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

Chapter 9

For two years, silence had preserved what little dignity rumour had left her.

It had not preserved her home. It had not preserved her work. It had not preserved Nell, who had been one signature away from a carriage that would have taken her to a cold building two counties off and made her a stranger.

Silence had preserved nothing at all. Silence had only kept the wound clean and open, and let Ottilie Vane pour salt into it at her leisure, once a season, gently, for two years.

Maren picked up the heather and held it out to him.

“Please end this,” she said.

Her voice was low. It had been low all her life; it was the voice of a woman who had learned early that a raised voice is a thing held against you. But every word belonged to her, and she felt that, and it was like standing up after a long illness.

“Keep Nell with me. That is the first thing and the only lasting thing. I will not stand before the harvest assembly and beg forty people to believe me — I did my begging in the first year and it bought nothing. I do not want to hide anymore. I want the threat finished.”

Adrian took the sprig from her hand. His fingers brushed hers, brief and hot, and he folded the heather into his waistcoat pocket with more care than he had given the notes.

“I will finish it,” he said.

There was no vow in it. No I swear, no on my honour, none of the grand machinery. Just certainty, cut to fit the request, the way the roof estimate had been cut to fit the school.

“Will you attend the assembly?” he asked.

“Yes. But as the person protected — not as the advocate required to earn protection. If I must plead for it, it is not protection. It is a wage.”

“Then that is how it shall be.”

The remaining days of their four-week engagement passed beneath a pressure Maren could measure without a calendar.

The green along the east drive turned copper. Then the leaves dropped, and the carriage wheels went over them, and each week the household looked a little less like a place that expected to be looked at. Conversations at dinner ceased whenever she came in and resumed, in lowered voices, after she sat down. Invitations continued to arrive for Adrian — cards thick as leaves, in every hand in the county — but her name began to disappear from the smaller ones, the notes sent by neighbouring families who had once been pleased to receive a drawing mistress at their tables and were now not certain what she was.

Meanwhile the cottage roof was finished.

The school windows were repaired, twelve panes in all, and the glazier came twice because Adrian stood over him the second time and asked about the putty. Twelve pairs of boots arrived from the village cobbler in a single crate, and Nell tried on three pairs before she found the ones she wanted, and wore them around the parlour until Maren told her to take them off before she wore the soles through.

The more secure Maren’s future became, the more openly Ottilie behaved as though it had been stolen.

That was the strange arithmetic of it. Every plank nailed to the cottage roof, every pane reset in the school, every pair of boots, was a plank and a pane and a pair of boots she had lost. And she said nothing — that was the terrible discipline of her — she said nothing that could be written down, nothing that could be carried to Adrian as a complaint, nothing that a servant could repeat in the kitchen and be believed as an accuser rather than a gossip.

Maren counted, instead. By the final week she had stopped counting the anonymous notes, because they arrived so regularly that the counting had become pointless; she counted the mornings remaining before the assembly, and she counted the evenings Adrian came back from another meeting with the solicitor carrying fewer promises and more completed papers.

On the last of those evenings he came to the schoolroom and found her alone, and told her the schedule of documents without any attempt to make it sound better than it was, and she listened and made him say the whole of it twice, and at the end he said, “Are you afraid?”

Maren considered the question honestly, because he had earned honesty.

“I am afraid she will do something I have not thought of,” she said.

Adrian did not comfort her. He said, “So am I,” and that was the moment she began to trust him, more or less completely, which she recognised as an extremely inconvenient development and did nothing whatever about.

On the morning of the harvest assembly, Ottilie Vane announced to the whole household that Nell’s carriage would depart at dawn the next day.

And at the same hour, calling cards and invitations carried the old accusation through every drawing room within twenty miles.

Miss Thurlow had coached the child’s proposal. She had trapped the Duke in a false engagement. She meant to force him into marriage.

Maren heard all three sentences before noon, from three different people, in three different rooms, and understood that the trap had closed — and that the closing of it was, in fact, the first thing that had gone right in four weeks.