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

Chapter 21

The orchard fruited in the seventh year.

It had been planted — Ellen had watched the men do it from the small drawing room window in September of the first year, nine trees going into the ground where nine dead ones had been taken out, and the whole business costing nine pounds and some shillings from the estate, under the order Adrian had finally signed.

She had gone out to look at them that first autumn, standing at the edge of the grass with the wind off the river, and the trees had looked, she thought, exactly like sticks pushed into the ground by a child who had lost interest.

They were sticks for three years. In the fourth year they were something you could call trees. In the fifth, Adrian Vane had begun — without ever once saying why, and without ever once mentioning that the order had been his own on a paper she had brought him — to walk down to the lower orchard at about five in the afternoon, and stand at the gate, and look at them, and then walk back up.

In the sixth year there was fruit, but not enough of it, and it was small and it was sour and the gardener said it wanted another year.

In the seventh year, on a still day in the middle of October, Ellen Rooke walked down to the lower orchard with a basket on her arm, and picked seven apples off the first tree, and carried them back up to the house herself, in the sun, past the wall of warm red brick where she had once walked around the outside of a house she had not been asked into.

She found her husband in the garden room, in the chair — the chair, the one everybody had known about and nobody had ever mentioned, the one she had sat beside at two in the morning seven years before with a shawl over his knees and a dead fire and no words at all.

He was forty-three. His hair was greying and he used a stick on difficult mornings, and he climbed the stairs twice a day and stopped at the turn both times, and there were still four nights in a month when he could not lie down, and there was still a chair in this room for exactly that purpose, and the whole of Ellingham still knew about it and still never mentioned it.

He was asleep. That was the other thing — he napped in the afternoons now, openly, which he had never done in the first years because a man who is trying to prove he is not dying does not sleep in the afternoon in front of anybody.

Ellen stood in the doorway with seven apples in a basket and looked at him for a moment.

Then she came in and sat down in the other chair, and put the basket on the floor between them, and waited.

He woke about ten minutes later. He looked at the basket. He looked at her.

“From the orchard.”

“From the first tree. Seven of them.”

Adrian Vane sat looking at those seven apples for a long moment.

“I did not want to plant them,” he said. “I want to say that to you once more, at forty-three, in this room, and then I shall never say it again.”

“I know you did not.”

“I gave that order in my second year because I could not see any sense in putting nine pounds into a thing I should never see.” He reached down and picked one out of the basket — a small, misshapen, slightly scorched apple, with a wasp-mark on one side of it. “And you told me in this room that I had stopped a whole house because I could not bear to spend nine pounds on apples, and I sat in that chair and found out that I had been extremely selfish for eight years in a way that everybody had agreed to call bravery.”

“And then you signed it,” said Ellen, “and told me not to tell anybody it was my doing, because you wanted them to do the sum about you.”

“I wanted them to do the sum about me.” He turned the apple over in his fingers. “I have been doing the sum about me for a great many years, and it has never once come out the way I expected when I was twenty-eight.”

He bit into it.

It was, Ellen noted, a very poor apple. Sour, and small, and hard.

Adrian Vane chewed it, and swallowed it, and said, “That is the worst apple I have ever eaten in my life.”

“I know it.”

“I want another one.”

“Have another one,” said Ellen Rooke.

He had two more, sitting in the chair in the garden room in the October sun, and complained about both of them extensively, and Ellen sat in the other chair and let him, and did not fuss, and did not look away.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Mrs. Trant died in the spring of the fourteenth year, at sixty-four, in her own room at the top of the house, of an inflammation of the lung that took nine days.

She had been thirty-three years at Ellingham. Ellen sat with her for the last two days of it, in the chair by the bed, and did not look away and did not speak softly and did not say anything that was not true, and on the last afternoon Mrs. Trant opened her eyes and said:

“Your grace. Is the long gallery on the list?”

“It is on the list.”

“Good.” A long breath. “I have had it on the list fourteen years.”

“You have had everything on the list fourteen years, Mrs. Trant, and you have never once let me do more than four things at a time, and the house is standing because of it.”

The housekeeper of Ellingham lay looking at the ceiling of her own room.

“I want to say something,” she said, “and I have been three days deciding whether to say it, which is the same three days as the sash cord, if you remember.”

“I remember.”

“You came to this house with a bag,” said Mrs. Trant. “And I thought what everybody thought. I thought that is a young woman who has got what she came for. And I have been thirty-three years in service and I am not a stupid woman, and I thought it, the same as Lady Fell thought it, the same as all of them. And I want to say it to you plainly before I go, because it has been on my conscience fourteen years, and it is the only thing that has ever been on my conscience in this house.”

“You are not to fret about it.”

“I am not fretting. I am finishing.” She turned her head on the pillow. “And what I have watched for fourteen years is a woman keeping a house and a man and three living children, while carrying the loss of a fourth, and sitting up in a chair in a garden room at two in the morning, and never once asking anybody to be told she was a good person. And I have thought, since about the fourth year, that the county has got it exactly the wrong way round.” A breath. “You did not get what you came for. You came for a bed for two nights. And you got a whole life out of it, and he got one too, and I do not think either of you has ever worked out that the two of you built the whole of it between you out of nothing at all, on a doorstep, with four shillings.”

Ellen Rooke sat in the chair and did not say anything for a moment.

“Thank you, Mrs. Trant,” she said.

“That is better,” said the housekeeper of Ellingham. “The last one said you are not to fret.” And she shut her eyes, and went to sleep, and did not wake up again.

She was buried in the churchyard under the yew, eleven feet from a small grave with no name on it that Ellen had never once visited and that Adrian went to alone, twice a year, for the whole of his life.