Page 66 of A Bride for the Ruthless Duke

He went out to the garden without his greatcoat, though it was cold, because stopping for it would have given him time to think better of going at all.

It was nearly dark, the early dark of the failing year, and the kitchen garden lay grey and orderly under the last of the light. She was at the far end of it, kneeling at a cleared bed with her sleeves pushed up and earth to the wrist, doing in the cold and the dusk the work she had let go for a week and plainly meant to have back. She did not hear him on the soft ground until he was close, and when she did she came to her feet quickly and put her dirty hands behind her, and the wariness that crossed her face was the worst single thing he had seen in a season, because he had put it there, with a week of silence she had read as the only thing silence had ever meant to her, which was judgment.

“Your Grace.” She was braced for it, whatever it was. “I am sorry. I will go in. I did not think you would be out here.”

“Stay.” It came out more abruptly than he had meant. “Please. I did not come out here to send you indoors.” He had no practice at any of this, and heard the want of practice in his own voice, the stiffness, the absence of any easy way for a man to stand in a garden at dusk and speak plainly to his own wife.

“Stay a moment. There is a thing I have come to say, and I have already delayed it five days beyond what I ought, and if you go in now I will lose the nerve of it and put it off again, and you will continue thinking about whatever it is you have been thinking this week, and I find I cannot bear that for another night.”

She went still, half risen, her earthy hands behind her, and waited.

“You asked Mrs. Selby something.” He had meant to begin gently and found he had no gentle beginning in him, only the true thing, come out sideways. “The morning after. You asked her whether I was very angry with you.”

The color went out of her face and then came back. “She should not have told you that.”

“She told me because she is wiser than I am, and braver, and has been trying for a fortnight to make me do the thing I am doing very badly now.” He stopped a yard from her, the careful yard, the one he had kept between them for three months, and for once he did not let it stand. He closed it. “I am not angry with you, Ellen. I have never for one moment been angry with you. I have been a great many things since that night, and not one of them, not for one second of one hour, was my anger meant for you. I should have come and said so the next morning. I told myself my silence was a kindness, that you needed to be let alone, and that was a falsehood or half of one. The truth is that I did not come because I did not know how to stand in front of you and say what I felt, and I have not known how since I was a boy, and you have borne the bitter cost of it, while I am filled with shame.”

She stared at him in the near dark, her hands still earthy at her sides, and for a moment she did not say anything at all, because she had braced the whole of herself for a sentence read over her head and had been handed something else entirely, and had nowhere yet to put it.

Then she found her voice, and it came out uneven. “You have not spoken to me in a week.” She stopped, and made herself go on. “I have spent seven days certain that you had seen the whole of what I am and found it was less than nothing. That you were only waiting for a quiet way to be rid of me. That a man does not look at his wife in another man’s arms and feel anything in the world but disgust.”

“Then you were wrong in every particular.” He said it very low. “I looked at my wife in another man’s arms and felt that I would take the man’s throat out in my two hands and hang for it and count it cheap. And under that I felt that I had driven her to that folly myself, with three months of a cold house and a door I locked from my own side, as surely as if I had written the letter in his place and signed his name to it. That is what I felt. Not disgust. Not for one instant, disgust.”

She was weeping now, without sound, the way she had wept in the folly, and not from grief this time, or not from grief alone. “Why are you telling me this here? In the cold, in the dark, among the cabbages.”

“Because it is your ground.” He looked about the grey beds, the turned earth, and the thing she had raised out of a wilderness with her own hands. “Everything else in this matrimony is mine. The house, the name, the money, the rules you were handed and never allowed to question. This is yours. You made it out of a ruin while no one was troubling to watch you. If I was to stand in front of you and say a true thing at last, I found I wanted to say it on the one piece of ground in the whole of my holdings that belongs to you and not to me.”

She looked down at her own earthy hands, and then out at the cleared beds going into the dark, the rows she had measured and dug and coaxed back from a wilderness, and when she raised her eyes to him again something in her face had changed. It had not softened so much as opened, the way a fist opens when it has grown too tired to go on being a fist.

“That is all,” he said, after a moment, gently. “I do not ask anything of you tonight. I only could not allow you to harbor the feeling that I was angry one hour longer, now that I know you thought it.” He inclined his head, the old formal habit, though quite absurd in a garden in the dusk, but could not help it. “It is cold. Come in when you are ready. There is no hurry. The garden will wait, and so will I.”

He turned to go back to the house, and had taken three steps across the dark beds when something she had been holding all week came loose, and she said it to his back.

“You sent the violets.”

He stopped.

“In the spring. To my room, the week after the wedding. A little bunch of them on the sill one morning, and never any card with them. I asked Bess and she did not know, and I asked Selby and she would only say that flowers came up from the gardens at this season, as though I were simple to wonder. I decided in the end that I had imagined anyone meant them for me at all.” Her voice was not quite level. “It was you. You came out to this garden, or sent Coyne to it, and cut violets for me, and could not put your name to a single stem. All this while.”

He stood with his back to her in the grey garden, and found that the thing he had kept hidden the better part of a year cost him, in the end, only four words to give away.

“It was always me,” he said.

And he went in, and left her standing among the cleared beds with the dark coming down over the park, and the whole shape of her matrimony quietly rearranging itself behind her eyes, every cold and unexplained kindness of three months turning over, one after another, to show her the warm and frightened thing that had been on the underside of each of them the entire time.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

“You are staring at your wine, Your Grace, as though it has done you some injury.”

“I am trying to express a sentiment in words, and find I possess no skill in the uttering of sentiments, only in their suppression.”

It was the fourth night running he had come to dinner and stayed past the meal, and the fourth night Augusta had developed, with great tact and no subtlety whatever, a sudden need to retire early, and they had been left at the long table with the candles burning down between them and the footmen sent away.

“Then say it badly,” Ellen said. “I have heard a great deal of bad saying in my life. I shall not mind one more piece of it.”

“Very well.” He turned the glass by its stem and did not drink. “I find I do not know how you take your tea. We have been wedded four months, and I have watched you pour it a hundred times, and I could not tell you tonight whether you take sugar, because I have never once let myself sit close enough to learn. I find that I should like to know. That is the thing. It is a very small thing, said badly, and it is the truest thing I have said at this table in four months.”

“One sugar,” she said. Her voice was not quite steady. “In the morning. None in the afternoon, because the afternoon pot is stewed and sugar only makes it worse.”