Every Lady Tried to Impress the Duke—Only One Asked, “Are You Tired?”
Chapter 20
The summer unfolded itself over Marnfeld like a green hand.
The Duchess — Eleanor Linden, the wine merchant’s girl from Brackley who had asked the Duke of Marnfeld if he was tired — became, with remarkable speed and complete lack of effort, the most quietly influential person in the county. She did not do it through ambition. She did it through the particular obstinacy of her honesty: she opened the West Ballroom to the village for the harvest, so that people could dance in rooms their grandparents had been permitted only to clean; she rearranged the visiting hours so that the servants of the house had somewhere private to receive their own friends; she began, with Mrs. Quill’s help, a standing arrangement by which the house’s surplus fruit, surplus linen, and surplus opinion went out into the village with no invoice attached.
The Dowager Duchess watched this proceed with a skepticism that lasted approximately six weeks, and then, with the particular grace of a woman long experienced in recognizing a losing battle, decided that it was the most sensible household management she had ever witnessed, and descended from her wing to propose a weekly alliance of her own. “You will ruin the tone of the house,” she told Eleanor, “and I find I do not care. I have spent forty years defending the tone of the house, and the tone of the house has never once done anything for me except require that I sit in its chairs.”
“Then sit in the new ones,” said Eleanor. “They are much improved.”
“I have sat in them. They are insufferably comfortable. I believe you have ruined my standards.” The Dowager looked at her for a long moment, and then, with one of her rare, unguarded smiles: “He has been happier this summer than I have seen him in twenty years, Duchess. I did not know I was raising a man who could be happy. I thought I was raising a duke. I find I was wrong, and I find I do not mind it.”
The autumn came, and with it, one afternoon in late September, a letter.
Marcus did not read it first. The morning post had been brought to the morning room, and he was standing at the window with his coffee, watching the first yellowing of the leaves, when Eleanor — seated at the table with the correspondence — went very still over one sheet, and read it twice, and set it down.
“Eleanor?”
“It is from my mother,” she said. “She has been reading the newspapers. There is a notice — she says it is in the society pages of the Bristol paper.” She looked up at him. “Mr. Ashcombe is married. To the daughter of a barrister, I believe. My mother says it is a very suitable match.”
Marcus came and stood behind her chair, and looked at the letter over her shoulder, and said nothing.
“It is strange,” Eleanor said, “how small the news seems. I spent two years carrying that man’s name like a stone in my shoe, and the stone has been gone for a year, and I had not noticed until now.” She folded the letter carefully. “I wrote to him, once, in the spring — did you know? To wish him well, and to tell him that I did not intend to carry the story of us into my own marriage, because I found I no longer needed it.” She paused. “He did not reply, which I also find I no longer need.”
“Are you tired, Duchess?” Marcus asked, and the question — the old question, the first question, the question that had begun everything between them in a room full of strangers — landed in the morning sunlight with all its original weight, and none of its original armor.
“Not in the least,” she said. “Ask me again tomorrow.”
“I intend to ask you every day,” he said. “I have been practicing.”
It was not, perhaps, a conventional proposal of a marriage’s permanence. But it was theirs, and it survived, and it was asked — she counted, privately, in the small notebook she kept in the library — on three hundred and eleven mornings in the first year, and answered, faithfully, three hundred and eleven times.