“You Should Marry My Sister,” the Girl Told the Duke — The Duke Smiled at the Child’s Bold Proposal

Chapter 14

Three months later, Thurlow Cottage smelled of chalk, beeswax, and the soup simmering in its small kitchen.

The school roof no longer leaked. Twelve pupils worked at the long table beneath the east window, and their boots stood in two muddy rows by the door — proof, which Maren pointed out to Adrian at least once a fortnight, that she had been right to begin with the feet.

He had not moved out of Elmswood. That had been a delicate business, and Maren had insisted on handling it herself. Adrian had wished to relocate to the cottage at once, in a manner that would have told the entire county precisely how matters stood, and she had made him wait eleven days, during which the county told itself a great deal anyway and she found she minded it much less than she had feared.

Ottilie Vane had gone to her sister in Bath and had written twice to Adrian, letters of the careful, wounded sort that a woman writes when she intends to be thought gracious by posterity. He had read them and replied briefly and shown them to Maren, unasked, which she appreciated more than she said.

Nell was thriving in the way that children thrive when nobody is frightened.

She had filled two copybooks. She had made friends among the estate children with a ruthlessness Maren found slightly alarming. She had been permitted, after a long negotiation, to keep a hedgehog in a crate behind the schoolroom, on condition that she drew it once a week, and she had negotiated that condition down to once a fortnight by arguing, with perfect accuracy, that a hedgehog asleep is the same hedgehog drawn twice.

Adrian still arrived with more plans than Elmswood could accomplish in a year.

But he brought them one at a time now.

That morning it was a cabinet for maps.

“Not until spring,” Maren told him.

He sighed. “The maps will suffer from neglect.”

“The maps do not yet exist.”

“A severe objection.”

Nell, bent over her fourth attempt at a thistle, announced without looking up that the Duke’s cabinet should be allowed if he would promise not to letter the labels himself, on the grounds that his handwriting resembled a fence.

Adrian accepted the condition with dignity.

Later, after the pupils had gone and the light along the wood had gone the long gold of late afternoon, he asked Maren to walk with him to the flower terrace.

It was the first time either of them had been back.

The stone urns held nothing but winter greenery now, and the terrace looked smaller than she remembered — much smaller, a strip of grit and stone that had once contained her entire life and now contained only a place where a hedge had been clipped. There were no chairs out. Nobody was watching.

Adrian stopped where Nell had once thrown the flowers at him.

He reached into his waistcoat and unfolded a square of paper.

Inside it, pressed flat and perfectly preserved, lay the heather. Purple at the tips still, as though it had been picked that afternoon.

“The cottage is yours to keep,” he said. “The school has trustees besides me, and the tenancy is enrolled. Nell is secure in your care. Mrs. Vane has gone to Bath and has no authority here.” He looked up. “You do not require marriage — for protection, or income, or a home. I have made certain of that. I want you to understand that I did it before asking anything, so that there is nothing in this question but the question.”

“I understand,” Maren said. “I do not require it.”

“Then I am free to ask for selfish reasons.”

She raised one brow.

“I love your exactness,” he said. “I love that you see the muddy road beneath every shining plan. I love that you make silence feel honest rather than empty.”

He paused.

“And I love Nell, though her judgment of drawings is unnecessarily harsh.”

From somewhere behind them, at a distance made respectable only by the fact that she was walking a wolfhound, Nell’s voice carried with the clarity of a bell.

“It was terrible.”

Adrian glanced back towards her. “I am told my foundations require work, Miss Thurlow. I leave exactness to your sister.”

Maren laughed.

He held out the paper with the heather in it.

“Will you marry me? Not because you need my name. Not because Elmswood needs a duchess. Not because an eight-year-old recommended it before half the county, although I will admit that this last one has grown on me.”

Maren looked at the heather.

Then she looked past him, at the house — at the long glass oriel where eighty candles had burned, and the drawing rooms beyond it, and the carriages on the drive that would slow, some of them, when they passed a woman who had been the subject of a story for two years. There would be hostesses who smiled at Adrian and measured her. There would be a season in London, eventually, at which she would be looked at. Ottilie’s accusation had been withdrawn in public, which is not the same as forgotten in private; the county had enjoyed the story too much to put it down entirely, and there would be dinners at which somebody would say something, eventually.

“They will say you were trapped to the end,” Maren said.

Adrian did not dismiss it. That was the thing she loved about him, if she was honest, and she was trying to be honest now.

“They may,” he said. “Some families will refuse us. They may do that as well, and Elmswood may pay for your choice — there are two tenancies riding on the goodwill of the Herriots, and the Herriots are Selwin cousins.”

“You have counted it.”

“I have counted it.” He held her gaze. “I am not asking you because I believe affection will make the world reasonable. I am asking because the cost does not alter my choice.”

He had once answered danger with a promise large enough to hide its limits.

Now he named the limits and remained.

Maren let the silence stretch.

Hope and impatience crossed his face in quick succession, followed by the discipline — he had learned well enough not to fill the space for her, and she saw him physically forbear from speaking twice, and the second time was harder for him than the first.

She took the heather out of the paper.

Then she put her other hand in his.

“Yes,” she said. “Because you spoke when I asked, stopped when I required it, and waited when the answer belonged to me.”

His fingers closed around hers.

There was no audience to applaud.

Nell applauded anyway.

They were married a month later in the small stone chapel at the edge of the estate wood.