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

Chapter 19

The wedding night, as it happened, was spent in the library.

The great bedchamber of the Duke of Marnfeld had been prepared with every ceremony the house could command — fire laid, sheets aired, the ghost of a dozen ancestors’ weddings hanging in the air like old beeswax — and the household had retired, and the new Duchess and her husband had stood in the doorway of that great room, and looked at it, and at each other, and Eleanor had said: “This room is enormous.”

“It is.”

“It is enormous,” she said, “and I am not certain I am willing to begin my marriage being the smallest thing in a room that size.”

And Marcus, whose entire life had been lived in proportion to rooms that size, and who had spent thirty-six years adapting his smallness to their scale, looked at her beside him in the doorway, and understood, with the sudden force of a door opening onto a landscape, what she meant.

“Eleanor,” he said.

“Yes?”

“I was not certain I knew the way to be married,” he said. “I was raised to believe that a duke’s marriage is a matter of the correct room.” He took her hand. “I find I am not interested in being correct. I should like to be married in the room where I am most myself, which is the library, where there are books I have actually read, and a fire that knows my face, and a chair that does not pretend to be anything other than it is.”

So they spent the first night of their marriage in the library, in the worn leather chair by the fire that had held him on the night he had realized he loved her, and the new Duchess sat on the arm of the chair with her blue dress pooled around her, and they talked until the fire burned down to its red heart.

“Marcus,” she said, into the dark, much later.

“Mm?”

“I should like you to know that I will not always be the woman who noticed you were tired. I will be cross, sometimes. I will be wrong, sometimes. I will come home from visiting my mother in a temper, and I will serve you opinions about your books, and I will forget your birthday if it falls on a market day.” She paused. “I am telling you now, so that you may decide, in the light, while it is still cheap to decide.”

“I am glad you have told me,” he said. “I will raise you my own account, then: I am moody in November, I vanish into estate business without warning, I will not be lectured about my Latin, and I ride in the rain. I have been told these are defects. I hold them, I confess, in high regard.”

“Then we shall be defective together,” she said, “in the most comfortable room in England.”

The household, which had prepared the great bedchamber and had been preparing, with varying degrees of trepidation, to witness the birth of a new dynastic era, was startled the following morning to find the Duke and Duchess breakfasting in the small morning room, in their ordinary clothes, arguing comfortably about the pile of correspondence, and even more startled to receive the order — delivered by the Duke himself, mid-toast — that the library chairs were to become, henceforth, the state furniture of Marnfeld Hall, and the great bedchamber was to be closed until such time as the house required it for anyone who actually wanted it.

“I should like,” the Duke said to his steward, “to have the house run the way my wife finds comfortable. I am told this is radical. See that it is implemented.”

“The chairs, Your Grace?”

“The chairs. All of them. Every chair in this house that exists to be looked at — I want them either made comfortable or moved to the attics. The Duchess,” he added, with the particular careful offhandedness of a man stating a principle he has only recently understood, “believes that beauty is not worth very much when it pinches.”

The steward, who had served three Dukes of Marnfeld, and who had spent his career arranging the comfort of guests who were not permitted to be comfortable, bowed. “Yes, Your Grace.”

“Steward.”

“Your Grace?”

“I have four hundred rooms in this house. If you find one that does not need to be uncomfortable, do not tell anyone.” And he went out into the garden to find his wife, leaving the steward standing in the hall with an expression of profound and, it must be said, joyful bewilderment — because he had watched the Duke, over the winter, become a man he could not have predicted, and he had decided, in the way of a long servant, that this new Duke was the one worth serving.