Page 68 of A Bride for the Ruthless Duke

“She passed away bearing their third child, who departed this world with her, on a wet afternoon rather like this one.” Augusta did not look up. “And the old duke, who had hidden nothing, who had cherished her in the full sight of the world, was left standing in the wreck of it with everyone watching, every soul in three counties who had smiled behind their hands at his great unfashionable affection now watching to see what the affection had cost him. And it had cost him everything. He closed the great house. He let the gardens go. He sat in one room for the better part of twenty years and saw almost no one, and drank, and grew strange, and the boy who would be Theodore’s father grew up in that cold ruin with a father who could not look at him because he had his mother’s eyes, and that boy, Theodore’s father, learned the lesson the house was teaching, which was that to show your affections openly is to be flayed in public when the affection ends. And he taught it to Theodore. Not in words. Houses do not teach in words. He taught it by never once, in Theodore’s whole childhood, saying a warm thing where it could be seen.”

Ellen thought of the dinner table, the tea, the four hundred things he wished to know and the single one he had managed to ask. “And no one ever told him it was a falsehood? That the old duke’s grief was not a punishment for affection, only the price of having affection and a price most people would pay over again gladly?”

“Who was there to tell him? His father believed it too. His father had taken it in from the same cold house and the same cold man, and a child believes the house he is raised in, having no other house against which to measure it.” Augusta set a careful stitch. “I told him myself, once. He was perhaps nineteen, and I had grown brave enough at last. I sat him down and I said, Theodore, your grandfather was not destroyed by holding your grandmother in his highest esteem, he was destroyed by losing her, which is an entirely different thing, and the affection was the one good your grandfather was ever given, and he would tell you so himself if the drink had left him the words for it. And do you know what your husband said to me, at nineteen years of age?”

“What did he say?”

“He said, very civilly, that he took my point entirely, and that he had decided nonetheless that he would far rather have the cold and the safety than the good and the risk, because the good might be taken from him at any moment and the cold could not.” Augusta’s mouth tightened on the memory. “Nineteen, and he had it worked out like a sum, like the acreage of the river land. I could have wept. I did weep, a little, afterward, where he could not see it, for there is nothing on this earth colder than a clever child who has sat down and reasoned his way to being safe.”

The rain went down the glass.

“And then Theodore’s mother passed, when he was four-and-twenty,” Augusta said. “The one warm person the family had managed to produce in three generations, the one who rode and laughed and named cottages, and Theodore had cherished her without guarding against it because she was his mother and a boy does not think to guard against that. And when she passed he had his proof. Two generations of it. Affection a thing in the open, and the world will gather to watch you destroyed when you lose it. So he built his wall, and he has lived behind it very successfully for eleven years, and he has been, I think, until this autumn, entirely alone inside it, and entirely safe, which he had come to believe were the same thing.”

Ellen sat very still. “And now.”

“And now there is a girl in his house who raised a garden and faced down his housekeeper and worked out the whole of him in a fortnight, and he has begun taking the wall down stone by stone, at his age, against everything three generations beat into him, and I find I can hardly breathe for watching it, because I do not know whether he will get it down in time, or whether he will lose his nerve at the last and mortar it all back up, and I am too old to watch this family make the same mistake a fourth time.” Augusta knotted her thread, and her hands were not quite steady. “He is not cold, Ellen. That is the thing you were never told. He is the opposite of cold. He is a man who feels too much and was taught from the cradle that the sentiment is a loaded weapon, which will inevitably discharge and prove his undoing. So as a result, and he has spent his life keeping it pointed at the floor. Do not mistake the caution for the absence. It is the most common mistake made about him, and it is entirely wrong.”

That evening Theodore did not come to dinner.

He sent word, by the maid, with the old formal courtesy, that estate business kept him and that he hoped Her Grace would not wait on him, and Ellen ate alone with Augusta’s voice still going in her, the wall and the old duke and the loaded weapon kept pointed at the floor, and she understood that she had spent four months reading his silence as a closed account when it had been, the whole time, a man holding his breath.

She went up early. She let Bess undress her and take down her hair and bank the fire, and she sent the girl away, and then she sat on the edge of her bed in her nightgown with a single candle going and looked at the connecting door in the panelled wall.

She thought about the wedding night, the dark and the dutifulness, and understood it now for what it must have been from his side, a man performing a necessary thing while holding the whole of himself a careful distance off, not from coldness but from terror, because to have done it warmly would have been to open the wall to her on the first night, and he had not been able to bear it.

She thought about the violets with no card, and the mare bought for no reason she had ever been given, and the wall raised quietly around her against her brother, and the ride into the dark to bring her home, and the tea, one sugar in the morning and none in the afternoon, gathered at a candlelit table because it was the only courtship the man had the language for. She turned each of them over the way Augusta had bid her, looking this time at the underside, and on the underside of every cold thing was the same warm and frightened thing, kept all this while carefully pointed at the floor.

She sat a long while with the candle and the closed door, and the great house went quiet around her, the particular deep quiet of old stone after midnight. She thought about being brave. She had been brave a good deal in her life, brave for her brother, brave at the draper’s window, brave in a falling household keeping accounts no one else would touch, and not once in any of it had she been brave for herself, brave toward a thing she wanted rather than away from a thing she feared. This would be the first time. It frightened her rather more than the folly had, because the folly had cost her only her pride, and this could cost her a thing she had been without for a long while and had only lately discovered she owned again, which was hope.

She got up, before she could reason herself out of it, and crossed the cold floor to the door, and put her hand on her own bolt and drew it back, and the small sound of it in the quiet room was the loudest thing she had ever done.

Then she put her hand on the handle, and turned it, and waited for the resistance of his bolt on the far side, the resistance that had been there, she had always assumed, every night for four months.

There was no resistance.

The door gave under her hand and swung in toward his room, silent on its hinges, and she stood on the threshold with the candle behind her throwing her shadow long across his floor, and understood, in a slow turning-over of everything, that his bolt was not drawn. That it had not been drawn. That somewhere in the four nights since the garden, without a word to her, without a card or a message or a servant to carry it, he had gone to his side of this door and drawn back the bolt and left it so, and said nothing, and waited, because opening the door was the most that a man taught what he had been taught could do, and the rest, the asking, the crossing, he had had to leave to her.

He was standing by his own cold hearth, still dressed, a book in his hand that he had plainly not been reading, and he turned when the door moved, and saw her on the threshold in her nightgown with the candle behind her, and neither of them said anything at all for the space of several breaths.

“You unbolted it,” she said.

“Four nights ago.” His voice was low and not steady. “I could not knock. I have tried, four nights running, to make myself knock, and I could not, because knocking is asking, and I have never in my life learned how to ask for a thing I wanted this much. So I drew the bolt instead, and left it, and hoped you might one day try the door and find it open, and understand from that what I could not find the courage to say across a dinner table.”

“You might have waited forever. I never tried it. I thought it was locked against me. I have thought so for four months.”

“I know. I have lain awake on the other side of it every one of those four nights knowing exactly that, and not able to do the single small brave thing that would have ended it.” He set the book down. “I am not a brave man, Ellen, whatever the world has been told of me. I am brave about every other thing under the sun. About this I am the greatest coward you will ever meet.”

“Augusta told me about your grandfather.” She said it quietly, still on the threshold, the candle warm at her back. “The old duke. And your grandmother, and the twenty years he sat alone in one room of a shut house. And your father after him, and your mother. She told me what the house taught you. That to cherish something in the open is to be flayed in front of everyone the day you lose it.”

Something crossed his face, half relief that she knew and half the old fear of being known. “Then you understand precisely what you would be crossing that threshold toward. A man who believes, in the very marrow of him, that this ends in catastrophe, because every soul in his blood who ever cherished in the open was destroyed by it in the sight of the world.”

“I understand it. And I am going to cross it anyway.” She did not move yet. “Because the other thing Augusta told me is that you are not cold. That you are a man who feels too much and was taught to keep it pointed at the floor. I spent four months thinking I had wedded a closed door. I would rather spend the rest of my life finding out I wedded the opposite.”

She crossed the threshold.

She did it slowly, and on her own two feet, by her own choice, the first thing in the whole of this bought and bargained matrimony she had chosen entirely for herself, and she crossed his cold floor to where he stood by the cold hearth, and she put the candle down on the mantel, and she looked up at him, and she watched the fear and the wanting war in his face and watched the wanting win, slowly, the way a fist opens.

“Then be a coward,” she said. “I will be brave enough for the both of us tonight. I have had four months’ practice at being braver than I feel.”