Chapter 24
He did not come back on Friday.
Leonora spent the whole day waiting and pretending that she was not, which meant she did a great many useful things very badly.
She sat on the floor of the nursery and rolled a wooden ball toward Katherine forty times.
She wrote to her mother about nothing. She went into the library and got the improper book out from behind the Herodotus—it was indeed improper—read four pages and retained not one word of them.
Every time a door opened somewhere in the house, her whole body turned toward it.
This is what I said I would do, she reminded herself on the stairs, at about four o’clock. I said I would go on as I am. However, I did not expect that waiting would consist of standing in corridors listening to the doors.
Mrs. Pike sent a boy out with food twice and said nothing about it either time.
The household, meanwhile, carried on as usual.
That was the part nobody had warned her about.
Peg came to ask whether the blue room was to be turned out.
Mrs. Rowe sent up a message about the turbot, which was ordered, and which she could hold until Saturday and not one day longer.
Beddoes came to the kitchen door about the north field and had to be told that His Grace was not available and would be spoken to, and went away looking as though he had expected exactly that and had come anyway, which Leonora chose to regard as a victory.
At two o’clock, a letter came from her mother, four sheets of it, wanting to know whether she had recovered, whether the Duke was kind, whether there was any news. The word news was underlined twice in a manner that could not possibly be misunderstood.
Leonora looked at it for a while. Then she wrote back that she was quite well, that Katherine had cut a tooth, and that Mrs. Rowe had produced a turbot on Thursday that had reduced the kitchen to religious silence and had been the finest thing eaten in that house in six years.
She did not answer the underlined word at all.
At six, Mrs. Pike came to the nursery and found Leonora on the floor.
“He’ll come in tonight, Your Grace.”
“You can’t know that.”
“I’ve watched him do this since he was fifteen years old, and I can tell you the shape of it to the hour.
Two nights is temper. Three is a decision, and he’s not made one, because he sent the tray back with the plate empty and he has never once eaten when he’d decided something.
” Mrs. Pike slowly lowered herself onto the chair by the window.
“You’ll want to be somewhere he can find you. ”
“I have spent the entire day being somewhere he can find me.”
“I know.”
Later, unable to sit still, Leonora went to the gallery.
Somebody had put the dust sheets back over the furniture. The curtains she had drawn open on Saturday had been left open, which she had not expected and did not know what to make of. Sixty Walford ancestors watched her cross the room, and none of them had anything useful to offer.
She stopped at the north end in front of eleven feet of black Holland cover.
It would take one tug. That was what she was thinking about as she stood there. The bottom corner of the cloth hung loose, the house was quiet, and nobody in England would ever know.
But I would know. And I would have to look at him across the table tomorrow knowing it.
She pressed her palm flat against the cover, the way one would press their hand against a closed door to feel whether there was a fire on the other side. Then she dropped it and stepped out, leaving the curtains open.
At half past nine in the evening, when Katherine had gone down and the house had begun to settle, she heard boots on the stone at the side entrance and a door close. Then footsteps came up the back stairs, along the corridor, and into Colin’s bedchamber.
Leonora sat on the edge of her bed for perhaps ninety seconds. Then she got up and opened the green door without knocking.
Colin had a candle lit and his coat off, and he was standing at the washstand with his hands braced on either side of the basin. He did not turn round.
“You should be asleep,” he said.
“I withdraw my condition.”
“Your what?”
“My condition. The one I set on our wedding night.” She had her hands at her sides and her chin up.
She had rehearsed none of this, which was the only reason why she could say it.
“Seven days have passed since then, and it is Friday. So I have come to tell you that I withdraw it and that I shall do my duty. We can consummate our marriage tonight if that is what you want.”
Colin turned around. He crossed the room so fast that she did not have time to step back, and stopped six inches from her face. Her heart went off like a dropped tray.
“Your duty,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Say it again.”
“We can consummate our marriage tonight if that is what you—”
“No.”
She blinked. “No?”
“The deal is off, Duchess.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“It means that I will not be claiming what is mine.” He said his own words back to her, and there was something in his voice she had never heard before.
It took her a moment to identify it as disgust, and another to realize it was not aimed at her.
“It means that a man made you a bargain in a corridor a fortnight ago that he had no business making, and that he has since had the opportunity to observe what he is, and that the bargain is over. You needn’t do your duty.
There’s no duty. There’s nothing to do at all. ”
“So I am to have nothing.”
“You are to have everything else. The house, the name, the child, the income, my absence whenever you’d like it.”
“That is not everything else. That is a list.” Her voice rose, and she did not care who heard it. “You cannot do this.”
“You finished it.”
“On Tuesday. The Tuesday you went to your mother’s.” He was standing with his back to the far wall and his hands at his sides. “I could not think what else to do with the afternoon.”
“You cannot win every single time!” Leonora protested.
“Do you know what you are doing? You are taking every choice in this marriage into your own hands and calling it restraint. You wanted my desire, and you took it, twice. I gave it gladly, and I would give it again. And now that I’ve told you it isn’t enough for me, you have decided by yourself that I shall have nothing. ”
“Because the alternative—”
“You cannot want my body and refuse my love, Colin. Not when you are not ready to give either back.” She was crying, which infuriated her. “You may have all of me or none of me. Those are the terms. I did not set them. And they are not cruel; they are simply how a person is made.”
Colin stood utterly still.
“Get out of my room,” he said.
Leonora stared at him. “I beg your pardon?”
“Get out of my room, wife. Please.”
It was the please that broke her, because it came out of him cracked and quiet, and because his hands were shaking, and because she could clearly see that he was two seconds from reaching for her and had decided that reaching for her was the worst thing he could do.
If I stay, he will hate himself in the morning. Then he will sequester himself in the treehouse and not come down for a fortnight.
She went to the green door and put her hand on the handle.
“Thursday week,” she said.
“What?”
“The opera. We accepted the invitation, and half the ton will be there. If the Duke and Duchess of Thorton are not in their box together after everything the columns have printed, they will start again, and they will be worse. And this time, they will be right about something.” She did not turn around.
“So you will put on your black coat, I shall put on my best gown, and we shall sit side by side for three hours and be extremely pleasant to one another, and everybody who looks up at our box will see a duke and his wife who cannot stay away from each other.”
“Leonora.”
“Goodnight, Your Grace,” she said, and shut the door behind her.
She stood on the other side of it in the dark, with her hand still on the handle, listening to a man on the other side of two inches of oak not moving at all.
Colin stood where she had left him for a long time.
The candle went down a quarter of an inch.
Somewhere below, the house made the small sounds a house did at ten o’clock.
Beyond the green door, there was no sound whatsoever, which meant she was standing on the other side of it, which meant that all he had to do was cross four feet of floor and open it.
He did not cross the floor.
He had climbed down from the treehouse at nine o’clock with a sentence worked out, and he had rehearsed it the whole way across the lawn. He was going to tell her about the gallery; that was the plan.
Then she had come through that door and offered him her duty, in the voice of a woman reading out terms, and he had understood what he had made of her in a fortnight.
She came in here prepared to be a payment. That is what I have taught her she is.
So he had thrown out the bargain, which was the only decent thing left on the table, and she had told him what it cost her—she had been right about all of it—and he had stood here with his hands shaking and asked her to leave his room.
He looked at the green door.
Say her name. She is four feet away and has not moved. If you say her name, she will open it.
He put out the candle instead and stood in the dark, and after a while he heard her retreat.