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

Chapter 4

“First,” she said. “Are you asking me to nurse you?”

“No.” He said it at once. “There is a man for that, and there will be more of them, and it is not going to be your business unless you want it to be. And I want to say that plainly, because I think you have got a picture in your head of the next three years, and I should like to correct part of it.”

“Second. If I say no, this minute, in this room — what happens to me?”

He looked at her steadily.

“You get a bed for as long as you want it. A character from me that would get you a place in any house in England. And enough money to get to it.” A pause. “That is not a bargaining position. It is not conditional on anything. And I should have said it before I said the other thing, and I am aware that I did not.”

“Then why did you not?”

“Because I have been dying for eight years,” said Adrian Vane, “and I have entirely lost the habit of doing things in the right order.”

She stood there a moment.

“Third question. Is there anybody else — a woman, an understanding, somebody who is going to be hurt by this?”

“There is nobody. And there has not been for nine years.” He shifted his weight on the arm of the chair. “And I shall tell you why if you ask me. But I would rather do it sitting down, and not today.”

She took that the way she took most things — filed it, and did not press.

“The fourth.”

She put her hand on the back of the chair in front of her.

“Do you want a child, or do you want an heir?”

Adrian Vane did not answer that for about four seconds.

“That is the best question anybody has asked me in eight years,” he said. “And I have been asked about a great many things, by a great many careful men.”

He looked at his own hands.

“An heir. That is the honest answer, and I am going to give it to you honestly, because you have asked me plainly, and because I do not think you are a woman who wants to be told a nicer thing.” He breathed, carefully, and went on. “I have arranged my death for eight years, and this is the last piece of it. I have been sitting in this house for two of those years with the whole thing done except this one item, and it is the only one I could not do, because it required somebody else to agree to it. I want the house not to go to Northumberland. That is what I want.” He met her eyes. “And if I said to you that I wanted a child — at six-and-thirty, in this condition, knowing what I know — then I should be a liar. You would find it out inside a year. And you would be perfectly entitled to hate me for it.”

Ellen Rooke picked her bag up off the floor.

“Then I shall marry you,” she said.

He got up off the arm of the chair.

“Miss Rooke. You have not asked me my reasons. I am going to give them to you anyway, because you have been extremely honest with me for a quarter of an hour, and I am not going to be less so.”

She stood very straight and let him.

“I have got four shillings,” she said, when he had finished. “That is the first one, and it is the largest, and I am not going to pretend it is not. The second is that I have kept a house for nine years, and been good at it, and had nothing whatever to show for it — and you have just offered me one for my life. And I have been on a road for three weeks finding out exactly what a woman with no money and no character is worth in this country.”

He said nothing.

“And the third,” she said, “is that you asked me a question on that step and I said I do not know, and you did not look at me the way people look at a woman who does not know.”

She stopped.

“That is all. It is a very small thing to marry somebody for. I have not got a better one, and I would rather tell you the truth than invent something creditable.”

Adrian Vane stood in his own library.

“Then we understand each other,” he said.

“Not yet,” said Ellen Rooke. “But we have both told the truth twice in a quarter of an hour, which is a great deal more than most people manage. And I find I am willing to see what happens next.”

They were married nine days later, in the parish church, with four people in it.

She wore the green gown. He had offered to have something made, and she had said no, and had given her reason, and he had never argued with it.

“If I am married in a gown you have paid for, in a church in front of your own tenants,” she said, “then every soul in this county has the whole story inside a fortnight — and they have it in the shape that suits them. If I am married in the gown I walked here in, they have got a great deal less to work with.”

“They will say it anyway,” he said.

“They will say it anyway,” she agreed. “And they will be about half right. And I would rather be half right in my own clothes.”

There were four people in that church. The rector, who was kind and had known Adrian since he was a boy. The agent, Mr. Hale, who was careful and said nothing. Mrs. Trant, the housekeeper, who had been nineteen years at Ellingham and whose face did not move once during the whole of it. And a clerk.

When it was done, the Duke of Ellingham stood on the church steps with his wife’s hand on his arm, and looked down the lane at the wet green of the county he was not going to see in twenty years, and did not say anything at all.

The county said it inside four days.

Ellen never heard the worst of it, and she knew there was worse. What came back to her, through Mrs. Trant, in the second week — because Mrs. Trant had decided that somebody ought to — was roughly this: that a woman had come up to the door at Ellingham with a bag, and had been married in nine days, and that the Duke was dying, and that anybody could see what that was.

Ellen heard the whole of it standing in the stillroom, with her hands in a basin of cold water and the smell of rosemary in the air.

“Yes,” she said. “That is more or less what happened, Mrs. Trant. And I am not going to be able to contradict any of it. And I should be obliged if you would go on telling me things.”

Mrs. Trant, who was fifty, and who had come into that stillroom braced for tears or for temper, stood there for a moment with her mouth slightly open.

“You are a very odd young woman,” she said.

“I have been told that before.”

“It was not a complaint,” said Mrs. Trant, and went back to the linen.