He answered questions about the weather, the roads, the king. For a quarter hour he did not look at Eleanor at all. Then he turned toward where she sat in the window seat, half hidden by the curtain. In daylight his face was less remote and more tired.
A small scar at his temple. A softness at the corner of his mouth he had not allowed the night before. Miss Vance, I owe you an apology. She set down her cup.
For asking when the room made it impossible for you to refuse without punishment. I did not understand last night. I understood on the drive home. She was silent.
She had prepared replies for gallantry, for flirtation, for anger. Not this plain careful speech of a man taking responsibility for a small unkindness he had not known he was committing. You are very generous, your grace. I am not.
I am only attentive. He turned his teacup a quarter turn. Set it down. Folded his hands on his knee.
I would like to ask you again. Not here, where a refusal would be costly. Somewhere of your choosing, at a time of your choosing, with no witnesses but the person you trust most. I would like you to feel free to refuse me a second time.
I will not take it less well than the first. She heard her aunt’s teacup clatter in the next room. Her aunt had been listening. But the Duke had pitched his voice so quietly that her aunt heard only the cadence, not the words.
He had given her a private conversation in a house where privacy did not exist. I shall think about it, she said. He inclined his head. Of course.
He rose. He bowed to her aunt, who appeared in the doorway with the expression of a woman who had not been listening at all. He bowed again to Eleanor. He left.
—
The second meeting happened three days later in a circulating library on Bond Street. Rain loud on the high windows. Eleanor had come to return a volume of sermons. She brought a French grammar and a notebook of verbs she did not yet know.
He was already there, reading the price of wheat. He waited until she had returned the sermons, chosen a chair by the window, arranged her grammar. Only then did he cross the room. May I sit?
She considered him. The reading room was nearly empty. An elderly clergyman dozed. A young woman turned pages without reading.
You may. He sat. He looked at the rain for a long time. She returned to her verbs.
When she reached the fourth conjugation, he spoke again. You are studying French. I am studying the verbs of which I am not yet certain. The rest I trust.
It is a good principle. Most things in life come down to the verbs of which we are not yet certain. She looked up. He was not smiling.
He was looking at the rain. I should like to tell you something, Miss Vance. Here, where you may stand up and walk away from me without anyone marking it. She put down her pen.
I am listening. I have an arrangement. Not a betrothal. A wish expressed by my mother on her deathbed, acknowledged by the mother of a young woman of suitable family.
It binds neither of us in law or honor. An old letter in a drawer. But it exists, and I would not wish you to learn of it from someone else. He paused.
The rain kept its steady counting. I am telling you this because I have decided I should like to know you better. Slowly. Against my usual habits.
On the basis of a single sentence you spoke at a ball and a single afternoon in which you said almost nothing at all. I cannot account for it. I will not insult you by pretending I can. Eleanor looked at her hands.
A tiny crescent of ink on her thumbnail. She thought about the letter in the drawer. Her aunt. Her mother opening the post each morning with patient hope.
Penelope, who would never understand what she was about to say. I am grateful you have told me, she said. I am also grateful you have allowed me to stand up and walk away. She closed the grammar.
She rose. He rose with her. I am not, however, going to walk away. The slate gray eyes did not move.
I should be glad to know you better also. On the understanding that the letter remains a letter in a drawer. We are not in any way hurrying. I am, as it happens, in no hurry at all.
He inclined his head. A small decided softening at the corner of his mouth. Thank you. He hesitated.
Then added, in a voice almost too low for the rain to allow. I had thought I made up my mind never to marry a woman who had not first been able to refuse me. I had not understood how unlikely that made it. She laughed.
A small real laugh that surprised them both. You will understand that I cannot promise to refuse you again. I will not ask anything that requires you to promise such a thing. I will ask only that when you do refuse me, you do it as well as you did the first time.
She sat down. He sat down. The rain kept counting. They did not say much else that afternoon.
But the small table between them had become a room within the room, with a door that opened only inward. —
He called in the weeks that followed with a regularity that lacked display. They met in the British Museum, where he showed her a small Greek bowl broken and mended in antiquity, the crack repaired with a line of gold. They met at a music room in Hanover Square, where a young woman sang an aria so simply that Eleanor cried without meaning to, and the Duke did not look at her crying, and did not pretend not to see.
They walked the long avenue beside the serpentine while Penelope, sent as chaperon, lagged behind in a sulk. They spoke of books. They spoke of the country she missed and he had been taught to mistrust. They spoke of the price of bread, which she knew exactly and he did not pretend to know.
They did not speak of the letter in the drawer. It was the young woman of suitable family who spoke of it first. Lady Sophronia Wynn arrived in London at the end of April, took one look at the Duke and Eleanor in the same room at an evening party, and wrote the next morning a short letter releasing the Duke from a wish she had never been consulted about. She enclosed a sprig of dried lavender.
I find I should prefer a man who likes dogs more than I do. The Duke read it aloud to Eleanor at the bowl in the museum. Eleanor said Lady Sophronia had excellent judgment. —
The quiet climax came on a Thursday in early May in the small back garden of the house in Half Moon Street.
A square of soot-streaked paving with a single sycamore. Eleanor had gone out to cut mint for her aunt’s evening tisane. The Duke had come by arrangement to call on her uncle on business that had nothing to do with her. Her uncle prolonged the meeting just long enough for the Duke to step into the back garden afterward.
He found her with kitchen scissors in her hand and a smudge of soot on her wrist. You have made me very happy these last weeks, he said. She did not look up from the mint. I am glad.
I should like to ask you a question. You may refuse it without explanation, and I will not raise it again. She set down the scissors. She turned and looked at him properly, without softness and without armor.
Ask. He asked. He did not kneel. He did not flourish.
He asked in the voice he had used about the verbs of which one is not yet certain. She did not answer at once. She turned to the sycamore. Put her hand on its rough bark.
Felt the soot come off on her palm. She thought of her mother in the long stone-floored hall. Penelope on the velvet bench. The embroidered square above her bed.
The slate gray eyes. The line of gold in the old bowl. She did not hurry. He did not fill the silence.
When she turned back, the answer had arranged itself in her throat. Yes, she said. Quite. He inclined his head no more than half an inch.
The same half inch he had given her on the night she refused him. But this time the thread of light behind his eyes did not close. It broke quietly into something she had no other name for than gladness. He took her hand, the one without soot.
Held it briefly. Let it go. I shall write to your mother tonight. I shall not write to your aunt until tomorrow, so you may tell her first.
He gave her the smallest, driest smile she had yet seen. I think you have refused me as well as we ought to expect. I am content to leave it there. —
They were married in the small church in her mother’s village in Wiltshire on a morning when the hedge put out its first cream of hawthorn.
Her mother stood by the gate in a dress three times turned and looked for the first time in a decade like a woman who had stopped opening the post out of habit. Lady Sophronia sent a small well-trained spaniel and a note that said only be useful and be kind. Penelope came with a new bonnet and a smile she had been holding for a month. In the churchyard she announced she had always known.
Eleanor kissed her cheek and asked after her health. The small Greek bowl remained in its case at the museum. It was visited twice a year by a tall quiet man and a woman with ink on her thumb.
They stood before it without speaking, and went away each time a little gladder than they had come.