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

Chapter 24

The note stayed in Eleanor’s blue dress.

She had kept it — the letter Marcus had sent to the inn the night before the wedding, folded into a square so small it would have surprised the footman who had delivered it — in the pocket of the pale blue gown, and she had moved it, after the wedding, to the drawer of the small table beside the bed they used in the library, where it lay among the other relics of the winter: a pressed sprig of lavender from Mrs. Quill; a receipt for the reupholstering of the chairs; the dowager’s letter, folded in its turn; and, at the bottom of the drawer, her own note, the one she had left on his pillow at Marnfeld in October, in the year of the gathering, that said:

I hope you find someone beside whom you can rest.

She looked at them, some evenings, when the house was quiet and the children were asleep and her husband was down in the library arguing with a book, the way other men argued with their tenants. The whole of the winter was in that drawer: the asking, the refusing, the misunderstanding, the apology, the change, the choosing. It seemed impossible to her sometimes — the whole of a life, begun by three words spoken across a dinner table to a man who had been performing for so long he had forgotten there was a person underneath.

He was tired now, too. She had noticed it in his shoulders these last weeks, the way he carried the harvest and the correspondence and the county’s endless appetite for his attention. She went down to the library and stood in the doorway, and he looked up from his book with the particular expression he wore when she appeared in a doorway — as though she were a letter he had been waiting for.

“You are tired,” she said.

“Extremely.”

“Then I will sit in the comfortable chair,” she said, “and you will sit in the other one, and we will be quiet together until the quiet is enough.”

“Eleanor.”

“Yes?”

“The quiet,” he said, “has always been enough. It was never the quiet I lacked.” He set his book down. “I have been thinking about my mother’s gathering. I have been thinking about it every year, in October, when the leaves turn — about the eight women, and the candlelight, and the long table, and the fact that I sat in the center of it all with my armor on, answering questions about London and the ballroom and my preferences in winters, and feeling like a man being interviewed for a position he did not want.”

“And now?”

“And now,” he said, “I spend my Octobers here, in this room, with you and the children and the comfortable chairs, and I find I no longer have to answer for my preferences. I am permitted to have them.” He looked at her. “I owe it all to a question I did not ask for, and did not deserve, and have never once grown tired of being asked.”

“Are you tired, Your Grace?” she asked, and the words landed between them with all their original weight, and none of their original distance.

“Never,” he said. “Never when you ask.”

She went to him, and sat on the arm of the chair, and the fire burned low, and the library settled into its small sounds — the settling of coals, the turning of a page he was not reading, the breathing of the house — and in the quietest hour of the night, in the most comfortable room in England, the wine merchant’s daughter from Brackley sat beside the man who had stopped being a duke the moment she saw him, and who had spent the years since learning, slowly and without ceremony, to be a husband.

And the cold autumn of the gathering, the winter of the misunderstanding, the spring of the choosing, the whole long progress of the only honest thing that had ever happened to either of them — it all ended, as it had begun, with a question.

“Are you tired?”

“Not anymore.”

The End