She Said: “I Need a Place to Stay”… He Replied: “ I Need a Wife to Give My Dying Bloodline an Heir.”
Chapter 20
Three more children came after Rose, over nine years: a boy, and then another boy, and then a girl who died at eleven weeks and was buried in the churchyard under the yew, and who was never once mentioned by name in that house because Ellen found that she could not bear to hear the name, and said so plainly, and Adrian Vane understood, and after that nobody ever did.
The boy — the eldest, Thomas — was born in the fourth year, in the same west room, in the same October, in the same noise.
The county had a great deal to say about that.
Ellen heard it, of course. Mrs. Trant told her, because Ellen had made it a rule on the second week of her marriage that Mrs. Trant would go on telling her things, and Mrs. Trant had kept that rule for eleven years with the care of a woman who had once been braced for tears and had got a strange young woman with her hands in a basin of cold water instead.
And what the county said, when the boy came, was that the marriage had turned out remarkably well, and that his grace had exceeded every expectation, and that it was wonderful what a good woman could do for a man, and that Lady Fell had always said so.
Ellen heard that too.
She was standing in the stillroom in the eleventh year, with a bowl of damsons in front of her, when Mrs. Trant finished, and she put down the knife and stood there a moment.
“Your grace,” said Mrs. Trant, who had grown old enough in the service of that house to know when a silence wanted filling. “I have told you what was said. And I did not ask for it.”
“No. But you have told me for eleven years, and I have asked you to, and I am not going to start complaining now.” Ellen picked the knife back up. “And it is the same sentence, Mrs. Trant. It is the identical sentence they said in the churchyard in the first July, with one word changed.”
Mrs. Trant looked at her.
“Then they said how clever of you,” said Ellen. “And now they say what a good woman, and always said so. And underneath both of them it is the same thing, which is that they have decided what I am, and they are going to be extremely nice to me about it for the rest of my life.”
She split a damson and took out the stone.
“And I have decided,” she said, “that I shall not spend one more hour of my life on it. I have been eleven years in this house. I have three living children in it, and one child buried under the yew. I have a husband who is forty-seven and who was told at eight-and-twenty he would not see thirty. And there is a man in the town who has said to me four times in the last three years, ‘his grace is looking well,’ in a voice that means I had not expected to see him at all. That is the only sentence in this whole business that I have ever been able to answer. And I have answered it four times, and I shall answer it forty more, and one day somebody will count the years properly and stop saying it.”
Mrs. Trant stood there for a moment.
“They will not,” she said.
“No,” said Ellen. “But there will be somebody in this house in a hundred years who reads the register and does the sums, and finds that the Duke of Ellingham died at ninety-one, and looks at the date of his marriage, and works out that he married at six-and-thirty with four shillings in his wife’s pocket, and that fifty-five years came out of it.” She dropped the damson in the bowl. “And that will be the answer. And it will not be a clever one. It will simply be the arithmetic.”