Page 79 of A Bride for the Ruthless Duke

“I have a great deal of feeling banked up from thirty-five years of spending none of it. You will have to bear the interest. It comes due at inconvenient moments and frequently in front of the staff.” But he said it with the small private turn at the corner of his mouth that was as near as he came, even now, even to her, to a grin, and she counted it, the way she counted the steadiness of Henry’s hand, as a thing got by long stubborn refusal to settle for the cold version.

Augusta arrived for her customary fortnight at the end of the month and stayed, as she always threatened to and always did, considerably longer.

“She is too thin,” Augusta announced, of the eleven-week-old, on the first evening, having held her for an hour and surrendered her to the nurse with visible reluctance.

“All this family is born too thin and spends the rest of its life alarming people who like a child with some upholstery to it. You were too thin. Theodore was a positive reproach. I shall have Cook make the things that put weight on a nursing mother, and you will eat them, Ellen, and not move them about your plate in the way you think I have never noticed, because I have noticed it across this table for a year and held my tongue on account of the wedding and then the sickness and then the lying-in, and the holding is now officially at an end.”

“I have eaten everything put in front of me for a year, my lady.”

“You have eaten everything put in front of you since the morning you threw me out of your bedroom and discovered you would rather be furious than lifeless, which I have always counted the best afternoon’s work of my life, and I shall go to my grave taking the credit for it whether you grant it me or not.” Augusta arranged her shawl with enormous satisfaction. “You named the child Sophia.”

“We did.”

“Theodore’s mother rode that ridge with her hair coming down and laughed at things a duchess is not supposed to find funny, and the whole county thought her fast, and she was the happiest woman I ever knew, and they put her in the ground at four-and-forty and this family spent eleven years afterward behaving as though happiness had been the thing that had taken her life.” Augusta’s voice did not waver, but her hands, folded in her lap, were not quite still. “I have waited eleven years to hear that name said in a warm room again. You have given an old woman a great many things this year, Ellen, most of which you did by accident in the course of saving yourself, which is the only honest way anyone ever helps anyone. But you gave me that one on purpose, and I have noticed, and I am too old to pretend I have not.”

“You are not so old as you make out, my lady. You manage three counties’ worth of drawing rooms from a card table and you ran a campaign against an earl that he is still abroad recovering from.”

“I am exactly as old as I make out and a good deal older when it suits me, and the campaign was the most entertainment I have had since the Regency, and if Greaves had been a cleverer man it would have been over too quickly to enjoy.” She held out her arms. “Give me the child back. The nurse has had her quite long enough and is making sheep’s eyes at the under-gardener through the window besides, which I shall mention to Selby, who will deal with it in the way Selby deals with things, which is to say it will simply have stopped by Tuesday and no one will ever know how.”

In the evenings now Theodore read aloud.

It had begun the night of the bolted door that was no longer bolted, and become, across the year, the shape the end of their days took, the two of them by the fire in the small parlor with the lamp lit and the open Cowper on his knee, and now a third small presence asleep in a basket near the warmth, brought down against every rule the nurse held sacred because Ellen had discovered that the child, who could not see across a room and could not understand a syllable, went quiet at the sound of her father’s reading voice the way Ellen herself did, which Theodore pretended was a coincidence and clearly did not believe was a coincidence for one moment.

“She is asleep,” Ellen said. “You may stop performing for her.”

“I am not performing for her. I am performing for you, and she is overhearing it, which is an entirely different arrangement and a great deal less embarrassing for everyone.” He turned a page. The violets were still pressed in the front of the book, three of them, gone now almost to dust at the edges, and neither of them had moved them, and the ribbon had migrated to whatever passage he was reading her that week, so that her wedding flowers and the place he had reached traveled through the volume together, a year of evenings recorded in the slow journey of a marker past a row of dead violets. “Where were we?”

“The garden. He had got at last to the garden, after a very great deal about a sofa.”

“He does go on about the sofa. I have made my peace with the sofa. A man who waited his whole life to say a warm thing learns to forgive another man for taking eighty lines to get to the point, because he understands, better than most, what the eighty lines are for.” He found the place by the violets and the ribbon both. “They are for working up the nerve.”

He read. The fire settled. The child slept in her basket with her grandmother’s name and her mother’s chin, and outside the long windows the ridge stood dark against a sky going to its first stars, the ridge a warm fast woman had ridden with her hair coming down and a cold careful son had refused to let his horse stand upon for eleven years and now crossed most mornings at a walk, in no hurry, with his wife beside him and a groom at a tactful distance, stopping at the top to look at the whole of the valley as though none of it were a responsibility.

Ellen listened to the dull part and then the rest, in the voice he had kept for years for no one and now spent every evening on an audience of two, one of whom could not understand a word and one of whom understood all of them, including the ones underneath, which were the ones she had married him without knowing were there.

She thought, sometimes, in this hour, of the girl who had sat on the edge of an enormous bed in fine lawn she had not chosen and listened to a clock strike one and understood that a stranger was not coming through a door, and had decided, with a calm that frightened her, that this was very likely the shape the rest of her life would take.

That girl had been right about almost everything and wrong about the one thing that mattered, which was the shape. The shape had turned out to be this. A fire, and a basket, and a dull poem about a sofa read in a voice that had learned to be unafraid of being heard, and an open door no one bothered to close, and a name on a sleeping child that an old woman had waited eleven years to hear said in a warm room.

She had been bought to clear a debt. She had been carried to a cold house and shelved like a thing acquired and set aside. And she had refused, stubbornly, over a long hard year, to be the furniture she had been purchased as, and had made instead, out of a ruined garden and a frightened man and her own considerable temper, a thing that no one had offered her and no one could now take away, which was a life that was hers, in a house she had been brought to as a stranger and had ended by teaching how to speak.

“You have stopped listening,” Theodore said, without looking up. “You have that face. The counting face. What are you counting?”

“My blessings, since you ask, which is a vulgar thing to be caught doing and I shall thank you not to mention it at any card table.”

“I would not dream of it. A man does not advertise the one sum in his life that came out larger than he had any right to expect.” He found his place again, by the violets, by the ribbon, by a year of evenings. “Shall I go on.”

“Go on,” she said, and he did, and the door stood open, and the fire burned down, and no one in that warm and talking house got up to close anything at all.

The End