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

Chapter 15

The winter was the worst of it.

The county had a hard December that year — the north road flooded twice, and the river came up over the low ground, and the two farms that had been let at the same rent as the high ground were under water for eleven days, which settled that argument for good and all, and gave Adrian and Ellen something to be furious about together in an entirely ordinary way.

But the cold got into him.

He had four bad nights in the last week of December, and then a fifth, and then on the second of January he did not come down to breakfast for the first time in Ellen’s knowledge of him, and Mrs. Trant came to the stillroom with her mouth set, and said, “Your grace, Mr. Croy is with him, and I think you should go up.”

She went up.

The room was dark and too warm, and there was a smell she knew — she had smelled it for four years in another house, in another county — of camphor and sweat and the particular closeness of a sickroom with a fire that is too big because somebody is afraid. Mr. Croy, who had been his man eleven years, was standing at the foot of the bed with his hands folded, doing what everybody in that house did, which was to be extremely calm and look at something else.

Adrian was on his side with his face turned to the wall and his hand up under his jaw, breathing in a way that Ellen Rooke had heard four times in her life and did not need to have explained to her.

She stood in the doorway and looked at him.

“Mr. Croy.”

“Your grace.”

“Open that window a hand’s width. And take the fire down to one log. And then go and get your dinner, and do not come back for an hour.”

Croy’s face did something complicated, because it was his master and his eleven years and his particular pride — and then he looked at the woman in the doorway, who was six-and-twenty and had been in the house eight months, and who was not crying and not speaking softly and not being brave, and who had given him an order in the voice of somebody who had stood in sickrooms before.

He opened the window. He took down the fire. He went.

Ellen took her boots off so that the floor would not sound, and sat down in the chair by the bed, and pulled the curtain back from the window a hand’s width so that there was a little grey light in the room, and then she sat there.

For three hours.

At some point in the second hour the breathing began to go the other way — the ugly way, the way she had heard once before and had known what it meant — and she did not get up, and she did not call anybody, and she put her hand flat on the blanket over his shoulder and left it there. Not holding. Not pressing. Just a weight, on the outside of the blankets, that he could have shaken off if he had wanted to.

He did not shake it off.

In the third hour the breathing levelled. His hand came out from under his jaw and lay flat on the coverlet, and after a while he turned his head on the pillow and opened his eyes and looked at her.

“You have been there the whole time,” he said.

“Yes.”

“How long?”

“About three hours.”

He lay still for a moment.

“Did you send Croy away?”

“I sent Croy to his dinner. He came back at four and I sent him away again.” She took her hand off the blanket. “He is a good man, and he has been sitting in this house watching you for eleven years, and I could not have done that to him twice in one afternoon.”

Adrian Vane lay looking at the ceiling.

“Ellen.”

“Yes.”

“If I die in this room,” he said, “I want it to be you in that chair. Not Croy. Not Trant. Not the physician.”

“I know.”

“I have wanted to say that for five months and I have not been able to, because I did not want to put it on you.”

“I know that too.”

“There is a difficulty in it,” said Adrian, “which is that you will then have to be in the room.”

“I know the difficulty,” said Ellen Rooke. “And I have decided.” She stood up and poured him a little water and held it while he drank it, badly, because his hand was not steady. “Two people have told me they know exactly what I am and what I have done and why: nine of your neighbours in a churchyard in July, and your cousin’s solicitor in a letter last month, who was extremely correct about it. And I have not denied it to either of them and I am not going to.” She set the glass down. “But there is one thing in this whole business that is mine, and nobody gave it to me, and nobody sold it to me, and nobody can take it off me — and it is that chair.”

He looked at her.

“Then sit in it,” he said.

“I intend to.”