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

Chapter 19

Rose Vane took her first steps in the long gallery, in the autumn of the year after.

It was a vast, cold, beautiful room that ran the whole length of the north front, and it had been on Mrs. Trant’s list at the bottom of the second page, marked not this year, but it should be looked at by somebody who knows. It had been looked at. It had been looked at by a man from Salisbury who knew, and who had said a number, and the number had made Adrian put his hand flat on the table and say nothing for about four seconds.

Then he had said, “Do it.”

And it had taken eleven months, and a great deal of dust, and a scaffolding in the middle of the house that the housemaids complained about daily and that Rose Vane, aged one, regarded as the greatest marvel ever built by human hands.

Ellen walked the length of it with her daughter in her arms on the day the scaffolding came down.

The plasterers had gone. There was a smell of lime and beeswax. Sixty feet of cedar floor, laid when Queen Anne was alive, had come up out of the dirt the colour of honey, and there were three tall windows at either end with all the glass in them, and the two great mirrors over the chimneypieces had been taken down, re-silvered, and put back, and the whole room had doubled in size and in light.

Mrs. Trant stood in the middle of it with her hands folded, looking like a woman at her own wedding.

“Your grace,” she said.

“Mrs. Trant.”

“I have been in this house twenty years,” said the housekeeper of Ellingham. “I first saw this room when I was twenty-four years old and I was a kitchen maid and I was sent up with a tray. And I have looked at it every year since, and I have thought that wants doing, and I have thought not yet, about four hundred times.” She looked around the room again, at the honey-coloured floor and the fresh plaster and the light coming in the whole length of it. “And this morning I came in here at half past six with my own dustpan to do the corners, because I had decided I was not going to let one of the girls do it.”

Ellen set Rose down on the floor and let her go.

“She will not manage the whole sixty feet,” said Mrs. Trant.

“She will manage three of them and fall over,” said Ellen, “and then she will do it again, and in a year she will run the length of it and you and I will be the ones who are out of breath.”

Rose Vane got three feet, fell over, and considered the matter.

And the door at the end of the gallery opened, and Adrian Vane came in.

He was thirty-seven years old that autumn. A little over a year had gone by since the afternoon in the library, and he had a stick now that he used in the mornings and refused to use in the afternoons, and he could not do the whole sixty feet without stopping, and he did not do it without stopping. He came a third of the way and sat down on the window seat and let his breath come back and looked down the length of the room at his wife and his daughter and his housekeeper, who were all looking at him, and none of whom looked away.

“Rose,” he said. “Come here.”

Rose Vane got up off the floor and went eleven feet at a dead run, fell over at his feet, and was picked up and put on the window seat.

“That was the first eleven feet she has ever done,” said Ellen from the far end of the room.

“I know it. I was watching.”

“You could not see her feet from that window seat.”

“I could see your face,” said Adrian Vane. “That was sufficient.”

Mrs. Trant picked up her dustpan and went out of the room with the particular dignity of a woman who has decided that she has seen quite enough for one morning.