing in the world and it is the only thing, and your father begged you for it from his own bed, and here you still are with the lamp and the ledger.”
He reached for the only language he had ever been permitted, the grammar of provision and solving and the next item on a list, and it failed in his mouth, and still the other words would not come. So she said the last of it plainly.
“I will say this once and then I will stop, because a woman can say a thing only so many times before the saying becomes its own humiliation. I will not be made a widow in practice, Declan, while you are still alive to prevent it. I have already fulfilled that particular matrimonial obligation, and survived it. I discover I have no desire to undergo the penance twice, and certainly not in your company.”
He said nothing. The figures held him, and the silence held them both, and she kept the promise she had made herself and stopped, those being the only promises in her life that anyone had ever reliably kept.
***
There was neither weeping nor rage in her.
The next morning she went up to the duchess’s chamber and gathered a few small things, her hairbrush and her writing case and the worn green Cowper of her father’s that she read when sleep would not come.
These she carried down the corridor to the little sitting room adjoining, and set them out there as though they had always lived in it.
It was no flight, only the oldest reflex she owned, the quiet removal of the soft parts of herself to a room with a door that shut, and she managed it without a sound, because a sound would have been one more request that he notice, and she had finished making requests.
Beatrice found her first, the following afternoon, in the blue sitting room among the few transplanted things.
“You have moved your hairbrush down the corridor. I notice these things. I have buried two husbands and I can read a corridor as a banker reads a column.” The old woman set down her stick.
“Tell me you have not given him up after a single fortnight, when it took me the better part of a decade to give up on a far worse man, and even then I was sorry I had not waited.”
“I have not given him up. I have stopped chasing him down a corridor he keeps walking faster along. There is a difference, and the difference is the last dignity I have, and I mean to keep it.”