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

Chapter 5

She met the county properly in the fourth week, at church, and found that she had not prepared enough for it.

She had braced for a cut. She had braced for four women turning their backs, for a remark she could repeat to herself afterward and be angry about, for the particular pleasure of having something to be angry about. She had been a relation in another woman’s house for nine years. She knew precisely what small cruelty looked like when it was done well.

What she got instead was a quarter of an hour of warm, careful, entirely correct conversation, conducted by nine people who had settled the whole question of Ellen Rooke before she got out of the carriage.

A woman of about fifty said she was sure her grace would find the county very quiet after Bath.

Ellen, who had been in Bath four days in her life, and had slept two of those nights in a lodging house at sixpence, said that she thought she should like the quiet.

Another said, with a great deal of warmth, that it was such a comfort to know his grace had somebody with him now.

And the rector’s wife — who was kind, and meant it, and had not the smallest idea what she was doing — pressed Ellen’s hand at the gate and said, “My dear, you must not let them tire you. You have taken on a great deal.”

Ellen worked at that sentence for four miles in the carriage.

You have taken on a great deal.

It was perfectly true. She had married a dying man in nine days off his own doorstep, and every soul in that churchyard knew it, and not one of them had said one unkind word. And what the whole quarter of an hour had actually said, underneath, in the pleasantest possible voices, was:

We know exactly what you are, and what you have done, and why. And we shall be extremely nice to you about it for the rest of your life, and you will never once be able to answer it, because nobody will ever say it.

She wrote it down that night in four lines and then sat looking at it.

I have been in this county four weeks and I have been condemned in a churchyard by nine people who were smiling at me. The worst of it is that they are half right. I did marry him for a roof, and I said so to his face in his own library, and there is not one thing they think about me that I could stand up and deny.

Then she sat with the pen a while longer, and wrote one more line.

So I shall not deny any of it. I shall simply be here in nine years, and in nineteen, and let them look at that instead.

The house was the thing she could not get out of her head, and it took her about six weeks to work out what was wrong with it.

Ellingham was not neglected. That was the first thing she checked, because a house where the master is dying very often is, and this one was not. It was clean. The accounts were straight. The servants were paid on the day. Mrs. Trant ran the whole of it with a competence that Ellen recognised inside a week and was quietly, deeply relieved by.

What was wrong with it was subtler, and it took her six weeks and a broken sash cord to see it.

There were four rooms shut on the west side. Not shrouded — shut. And they had been shut for about six years. When Ellen asked about them she got a perfectly reasonable answer about the damp and the chimneys, and the answer was true, and it was not the whole truth, and she knew it, and did not yet know why.

The lower orchard had not been replanted. There were nine trees in it that had been dead about four years and had not been taken out, and about a third of it was gone to grass.

And the sash cord in the small drawing room had gone in the spring, and had not been mended.

She mentioned it to Mrs. Trant in the second week, and Mrs. Trant said she would see to it.

She mentioned it again in the fifth week, and got the same answer.

In the sixth week, Ellen Rooke went and stood in that drawing room with the broken cord in her hand, looking out at the nine dead trees, and understood the whole of it at once.

Nobody in that house was doing anything that would take more than a year.

It was not a decision anybody had made. She was entirely certain of that, then and afterward. There had been no conversation and no instruction, and Mrs. Trant would have been horrified to have it put to her in those words. It had simply happened, over eight years, the way water finds a level.

A household in which the master has been dying since a particular spring had gradually, and without discussion, stopped doing anything whose benefit was more than about twelve months off.

You do not replant an orchard for a man who will be dead before it fruits.

You do not open four rooms for a house that will go to Northumberland.

You do not spend nine pounds on a chimney that somebody else is going to be looking at.

Ellen Rooke stood in that drawing room for about a quarter of an hour. Then she went to find Mrs. Trant.