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

Chapter 9

The letter took Marcus four nights to write.

He wrote it in the library, at the table where she had stood with the book she had not been reading, and he tore up the first three drafts because they were full of the two things he had resolved to eliminate: self-pity, and the word but. The fourth draft he wrote slowly, in the correct belief that this letter had to be the most honest thing he had ever committed to paper, and that it had to arrive without the weight of his title attached to it like a stone.

The final letter read:

Miss Linden—

I have spent four evenings composing this letter and four mornings tearing it up, which I mention not to impress you with the difficulty but to warn you that the version you are reading is the fourth, and the others were worse.

I was wrong. Not carelessly wrong, not idly wrong—wrong in the particular, harmful way that comes from a long habit of distrust, and I want to say clearly that I do not excuse that habit, I do not ask you to forgive it, and I do not expect it to be forgiven because of the man who held it.

I have been surrounded for twenty years by people who wanted things from me, and I grew expert at reading their wanting. I met a woman who wanted nothing, and asked nothing, and I treated her asking nothing as evidence that she wanted everything most skillfully of all. That is a sickness in me, Miss Linden, and it is not yours to heal, but I would like to be allowed to cure it in your company.

I overheard you tell your mother that you would rather be poor in a cold house than rich in a dishonest one. I have thought of nothing else since. I have looked at the chairs, and thought of you. I have walked the path to the sea, and heard you say you were not certain which of us you were.

I will not enumerate my titles, my estates, or my prospects. You know them; every woman in the county knows them; they have never once made a moment of my life less empty. I do not ask you to consider them. I ask you to consider only this: I am asking you whether you could one day come to care for me—not for the peace I am certain you could bring me, not for the relief of being seen, but for myself, as I am becoming, which is a man who would rather lose his dignity than lie to you.

If you never reply, I will understand, and I will not write again. But I will be sorry, and the sorriness will be the most genuine thing in my possession.

Yours, without claim,

Marcus

He sent it by courier the next morning, and he received the reply nine days later—a reply that he opened standing in the morning room, with his mother inventing errands in the corridor just out of sight, and that consisted, in its entirety, of the following:

Your Grace—

I have read your letter. I thank you for it. I am not ready to say more to you than that. I will say this much, because I think it is owed to you: I have grown used to being seen as a position in a seating chart, and you saw me, and I am grateful. But I have also grown used to being an inconvenience to the plans of the ambitious, and I am tired. I do not know yet whether I can trust your clarity. You must give me time, and perhaps you must give me distance, and I must decide whether the man in your letter is the man in your house.

—E. Linden

She had signed it with nothing but her initial, and he read the letter seven times, and he noticed—with a tenderness that surprised him—that she had not addressed him as Your Grace until the first line, and that everything after it had been plain, and level, and entirely her.

Eleanor Linden did not write to him again for six weeks.

In that time, Marcus Ashford did several things he had never done before. He wrote to his land agent and instructed him to set aside a portion of the coalfield income for reasons he declined to state. He sat through a full dinner with the vicar of Brackley, a man he had previously avoided, and asked careful questions not about parish finances but about the crops, and the cruelty of the late frosts, and the families who lived at the edge of the estate. He learned—as he had never thought to learn—where his own boundaries were, and who lived within them, and what they owed him, and what he owed them.

And he rode to Brackley.

Not on the day of the letter. Not after the first silence. He waited until the waiting itself had become discipline, until forty-two days had passed since her reply, he wrote one line to her—I will be at the turnpike gate at noon on Thursday; I will understand if you do not come—and he rode thirty miles through rain that soaked him to the collar, and he found her standing at the gate of the small white house with her mother behind her in the window like a warning.

She looked thinner. She looked tired. She looked at him with the level, unhurried attention he had dreamed about for six weeks, and she said:

“You came.”

“I did.”

“Have you come to choose me, Your Grace?”

“No.”

Her expression shifted—he saw the surprise move through it like wind across water.

“I have come,” he said, “to ask whether, eventually, you might choose me.”

The silence between them was long, and full, and neither of them broke it.

“That,” said Eleanor Linden at last, “is different.”

“It should have been different from the beginning. It should never have been anything else.”

She stood in her small white garden, in front of her mother’s small white window, with her hands clasped behind her back the way she had clasped them on his terrace, and she looked at him for a long time, and then she said, very quietly:

“I would like to take a walk with you, then. Down the lane, past the church. There is nowhere to sit that is both beautiful and comfortable—I have had to learn to compromise—but I would like to walk a little, and see whether the man in your letter walks like the man in your house.”

He did not move.

For a moment she thought he had not understood, and then she saw that he had—that he was standing utterly still, in the middle of the road, with rain dripping off his collar and relief moving through him like the sun coming out, and when she turned and began to walk, he followed her, and the whole of the small white village of Brackley watched the Duke of Marnfeld walk a woman down a lane in the rain as if he were being shown the first geography of his life.

Beside the church, in the shelter of the yew tree, she stopped.

“Your mother,” she said, “will be furious.”

“My mother,” he said, “is already writing to yours. I believe the correspondence is escalating.”

“About what?”

“About the chairs, I should imagine. It has become a diplomatic matter. Mrs. Linden has taken the position that they are comfortable; the Dowager has taken the position that they are character-building; I believe they are both wrong, and I intend to replace them the moment I have the authority.”

The laugh that escaped her startled them both. He heard it, tasted it, filed it away with the sound of the sea and the smell of the lavender and the other small inventories of the only honest woman he had ever known.

“Will you come in?” she asked. “It is a small house, Your Grace. Nothing like Marnfeld. There is nowhere to sit that is beautiful, and the tea will be ordinary, and my father will not know what to say to you, and I think you should meet him anyway.”

“I would be honored,” Marcus said, “to be shown every uncomfortable room you own.”

And he went inside the small white house, and he drank ordinary tea, and he met her father, whose hand trembled slightly when he stood; Marcus said nothing at all about money or doubt or the past, and he left at dusk with the promise of a walk tomorrow, and he rode home through the rain with the feeling—rare, unmistakable, long-dormant—of having begun something.