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

Chapter 7

“This house has stopped,” she said. “Not because anybody decided it. Because in your second year you told Mrs. Trant not to replant the orchard. And every single person under this roof took the sense of that, and has been quietly applying it to everything since.”

He was looking at her.

“Nobody here begins anything that takes longer than a year. Nobody mends anything that will still be wanted in five. And nobody has said one word about it in eight years — because the only way to say it is to ask you how long you have got. And there is not a person in this building who could do that.”

She stood up, and put both hands flat on the table.

“And you can. I have been here seven weeks, and I am your wife, and I have got a settlement that does not depend on your good opinion of me. So: yes. I can.” She held his eyes. “That is precisely what you bought when you married a woman off your own doorstep. And I do not think you had thought about it.”

The clock in the hall struck something, and neither of them counted it.

“The orchard will not fruit for six years,” he said.

“I know it.”

“I gave that order in the second year because I could not see any sense in putting nine pounds into a thing I should never see.” He paused. “I have thought about that order about four hundred times since. And I have never once changed my mind about it.”

“Then keep the order,” said Ellen. “And I shall pay for the orchard myself. Out of my own settlement. And it will be mine — and when you are dead it will still be mine, because it is in the deed you had drawn, and I shall have apples in six years, in a house I have got for my life.”

She let that sit for exactly one second.

“That is not a threat, Adrian, and I am not being clever with you. I am telling you that there are two people in this house now. One of them is six-and-thirty and has been given a date. The other one is six-and-twenty and has not. And you cannot arrange the whole of this building around your own arithmetic anymore, because it is not the only arithmetic in it.”

Nobody in that room said anything for about four seconds.

Then Adrian Vane sat down rather suddenly in the chair by the window — and Ellen, by now, understood exactly what that meant, and did not remark on it, and did not go to him, and simply waited with her hands on the table until he could speak.

“Nobody has spoken to me like that in eight years,” he said.

“I am aware.”

“No — I do not mean it as a complaint. I am not angry. And I am extremely out of breath, and it is not because of you.” He put one hand flat on the arm of the chair. “I mean that I have been surrounded since I was eight-and-twenty by about forty people who are all being careful with me. And I have found it perfectly comfortable. And I have not had one conversation in eight years in which anybody wanted anything from me that I was not already planning to give them.”

He looked up at her.

“And a woman I have known seven weeks has just told me that I have stopped a whole house because I could not bear to spend nine pounds on apples.”

“That is not quite what I said.”

“It is exactly what you said. And it is true.” He was quiet. “And I have been sitting here for about a minute, finding out that I have been extremely selfish for eight years — in a way that everybody has agreed to call bravery.”

Ellen sat down opposite him.

“Then plant the orchard,” she said.

“Ellen — ”

“Not for the apples. I do not care about the apples, and neither do you, and we are neither of us going to pretend otherwise at this hour of the afternoon.” She leaned forward. “Plant it because there are about forty people in this house who have not been allowed to want anything for eight years. And because Mrs. Trant went red in a passage last week and had to sit down. And because a household that is waiting for a man to die is a very great deal worse to live in than a household where a man is dying.”

She said the last of it very slowly, so that he would hear the difference between the two.

“Those are different things, Adrian. I watched one of them for four years at my great-aunt’s house. And I know exactly what it does to a house.”

He looked at her for a long moment.

“I shall think about it,” he said.

“That is not a no.”

“It is not a no. It is a man of six-and-thirty who has had one idea for eight years, being asked to have a different one on a Thursday afternoon. And I am going to want about a week.”

He took four days.

On the fifth he came into the small drawing room, and put a paper down on the table in front of her — an order to his agent about the lower orchard, nine pounds and some shillings, in his own hand — and said, “I have signed it. I am not going to discuss it. And I want you to know that I have been extremely uncomfortable for four days, and that it has not been about the money.”

Ellen looked at the paper.

“Thank you,” she said.

“There is a condition.”

“Say it.”

“You will not tell anybody in this house that it was your doing.” He said it evenly. “Not Mrs. Trant. Not the agent. Not one servant. Let them think it was mine.”

She looked up.

“Because if they think it was mine,” said Adrian Vane, “then what has happened is that the master of this house has ordered an orchard planted that will not fruit for six years. And every one of those forty people is going to do the sum you have just made me do.”

He was quiet for a second.

“And I should like them to do it about me. And not about you.”

Ellen Rooke sat with that for a moment.

Then she understood the whole of it, and found that she could not immediately speak.

“You are telling them you expect to be alive,” she said.

“I am telling them I have stopped saying that I shall not be.” He met her eyes without flinching. “That is a great deal less than the other thing. It is the most I have got. And I want you to be entirely clear about that before you look at me like that.”