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

Chapter 3

“Four shillings, sir.”

“And where were you before Bath?”

“My cousins at Chippenham. And before that my great-aunt’s house at Wilcott. Nine years.”

“Your cousins would not keep you.”

“My cousins had me a fortnight, and they were not unkind, and there were six of them in a house meant for five.” She said it without heat, without a plea in it anywhere. “They found out I had been left nothing. After that, everything got a great deal more difficult. I do not blame them. And I would rather not discuss it on a doorstep.”

He put his hands behind his back. The gesture cost him nothing, and he did it because standing still was easier than standing at his ease.

“Miss Rooke.” A pause. “Ellen Rooke. I am going to say something to you now that is going to sound like the worst kind of insult. I am asking you to hear the whole of it before you decide what it is — because I have not got the health to say things twice, and I would rather do it badly and quickly than well and slowly.”

She stood on that step with her bag in her hand. The gravel was still giving off warmth. A swallow went over the roofline, and neither of them looked at it.

“Say it,” she said.

“You need a place to stay,” said the Duke of Ellingham.

“I do.”

“And I need a wife.”

Behind her, in the hall, one of the two servants moved. A shoe on stone, one small sound, and then nothing.

She did not say anything at all. She stood there on the step and looked at a man of six-and-thirty in a good coat, a man who had gone a little grey at the temples, and she noticed — because she had spent four years in a sickroom and could not stop noticing — that he was breathing rather carefully, the way a person breathes when breathing has to be arranged.

She waited. There was nothing else to do, and whatever this was, it was not going to be improved by her guessing at it.

“You are going to think I am mocking you,” he said.

“I have not decided what I think. Say the rest of it.”

“Then come inside. I am not going to do this on my own steps, in front of — ” he did not finish the sentence, and did not need to.

The library was on the ground floor. He took the chair by the window without seeming to think about it, and she understood, at the time, only that he had chosen a seat; she understood, four months later, exactly why.

He told her the whole of it standing up, and it took about nine minutes.

That he was six-and-thirty. That his heart was failing, and had been failing for eight years. That a physician of great eminence had told him at eight-and-twenty that he would not see thirty, and that he had — as he put it — rather overstayed. That if he died without a son, Ellingham went to a cousin’s line in Northumberland whom he had met four times and had nothing against, and that this was the single piece of his own business he had never been able to arrange. That he had refused every match his mother had put in front of him while she lived, and every arrangement his agent had raised in eight years. And then he gave the reason, which he said he had never given anybody.

“I am not going to ask a girl of twenty to marry a dying man,” he said, “and then watch her be pleasant to me about it for three years.”

He said it flatly, the way a man reads out a sum.

Then he said the bargain.

“You would marry me. You would live in this house as its mistress, with everything that goes with it. If there is a son, Ellingham does not go to Northumberland, and I shall have done the last thing I have got to do. And when I die — which I have been told will be soon for eight years, and which I have stopped predicting — you will have this house for your life, and an income settled on you separately, that cannot be touched by anybody, whether there is a child or not.”

He stopped.

“That is the whole of it, Miss Rooke. It is a transaction, and I am not going to pretend otherwise, and I am not going to insult you by dressing it up. And I want you to understand that I would have said exactly this to any capable woman who came up those steps this afternoon.”

Ellen Rooke stood in the middle of that library with her bag still in her hand, and the smell of his books, leather and dust and a little coal-smoke, and she said:

“That is not true.”

He stopped.

“I beg your pardon.”

“You would not have said it to any woman who came up those steps,” she said, “because about four women a month come up somebody’s steps in this county wanting a place, and you have been dying eight years and you have not married one of them. So you said it to me this afternoon for some reason, and I should like to know what it was. Because I have got four shillings and I am going to have to make a decision in about a quarter of an hour, and I would rather make it knowing.”

Adrian Vane sat down on the arm of a chair.

She understood that, too, four months later. At the time it looked like a man making himself comfortable.

“You said I do not know,” he said.

“Sir — ”

“On the step. I asked what you would do after two nights, and you said: I do not know. In front of two of my servants, with four shillings in your pocket.” He looked at the floor between them. “I have had about nine people in this house in eight years who wanted something from me. Every single one of them had a plan, and told me about it inside four minutes. And a woman came to my door this afternoon with everything she owns in a bag, and did not have one, and did not invent one.”

He was quiet for a moment.

“I have been standing in that hall working out why that struck me so hard. It is because I have not told one person in eight years that I do not know what is going to happen to me. Not one. I have had a date, and a physician, and a set of arrangements, and I have gone about this county being extremely calm about the whole business. And I have not the smallest idea whether I shall be alive at Christmas. And I never have had.”

The clock on the mantel went on with what it was doing.

Ellen Rooke stood in the middle of that room, and put her bag down on the floor — the first thing she had put down in three weeks — and said:

“What is your name?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Your Christian name. You have offered to marry me and I do not know it, and I am not going to make a decision like this about a title.”

“Adrian.”

“Then I am going to ask you four questions, Adrian Vane, and I want plain answers, and then I shall tell you what I think.”