Page 57 of A Bride for the Ruthless Duke

Poor foolish creature, he thought, with something a better man would have been ashamed to find was almost fondness. She had believed every word. She would believe these too.

He thought about the money again, and that settled it, as money always settled it with him.

He carried the address up to his cold little room, trimmed the candle, and sat a while with the quill, summoning the old voice, the ardent one she had wept over. He wrote that he had played the fool and the coward, and yet it had cost him neither his fortune nor his standing, since he believed neither. He wrote that he had thought of her every day of the summer, a fabrication so old in his mouth it had the texture of truth. He wrote that he asked only to look upon her once and speak the truth openly, something he should have said a year ago, and would trouble her no further if she did not come, that last being the hook, for a woman forgives any boldness sooner than she resists a man who leaves the choosing to her.

He filled the page in the warm contrite hand he had used to undo better women than she, and read it back once, and was pleased with it the way a craftsman is pleased, feeling no more for the girl who would read it than a locksmith feels for a lock. He had a gift, he thought. It had been wasted on a militia commission and a long run of bad cards. Tonight, at last, somebody had found a proper use for it. He signed it with a single initial, sealed it, lay down, and slept without the smallest difficulty, which was, in the end, the truest and the worst thing that could be said of him.

CHAPTER TWELVE

“It was on the floor when I came in to do the fire, Your Grace. Pushed under the door, and no one saw it brought.”

The maid held it out, a folded paper with a wafer of red wax, and Ellen took it with a hand that was steady until she saw the writing on the front, and then was not. She knew the hand. She had not seen it since the last of the September notes in London, the small slanting confident hand that had once made her heart turn over in a morning room, and it turned over now, from old habit, before her sense could stop it.

“Thank you, Bess. That will be all. I shall ring when I require you.”

She waited until the door closed, and broke the wax.

I have no right at all to write to you, and I find I cannot help myself. The old voice, the ardent one, rose off the page and into her like warmth into cold hands. I have been a simpleton and a coward, and I have thought of you every day of this summer, and I have not had one moment’s peace since I saw you in the street and could not say a hundredth part of what was in me. I beg you, only once, to allow me to say it. The little folly at the south of your park, tonight, at ten. I will wait until eleven and no longer. If you do not come I shall understand, and I shall trouble you no more, and that will be the just punishment for a man who deserves no better. It was signed with a single letter.

She read it three times.

She sat down on the edge of the bed with the paper in her lap and read it a fourth, and a cold clear voice somewhere far back in her, the voice that had run a ruined household on nothing and was not in the habit of being untruthful to her, said plainly that this was wrong, that her husband was downstairs in his own house, that no honest woman received such a letter from such a man and did anything but hold it to the candle, and that she knew all of this perfectly well.

She did not hold it to the candle.

She carried it to the fire once. She stood with the corner of it almost in the flame, near enough that the paper warmed and the wax began to soften and run, and the cold clear voice told her to open her fingers, that a single second’s courage now would spare her a great deal later, and she stood there feeling the heat against her knuckles and could not make her hand let go. She drew it back. She told herself it was only that she wished to read it once more, and she read it once more, and the flame had had its chance and she had not fed it, and some part of her that stood a little apart and watched understood that the not-burning had already settled everything that came after, whatever fabrications she told herself in the hours between.

She told herself she would only go to refuse him. She resolved that she would speak her mind, the very sentiments she had been unable to utter at the draper’s window with Mrs. Selby hanging upon her sleeve and be done with him forever, and come home, and that there was a kind of courage in confronting a thing rather than fleeing it. She told herself a great many things, sitting on the edge of the bed, and not one of them was the true thing, which was simpler and worse. She had spent two months feeling like a chair in another person’s house, a useful piece moved from room to room, and tonight a man had written that he could not help himself, and the part of her that was still twenty and had been promised a different life wanted, just once, to be the one who could not be helped, the one worth a letter and a folly and a fool’s risk in the dark.

And there was the other thing, the thing she pushed down because it spoiled the story she wished to tell herself, which was that the cold house had lately stopped being quite so cold. There was a mare in the stable bought without a reason given. There was a wall around her she had only just discovered, built quiet and high by the very man she was about to deceive. There was a voice on a ridge giving her three flat words about his parents, and a garden that was hers, and a good-night the other evening in a tone she had not heard from him before. She knew all of that too. She set it down beside the note and found, to her shame, that the note felt the warmer of the two, because the note flattered her and the wall did not, and a girl of twenty will choose the thing that flatters her over the thing that keeps her safe very nearly every time, which is the whole quiet tragedy of being twenty.

She folded the note and put it in the bottom of her workbox under the silks, which was the first dishonest thing she had done in her own matrimony, and she went down to dinner.

Dinner was very quiet.

She made her answers when they were wanted and let Augusta carry the rest, and the food might have been ashes for all she tasted of it, and twice she caught the duke’s eyes resting on her, level and unhurried, the look of a man reading a page, and she felt the note in the bottom of the workbox three floors up as though it were sewn into her bodice.

“You are not eating again, child,” Augusta said.

“I walked too far this afternoon. I am only tired.”

“You walked too far yesterday by that account, and the day before.” Augusta’s eyes moved over her with something that was not quite suspicion and not quite worry. “If you go on at this rate I shall have the apothecary out, and you will not thank me, for he bleeds on the slightest excuse and has the conversation of a damp wall.”

“Tell me what you did with your afternoon, then, that has worn you so thin.”

“I walked the kitchen garden. Coyne and I are settling the spring beds.” It was true, the early part of the day, and the truth of it steadied her voice. “And I rode.”

“You have always ridden. You did not always come to dinner looking as though you had swallowed a key.” Augusta set down her fork. “Ellen. If something is the matter, you have only to say so.”

“Nothing is the matter. I am tired, and poor company, and I shall be the better for an early night.”

Theodore, who had said almost nothing, set down his glass. “You had letters today.”

The question went through her like cold water down the spine. “Letters? Nothing of any moment.” The fabrication came out smooth, which frightened her worse than a stammer would have. “Bess brought up the post. Two bills, and a note from Mrs. Aldous about the parish school. Why do you ask?”

“No reason. You seemed elsewhere all evening.” He returned to his plate without looking at her. “I wondered whether some news had carried you there.”

“Only the spring beds,” she answered, furthering her fabrication and loathed how easily it came out of her mouth.