Every Lady Tried to Impress the Duke—Only One Asked, “Are You Tired?”

Chapter 10

The courtship, such as it was, began in the smallest currency: errands.

Marcus came to Brackley six times in the first month—always announced, always honestly, always with a specific and unremarkable purpose. He brought books she had mentioned, a cutting of the white roses from the south terrace, a letter from his mother that turned out to be several pages of closely argued advice about furniture. He came for tea. He came for dinner. He came on a Tuesday afternoon with no excuse at all, and stood in the kitchen door with his hat in his hands, and said that he had been riding past, and that he had thought of her, and that he had stopped believing in coincidence somewhere around the age of twenty-five.

Eleanor did not make it easy.

It was not a strategy; strategy had died in her weeks ago, replaced by something more honest and more demanding—the actual, slow, unfinished business of deciding whether she could trust him. She tested him the way one tests a bridge, by walking onto it and listening for the give. She disagreed with him about the books he recommended. She forgot—genuinely forgot—two of their appointments, and arrived flushed and apologetic, and found him waiting without a single complaint. She told her father, in Marcus’s hearing, that the duke was the most arrogant man she had ever argued with, and Marcus, instead of laughing it away, said, “No, I am only the richest. Lord Fenwick is more arrogant,” and she had laughed so hard she had to set down her tea.

And slowly, in the ordinary weather of a winter courtship, he learned the geography of her.

He learned that she disliked early mornings despite pretending otherwise for the sake of good manners, and that she read the end of novels before the middle because she could not bear suspense, and that she became argumentative whenever anyone suggested that practicality should matter more than happiness. He learned that she kept the lavender Mrs. Quill had given her in a blue jar by her window, that she hummed when she gardened, that she could not abide the smell of violets, and that she had a small, fierce loyalty to the village schoolmistress that made her uncharacteristically sharp about the parish fund.

And she learned his.

She learned that he rode in the rain because the rain made the world uninhabited, and that he hated formal dinners with a passion that verged on the religious, and that he disappeared from large gatherings not out of rudeness but out of need, because silence genuinely restored him. She learned that he had a small scar on his left hand from a riding accident at nine, that he could not swim, that he wrote notes to his land agent in the margins of his correspondence, and that he had been engaged once, at twenty-three, to a woman his father had chosen, who had broken it off by letter while he was abroad, and who had made certain he knew—through friends of friends, through the particular cruelty of gossip—that she had never wanted him, only his succession.

“That is why,” Eleanor said one evening in December, as they sat in the small drawing room of the white house while the fire snapped and her parents tactfully vanished upstairs, “you distrust everybody who wants something from you. You were taught by her that wanting was a kind of conquest.”

“I was taught,” he said, “that being wanted for one’s position is a kind of death. It is a slower education than most.”

“And yet you came to Marnfeld to be chosen.”

“No.” He looked at her. “I came to Marnfeld to comply with my mother. I look back on it now—on the whole gathering, on the eight of you—and I think what I mainly remember is the shame of it. I treated human beings like a list of specifications. And then a woman asked after my fatigue, and I felt, for the first time in twenty years, like a person being addressed.”

“Your fatigue,” Eleanor said. “The first time you spoke to me alone, in your library, you said you were extremely tired. I could hear it in your voice. I could see it in the way you set your shoulders down.” She was quiet for a moment. “I know that tiredness, Marcus. It is the tiredness of holding oneself up for too long. My father has worn it for two years. He does not complain; he simply carries that weariness the way we carry the small inconveniences of age.”

“Then you know why I came back.”

“I know why you came back. I am still learning whether I believe it.”

“Take your time,” he said. “I am not going anywhere. I have, as it happens, nowhere I would rather be than uncomfortable chairs and honest company.”

She laughed, and the laugh was unguarded, and he rose, and crossed the room, and took her hand, and pressed it—without asking permission, without presumption—and she let him, and for a moment they stood together in the small warm room, and the winter closed in around the house like a hand around a candle.

But outside, in the frozen December evening, a carriage with the arms of Ashcombe—a shipping family of Bristol, whose fortunes had lately been remarked upon in the county papers—was pulling up at the village inn, and inside it sat a man of thirty, handsome in the way of a confident horse, who had heard, at a dinner party in Bath, that his former betrothed had attracted the attention of a duke, and who had come, at his father’s urging and his own expense, to see what there was, still, to be claimed.