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

Chapter 21

The first winter of the marriage was a hard one.

The snow came early, in December, and lay deep over the county by the week before Christmas, closing the roads and burying the hedgerows until the whole landscape was a white silence in which only the smoke of the chimneys moved. The new Duchess spent the fortnight before Christmas in the enormous, draughty halls of Marnfeld, arranging the household’s first holiday in decades, and the servants — who had learned, in the summer, that the Duchess’s kindness was not a campaign — watched her do it with a pleasure that had no seasoning of calculation in it.

On Christmas Eve the Dowager appeared in the kitchen, where Eleanor was supervising the plum puddings, and stood in the doorway looking at the steam and the noise and the wooden spoons, and said — loudly, as was her custom: “This is the first Christmas of which I have been aware in thirty years, Duchess. I intend to spend it in the kitchen. Do not tell anyone.”

“I would not,” said Eleanor. “I would not dare.”

“You are learning,” said the Dowager, and took up a spoon.

Christmas morning found Marcus at the window of the library before the light, looking out over the snow with the particular stillness of a man who has been given something unexpected and is testing its weight. Eleanor came in with coffee, and found him there, and stood beside him, and looked out at the white valley with him.

“You are thinking,” she said.

“I was thinking about my father,” he said. “He loved this place more than he loved anything. I never understood it, as a boy — I thought it was the stone he loved, the permanence.” He paused. “He used to say to me, in the autumn, when the leaves turned, ‘The world makes its arrangements, Marcus, and a man makes his.’ I never knew what he meant until this winter. It is not the arrangements I love. It is this — the snow, and the smoke, and you beside me, and the knowing that I am not performing anything.”

Eleanor was quiet for a long moment.

“Your father,” she said, “would be proud of you, Marcus.”

“Do you think so?”

“I think he would have recognized you,” she said. “That is the same thing, and it is better.”

They stood in the white silence together for a long time, and the valley lay under the snow like an enormous, unopened letter.

The old Marquess of Fenwick died in the new year, at the age of eighty-seven, after a season of hospitality that had worn out every chair in his house, and Marcus stood at the funeral in the freezing churchyard of the county town and was asked by a dozen men of consequence what he remembered of the old man.

“His opinions on chairs,” Marcus said. “He believed the best chair in any house was the one nobody else was sitting in.”

The men of consequence looked puzzled. Eleanor, standing at her husband’s side in the black veil, smiled — a small, fierce, private smile that no one else could have read, because she was the only person in the county who understood that the Duke of Marnfeld had been practicing his eulogy for thirty-six years, and that he had finally found the man brave enough to receive it.