They had used the minute he spent in the hallway deciding which kind of fool to be, and they had used it to compose their faces. “Ashbourne. ” Eleanor said his name the way she said the names of guests—small civil warmth at the front, perfectly maintained neutrality behind. “You are home.
”
He inclined his head. “I am. ”
Hartwell rose without haste, came around the table with one hand extended. “My dear Ashbourne, you have caught us at our soup.
”
The soup was long cleared. On Eleanor’s plate, a remnant of pheasant and pears poached in something dark. On Hartwell’s, the same. The decanter between them was three-quarters empty.
The candles had burned down by the breadth of a thumb. Ashbourne took the offered hand and felt in the dry easy grip the small infuriating warmth of a man not at all sorry to be found where he is. “Hartwell. You are far from your own table.
”
Hartwell smiled. “Ah. As to that, I was passing. ”
Eleanor lifted the small bell at her elbow and rang it once.
A footman appeared. “A place for his lordship, please, and the wine he prefers, and the warm bread if there is any left. ”
She had not asked whether he intended to sit. She had not asked whether he was hungry.
She had assumed his presence and ordered for him as she had every night of their married life when he was at home, and she had done it in front of Hartwell with the same untroubled smoothness. He crossed the room and took the chair at her left. He was grateful to her for this, and the gratitude irritated him, and he could not afford to examine why. Eleanor turned her face toward him for the first time at close range.
She was thinner. Not in a way another man would notice. The hollow under her cheekbone a quarter of a shade deeper. The earrings she wore were not the ones he had given her for their seventh anniversary, but smaller, plainer pearls—the kind a woman wears when she does not wish to be looked at too long.
She was looking at him steadily and without reproach, and he understood with cold exact understanding that whatever account was being kept between them, she had been keeping it alone for seven months, and the totals were not in his favor. “I trust your journey was not too tiring,” she said. “It was tolerable. The roads are dry.
”
“Good. ” Then, to Hartwell: “You were saying. ”
Hartwell allowed a small pause, the pause of a man deciding how much of a conversation he is willing to continue in the company of a third party who has just walked in from the road. Then he resumed as smoothly as if Ashbourne had been there from the soup course.
“I was saying that the bill, as it stands, will not pass before Michaelmas. The opposition is too well organized. They have the bishops, which I had not expected, and they have your Lord Marbury, which I had. ”
Eleanor said, “The bishops will turn if the wording on the entail is softened.
They have no objection to the principle, only to the precedent. ”
Hartwell looked at her. Ashbourne saw, in the brief exchange of their eyes, something he had not been prepared to see at his own table. Hartwell was listening to her.
Not as men listen to clever wives at dinners, with indulgent attention. He was listening as he would to a colleague whose grasp of a problem had already proved to exceed his own. “You may be right,” Hartwell said. “In fact, you almost certainly are.
”
Ashbourne set his glass down very carefully. “How long,” he said mildly, “has my wife been advising the Duke of Hartwell on legislation? ”
“Since March, my lord. ”
“Since March?
”
“Since March. ”
Hartwell broke the silence kindly. “Your lady was good enough to answer a letter I wrote in the spring on a matter concerning the northern boroughs. Her answer was so clear that I wrote again.
Then I came. I have come rather often. I have always sent word ahead to your steward. I would not have you imagine that anything has occurred here in your absence which would not bear, in every particular, the brightest possible light.
”
Ashbourne looked at him. Hartwell looked back with the steady gaze of a man telling the exact truth and perfectly aware that the exact truth is, in this room, the second most painful thing he could be saying. The most painful thing was unspoken: that Hartwell had come again and again to a house whose master was absent, to consult a woman whose mind he had discovered by accident to be the equal of his own, and that he had been welcomed in the long evenings of an empty country house by a woman who had nowhere else to put the part of herself her husband had stopped asking to see. “Brightest possible light,” Ashbourne said.
“Quite so. I thank you for the courtesy. ”
The pears went away. The cloth was lifted.
A second decanter was set down. Eleanor rose. “I will leave you. You will wish to speak.
”
Hartwell rose, bowed over her hand as if she were the hostess of a state occasion. She turned at the door and looked back—not at Ashbourne, but at the table between them, as a woman might look at a board on which a difficult game had been left in mid-play. Then she went out. The door closed.
The two dukes were alone. Hartwell turned the stem of his glass between his thumb and forefinger. “Ashbourne, I owe you no apology, and I will offer you none, because if I did we should both feel worse, and the situation would become impossible. But I will say this.
I have known your wife eleven years. For ten of those years, I knew her as your wife, which is to say, I did not know her at all. This past year, I have come to know her as herself. I tell you frankly that you have at your table a woman whose understanding of the management of an estate and the working of a bill through committee exceeds that of any three men on our benches.
She has not told me where you have been. She has not spoken your name except as master of the house. I have come to understand certain things by what is not said. I do not judge you.
But I will say one further thing. If you have come home for an evening before you go again, I will leave the house tomorrow morning and not return. If you have come home to stay, I will leave the house tomorrow morning and not return. The only circumstance in which I will return is the one in which your wife sends for me.
And I tell you with the directness due an old friend that in seven months under this roof, she has never once sent for me. I have always come uninvited, and she has always given me an hour of her time and then sent me on my way to the inn at Marley, where I have slept every night in a room not large enough for a tall man to dress in. ”
He drank. He set down the glass.
“Now,” he said, “tell me about your bill. ”
Ashbourne did not answer at once. He had been prepared for a wife in tears, a wife in fury, a wife in another man’s arms. He had not been prepared for a wife who had spent his absence not weeping, not raging, not betraying him, but quietly becoming the person she had perhaps always been.
He had not been prepared to be told that nothing dishonorable had happened, and to feel the curious unwelcome ache of a man who has been spared a wound he had almost counted on, because a real wound would have given him something simple to do. What he had been given was complicated. “There is no bill,” said Ashbourne. Hartwell raised one eyebrow.
“There is no bill. I have been seven months in a house outside Bath, with a woman who does not love me, and whom I do not love. We have both known it from the second week, and neither of us knew how to end it without unkindness. I have not been in Parliament.
I have not been anywhere a duke ought to be. I have been hiding from a wife I no longer knew how to speak to. ”
He stopped. He had said it to no one, not even to himself in those exact words.
He had said it now to Hartwell, of all men, across his own table. Hartwell looked only attentive, as he had looked at Eleanor over the pears. “You have a great deal of work to do. ”
“Yes.
I have. ”
He drank. The wine was very good. It was the best wine from his own cellar—the one she had kept for occasions she expected him to be there to recognize, and she had ordered it for him, not at the start of the evening when she had not known he was coming, but at the moment of his sitting down, when she had decided not to punish him in front of a guest.
They sat for a while longer in silence. Then they spoke of the bill that did exist, of the bishops, of Lord Marbury. At last Hartwell rose. “I will go to the inn.
I will leave in the morning. You will not see me again in this house unless your wife sends for me, and as I have said, she will not. Good night, Ashbourne. ”
He paused at the door.
“You are a fortunate man. You ought to know it. ”
He went out. Ashbourne did not go up at once.
He sat at the long table for a quarter of an hour after Hartwell’s carriage had been heard in the courtyard and after the courtyard had settled again. He watched the candles burn. He listened to the small ordinary sounds of a house putting itself to bed. He thought of the woman in the white house.
Not with anger, not with longing, not with the small false tenderness he had used to disguise the fact that he had stopped feeling much for her at all. She had taken him in when he had been ridiculous. She had given him a room and a place to be a man without consequence for a season. She had let him go without a scene.
He owed her an honest letter, a settled income, and no more of his attention ever. He rose. He took up one of the candles. He went out into the hall.
The mirror at the foot of the staircase showed him the tired, dust-coated stranger in the dark coat. This time he met the stranger’s eyes, and they did not flinch. He went up. He passed his own rooms without stopping.
He walked the long corridor to the east wing, to the door of her sitting room, which stood an inch ajar. He set his hand on the door. He did not push it. He knocked.
He had not knocked at his wife’s door in eleven years. The knock sounded in the long corridor like a small bell struck once. Then her voice, perfectly composed: “Come in. ”
He went in.
She was at her writing desk by the window. She had put on a shawl, taken down her hair and pinned it up loosely. She had a pen in hand and a half-written page beneath it. She did not put the pen down.
She turned in her chair and looked at him gravely, without surprise. He set the candle on the table by the door. “May I sit? ”
“The chair is yours.
”
He sat. He looked at the rug, a wedding gift from an aunt who had not believed the marriage would last six months. It had lasted eleven years and showed almost no wear. “Eleanor,” he said.
She waited. “I have not the words for this. ”
She nodded once. “Then do not look for them yet.
Sit. ”
He sat. The clock ticked. A log shifted in her grate.
Outside, the wind moved through the limes. “Hartwell has told me that nothing has happened,” he said. “I know. ”
“And I know it, too, without his telling.
I have known it from the moment I came into the room. I want you to know that. ”
She set the pen down—the first thing she had done with her hands since he came in. “Thank you.
”
“Eleanor. I have been a fool. ”
She did not contradict him. She did not agree.
“I have been in Somerset. I have been with a woman who is not my wife. ”
“I know that too. ”
“I have not loved her.
”
“I know that as well. ”
“How? ”
She smiled faintly. “Because if you had loved her, you would not have come home tonight—and certainly not in those boots.
”
He looked down at his boots. They were appalling. He laughed once, a short startled sound. She laughed too, very quietly.
For a moment the room was the room of two people who had laughed together for a long time and had not forgotten how. The moment passed. She folded her hands in her lap. “I will not ask you what you intend to do.
You will tell me when you have decided. I will ask you only one thing tonight. Did you come home because you were tired of her, or because you remembered me? ”
He did not answer at once.
He thought of the white house, the woman at the window, the road north, the candles downstairs, the second-best wine and the best, Hartwell’s eyes across the pears. “I came home because I remembered you. I had been told on the road that the Duke of Hartwell had been seen at Ashbourne Hall this summer. I rode the last forty miles in a temper I am not proud of.
I intended to be the kind of husband who walks into his own dining room in his riding boots and makes a scene. I did walk in in my riding boots. I did not make the scene. I did not make it because the moment I saw you at that table, I understood that whatever was happening in that room was not happening to me.
It was happening to you. You had earned it, every part of it, in the seven months I had been away and in the ten years before that in which I had not known you. I came home because I had been jealous of a man I had no right to be jealous of. And I have stayed in this room tonight because I have understood that the man I have most to be jealous of is the one I have been, and I would like, if you will allow it, to begin to be a different one.
”
She did not speak for a long time. The clock ticked. The log in the grate gave a small sigh. She looked at her hands, then at him.
Her eyes were bright, but not wet. “That is a great deal to say in one breath, my lord. ”
“I have had a great deal of road in which to compose it. ”
She almost smiled.
“Go to bed. Not here. In your own rooms. In the morning, we will speak again.
You will tell me what you mean to do about the house outside Bath, and I will tell you what I mean to do about the bill on which I have been advising the Duke of Hartwell—which is, by the way, a very good bill, and which I should like to see passed before Michaelmas, with or without your help, though I should prefer it with. ”
He rose. He stood for a moment by her chair. He did not touch her.
He had not the smallest right to touch her, and would not have for a long while. The realization ought to have been bitter. Instead it was a relief: it gave him something to do, and a length of time in which to do it. “Eleanor.
”
“Yes. ”
“Thank you for the wine. ”
She looked up at him and smiled—the small, dry, perfectly composed smile he had not seen in seven months, and possibly much longer. “It is, after all, your cellar.
”
He took up his candle and went out. He closed the door softly. He stood in the corridor listening. From within the room he heard, after a little while, the soft scrape of her chair as she turned back to her desk, and the small dry scratch of her pen as she resumed the letter he had interrupted.
She had not been writing to Hartwell. She had been writing to her steward about the entail. He went down the corridor to his own rooms. He undressed in the dark.
He lay a long while awake, watching the moon move across the ceiling. He had a great deal of work to do, and perhaps just enough life left to do it in. That was, in its quiet way, the best news he had received in a very long time. He woke before the house.
He shaved himself badly at the cold basin. He went down the backstairs in gray light and stood in the kitchen garden in the wet grass, watching his breath go up into the pale air. He thought of the letter he would write to the woman in the white house, the precise words, the income he would settle. She had been kind to him.
He owed her kindness in return. He went inside to the library. He set out paper, sharpened a pen, and began to write. He had not finished the letter when he heard his wife’s step in the corridor, and behind her the soft tread of Forrester, who had evidently been informed of his master’s return by a household that ran on its own intelligence.
Forrester came into the library with the small, dry, ancestral nod of a man who has served three generations. “Good morning, my lord. ”
“Good morning, Forrester. ”
“Welcome home, my lord.
” There was, in the small inflection on the word home, the only reproach Ashbourne would receive in that house on the subject of his absence. It was a fair one. “Thank you. ”
Forrester bowed and withdrew.
Eleanor came in. She had dressed for the morning in gray, her hair put up properly. She carried a small folded paper—a list. She set it on the desk in front of him.
“These are the matters on which decisions have been deferred against your return. I have done what I could. There are some I could not do without you. We will go through them after breakfast.
”
He looked at the list. It was long. Meticulous. In her hand.
He looked up at her. “Eleanor. ”
She waited. “I am very glad to be home.
”
She looked at him for a moment. Then she did a thing she had not done in seven months, and had not done in a great while before that. She laid her hand lightly, briefly on his shoulder. She did not say anything.
She took her hand away and went to the window, standing for a moment looking out at the park where the mist was lifting from the lower lawn. “I am glad you are home,” she said without turning. The light came up. The day began.
The long, slow, unglamorous work of becoming the man he had only that night decided to be began with it. It would go on in that house and in that marriage for many years. It would not always be easy.
It would be, in the end, the only thing he had done with his life that was worth the telling.