Page 49 of The Cold Duke's Hired Bride

“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 backof 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.”

“Splendid. Chasing never warmed a cold man. Standing still where he can find you when he is ready, that is the thing, and it is the work of real patience, and it asks a great deal more of a woman than running ever did.” Beatrice took her hand. “Stand still, my dear. He is his father’s son, and his father came to it in the end, only a lifetime too late. The boy has the chance to be early. Leave him the room to take it, and do not fill the room with your chasing, for there will be no space left in it for him to walk back into.”

***

He found her in the old nursery on the third floor, the day after that.

She had gone up only to look at it, the long disused room under the eaves where, the staff said, the duke had hidden as a small boy from his brother’s noise. It was shrouded and grey, the furniture under dust sheets like a roomful of patient ghosts, the window so filmed the afternoon came through it the colour of weak tea. And something in her, the same something that had folded lawn linen season after season against a child who nevercame, refused to leave it so. The sheets came off one by one, the window went up with a complaint of old sash weights, and she was standing in a flood of hard clean light, dust to her elbows, when his step sounded on the stair.

“Wells told me you had been coming up here.” He stopped in the doorway with the look of a man who had walked the length of a great house to reach one room. “You moved your things out of our chamber.”

“I moved a hairbrush and a book. I left you the greater part of the furniture.”

“You moved your things out of our chamber, and I stood in it this morning and could not find the smell of you anywhere in the air, and I have spent the day learning that I am losing you by inches and seem to have agreed to it without anyone consulting me, least of all myself.” His voice was not steady. She had never in her life heard it lose its footing. “You did it so quietly I did not mark it for a day. Your first husband would not have marked it for a year. I marked it in a day and did nothing, and a day is not so much better than a year, when a woman is carrying herself out of a room by inches.”

“It is a little better. I will allow you the day.” She stayed where she was, across the room from him. “What I am doing up here, since you have not asked, is opening a room. It has been shut a very long time. It has good light, when one troubles to let the light in, and it seemed a waste to leave it grey. I thought it might do, one day. For a child, if we are lucky. For a room a child need not be afraid to be loud in, which I am told this one was not, once, a long while ago.”

He took in the bright stripped room, and the raised window, and his wife standing in the middle of it grey to the elbow and wholly unafraid of a future she had every reason to have given up on. Something came apart in his face then that she had not seencome apart in him before, not at the altar and not at his father’s bed.

“You still believe there is to be a future worth the trouble of airing a room for.”

“I have always believed it. It is the most stubborn thing about me, and it has outlasted far worse than you, so I would not wager against it if I were you.”

The words came out of him then in a rush, as though a wall built to hold them had let go all at once. “I thought if I gave you safety, it would be enough. I know now it is not enough to be safely alone. I have been safe my whole life, Renae, kept and provided for and entirely alone for very nearly every hour of it, and I never called the thing by its name until I watched you carry your belongings out of our room and felt the house go cold in exactly the manner I spent thirty years pretending I did not mind. You have captivated my heart completely. I have feared the mastery you hold over my heart, but I will no longer suffer that cowardice to rule me.”

She crossed the nursery to him over the bare scrubbed boards, set down the cloth in her hand, and took his face in both her dusty palms, holding it where there was not a column of figures in the world for him to look at instead.

“You are an impossibly foolish creature,” Her thumbs moved along the bone of his jaw. “I gave you my heart at the pond, when you carried me there over your shoulder and set me down firmly. I gave you my heart when you talked about the brave young boy who defied all common sense and jumped in to save a drowning dog when nobody else dared to move. Usefulness was never what I was waiting for. It was only ever you. It was only ever going to be you.”

“I have been a great simpleton.”

“You have. I find, on balance, that I do not mind, provided you have finished.” Her eyes had spilled over and she made nomove to hide it. “Have you finished, Declan. Tell me you have finished being afraid in the next room, because I have a great quantity of being unafraid stored up and nowhere to spend it, and I should very much like to begin.”

“I have finished.”