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

Chapter 22

Adrian Vane died in the fifty-fifth year of his marriage, at the age of ninety-one, in his own bed, on the ground floor, in the room they had moved into when the stairs got to be too much, with the windows open onto the garden because he had asked for that.

Ellen Rooke was eighty-one. She had been six-and-twenty on a doorstep in June with four shillings in her pocket, and she had been married to him for fifty-five years and two months, and there was not one person left alive in that county who had been at the wedding.

She had been in the chair for the last four days. She did not sleep in it — she slept in a bed that had been made up in the corner of the room, because at eighty-one one does not sit up all night in a chair, and because he had told her, on the second day, in the only sentence of that whole week that had come out properly:

“If you ruin your back sitting in that thing, I shall be extremely annoyed, and I shall not be able to do anything about it, and I shall have to lie here and think about it.”

So she slept in the corner, and sat in the chair in the daytime, and did not look away, and they talked about the estate and the rents and the north road and the state of the lower orchard, which had been replanted in the fifty-first year with nine new trees.

“They will not fruit for six years,” Adrian had said on the third day, quite clearly, out of the middle of a long silence.

“No.”

“I am not going to see them.”

“No,” said Ellen Rooke. “But I am, and Rose is, and when you are gone I shall go down there every October and pick seven of them off the first tree and bring them up here and eat one, and it will be a bad apple, and I shall complain about it, and that will be the whole of the ceremony.”

He had looked at her for a long moment then, out of a face that had gone very thin, and had said:

“That is the best funeral I have ever been to.”

He had been in and out of the world for the last two days. On the final afternoon he was awake, and clear, and he looked at the windows and the light coming in off the garden, and then he looked at his wife in the chair.

“Ellen.”

“Yes.”

“Do you remember what you said to me on the step.”

“You said I need a wife,” said Ellen Rooke, “and I said I do not know.”

“No. Not that.” His voice had gone very quiet and very slow. “You said, I want you to know that I would not have come to this door if there had been anywhere else.”

She had not thought about that sentence in fifty years.

“I said it,” she said.

“I have thought about it about four hundred times,” said Adrian Vane. “And I want to say the last thing, and then I shall stop talking, because I am extremely tired and I have been arranging this for nine days.”

“Go on.”

“You came up my steps because there was nowhere else,” he said. “And I told you in the library that it was a transaction, and I meant it, and I am not going to revise it now, because we have never once lied to each other and I am not going to start in the last hour of it.” He breathed. “But it was the best day’s work I ever did, and I did it badly, on my own doorstep, in front of two servants, in about nine minutes, and every single year of it since has been better than the year before. And I have not the smallest idea how it happened, and I have never once been able to find the week, and I have stopped looking.”

Ellen Rooke reached over and put her hand flat on the blanket over his shoulder. Not holding. Not pressing. Just a weight, on the outside of the blanket, that he could have shaken off if he had wanted to.

He did not shake it off.

“Thank you,” she said, “for the house.”

Adrian Vane began to laugh — carefully, briefly, and this time he got to the end of it — and then closed his eyes.

He did not open them again.

She sat in the chair for another hour, and did not go and fetch anybody.

The house of Ellingham went on with what it was doing. There was a sound of somebody crossing the yard with a bucket, and a dog barking out beyond the stables, and the light came down through the garden and lay along the floor and then began to go.

At about half past seven her daughter came in. Rose Vane was fifty-five years old that summer; she had four children of her own and a house of her own on the other side of the county, and she stood in the doorway and looked at her mother sitting in the chair, and understood, and did not say anything for a moment.

Then she said, “How long?”

“About an hour.”

“You should have rung for somebody.”

“I know I should.”

Rose came across the room and stood at the foot of the bed.

Ellen Rooke looked up at her daughter — a woman of fifty-five, standing in a room in the house her father had been told he would not live to see his thirtieth year in, and there was a great deal of him in the face of her, and there was a great deal of nobody but herself in the way she stood.

“Sit down, Rose,” she said. “I am going to tell you something, and I have been getting it ready for about fifty years, and it is not what you think it is.”

Her daughter sat down.

“Your father and I were married in nine days off his own doorstep,” said Ellen Rooke. “He was six-and-thirty and had been told he would not see thirty, and I was six-and-twenty and had four shillings and a bag and nowhere at all to go. And every single person in the churchyard that morning knew exactly what it was, and they were about half right, and they were extremely nice to me about it for the rest of their lives.” She stopped. “And I have thought about it, over the years, and I have decided at last that they meant it kindly, and that they were fools, and that both of those things can be true at once, and that it does not matter in the smallest degree.”

“Mother — ”

“You are going to be told things in the next fortnight,” said Ellen. “You will be told that your mother married your father for his house. And what you are going to say is: yes, she did — for two nights of it. And then she stayed fifty-five years.”

She stood up out of the chair, which took her a moment, because she was eighty-one.

“And when they have finished telling you that,” said Ellen Rooke, “you are going to take them down to the lower orchard, and you are going to show them nine trees, and you are going to tell them that his grace ordered those planted the second autumn he was dying — and that he did not see the fruit of the first nine, and that he had nine more put in when he was eighty-eight, which he also did not see the fruit of, and that his wife went down there every October after they fruited and ate one apple off the first tree and complained about it.”

She looked at the window, and the last of the light going out of the garden.

“And then you are going to let them do the sum,” she said. “And that will be the whole of the answer, and it will not be a clever one.”

She did not go to the funeral.

She watched it from the garden room, through the open window, because the grave was under the yew and the yew was visible from that chair, and because there was a great deal of the county there and she had no intention whatever of standing in a churchyard being spoken to kindly by nine people who were smiling at her.

Her son came up afterward and sat with her. Thomas Vane was fifty-one, and he had his father’s way of putting a hand flat on the arm of a chair when he had run out of breath, and he had never once in his life known that anybody else in the world did that.

“Mother,” he said. “There were about four hundred people.”

“I know it.”

“Lady Fell’s granddaughter came up to me and said that she had always understood that the marriage had been a remarkably happy one.”

“Yes,” said Ellen Rooke. “She would.”

“What did you say?”

“I shall tell you what I would have said,” said Ellen. “She would have said it was a transaction, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. And she would have said it in the exact voice your father used when he said it to me in a library in June, on the first afternoon, with four shillings in my pocket.” She put her hand flat on the arm of her own chair. “And it would have been true, and it would have been the whole truth, and everything else that happened after it came out of that one honest sentence. That is all.”

Thomas Vane sat with his mother in the garden room until it got dark.

She lived eleven more years.

Rose came every third day and Thomas came every Sunday and the grandchildren came at Christmas, and the house on the west side stayed open, and the orchard stayed in, and every October Ellen Rooke walked down to the lower orchard with a basket on her arm — slower each year, and using a stick herself from about eighty-seven — and picked seven apples off the first tree and carried them back up to the house and ate one of them, which was always sour and always small, and complained about it, loudly, to nobody in particular.

She died at ninety-two, in the summer, in the garden room, in the chair — the chair, the particular one, the one everybody in that house knew about and nobody had ever once mentioned to anybody, the one in which a man of six-and-thirty had sat up on bad nights for more than sixty years in order to breathe, and in which a woman of six-and-twenty had sat beside him at two in the morning in the first November of their marriage and put a shawl over his knees and not looked away.

They buried her under the yew, on the other side.

The house went to Thomas, and then to his son, and the west rooms stayed open, and the long gallery stayed on the list, and Mrs. Trant’s two pages were found in a drawer in the stillroom, and were framed, and hung in the passage by the linen press, where they still are.

And in the parish register there are three lines: the marriage in the June of that year, and the burial of Adrian Vane, Duke of Ellingham, in his ninety-second year, and the burial of Ellen, his wife, eleven years after, in her ninety-third.

Anyone who reads them together will see that the man who was told at eight-and-twenty that he would not see thirty lived to be ninety-one, and that he married a woman who came up his drive on foot with a bag and four shillings, and that fifty-five years came out of it, and four children, and nine trees that took seven years to fruit and were never any good.

And anybody who does that sum will find that it comes out clean.

The End