She Said: “I Need a Place to Stay”… He Replied: “ I Need a Wife to Give My Dying Bloodline an Heir.”

Chapter 11

She found him in the garden room in the first week of November, at about two in the morning.

She had not been looking for him. She had come down for a book, because she had been awake since midnight with the household accounts going round in her head — the dairy roof, the north bridge, the four hundred pounds on Mrs. Trant’s list, and how much of it could be got out of the timber — and there was a light in the garden room and the door was ajar.

He was in the chair. The chair. The particular one — the one everybody in that house knew about and nobody had ever once mentioned to him.

He was not reading. There was no book, no candle beyond the one on the sill, no paper. He was sitting in the dark with the shutter open a hand’s width onto the black garden, and his head back, and his hands on the arms of the chair, and he was working at breathing the way other people work at a difficult sum — slowly, carefully, with everything he had.

Ellen stood in the doorway for a moment.

She could have gone back. That was the thing she thought about afterward — that she could have gone back up the stairs, and he would never have known, and that would have been the careful thing, the thing forty people in that house had been doing for eight years.

She came in, and shut the door behind her quietly, and sat down on the little stool by the window.

He turned his head. In the light of the one candle she could see that his face was grey, and that there was sweat along his hairline, and that he was not afraid. That was the part that stayed with her. He was not frightened. He was bored. A man of six-and-thirty sitting up in a cold room at two in the morning, having gone through this four nights a month for eight years, and the thing on his face was not terror.

It was the look of a man waiting out weather.

“You should go up,” he said. The words came out thin and spaced out.

“I know I should.”

She did not move.

They sat there for — she never knew how long. Ten minutes. Twenty. The candle guttered once and steadied. Somewhere out in the black garden an owl made its noise and then did not again. At some point his breathing came back enough that he could let his head down, and he did, and closed his eyes, and stayed there, and she stayed where she was.

When he opened them again he said:

“Nobody has ever sat in this room with me.”

“I know it.”

“Do you know why?”

“Because if somebody sits with you,” said Ellen Rooke, “then it is a thing that is happening. And if everybody stays on the other side of the door, then it is a thing that is not happening.”

He looked at her for a long moment.

“You are an extremely inconvenient woman,” he said.

“Yes.”

“At the time I chose you,” he said, “I thought I was choosing somebody who would not lie to me. I did not consider that she would also not lie to anybody else in the house, and that I should end up being the one who had to stop.”

He said it with something in his voice she had not heard before — not warmth exactly. Something under the exhaustion. And then he closed his eyes again, and she understood that he had used up everything he had, and that he would not be able to say anything else tonight, and that he would not want her to fetch anybody.

So she did not fetch anybody.

At around four she got up and put a second log on the fire, and pulled the shawl she had brought down with her — she had brought it, she realised, without knowing she had brought it — over his knees. Then she sat back down on the stool, and slept sitting up, in a chair, in a cold room, the way she had slept in the last year of her great-aunt’s illness, because she was very good at it and because holding a thing and looking at it at the same time had, by then, become the whole shape of what she was.

He woke her at half past six with his hand on her shoulder.

The room was grey. The fire was out. He was standing, and he was himself again, or as near to it as he ever got.

“You have been down here all night,” he said.

“Yes.”

“That was not in the bargain.”

“No,” said Ellen. “It was not.”

He stood there looking at her — and then he went out of the room, and she heard him in the hall, and a servant’s voice, and the ordinary sounds of a house waking up.