Page 41 of The Cold Duke's Hired Bride

He kept his place at the foot of the bed, his hands open where she could watch them. “Nothing is expected. Not tonight. Not ever, unless and until you wish it for its own sake. I did not enter into matrimony with you to collect a debt. I have had quite enough, in one life, of being owed things and of owing them, and I will not open a matrimony with an account already running between us.”

She regarded him a long moment, and something behind the straight back gave way. Not collapse. The more dangerous thing, the first faint beginning of belief.

“Then what are you for,” she said, and it was not cruelty in it but bewilderment, the honest confusion of a woman handeda tool no one has taught her to grip. “If not for that. A husband provides a thing or takes a thing. I have known the two arrangements and no third. I do not know what a man is, in a room at night, who intends neither.”

“Nor do I, which you may find poor comfort from a husband of one afternoon’s standing.” He found, with the candle low and the dark forgiving, that he could say it more easily than he had ever said a true thing in daylight. “My father handed me duty and named it affection, and did it so steadily that I grew up believing the two were one word wearing different coats. When I wished, this past month, to give you something, the only tongue I had for it was a settlement and a column of advantages drawn tight as a drum. I pay. It is the single language I speak without an accent, and I have heard tonight, from your own mouth, what a poor thin thing it is to be fluent only in that.”

“It is not nothing, a man who pays. I have been wedded to one who would not.”

He turned his hand over on the coverlet, palm to the cool air. “It is not enough. You have just told me the one thing you want cannot be paid for, and I believe you, and I am left sitting at the foot of your bed, my hands quite empty, wondering how a man is to proffer a thing that defies all definition.”

“Then begin by staying. Not providing. Not solving. Only staying, in the room, when there is nothing useful to be done in it. I have never once had that in all my life. My father stayed for the dowry and was gone the week it failed to appear. My husband stayed for the look of the thing and was elsewhere in every way that signified. It is the thing I want most, and the thing no one has thought worth the giving, because a man cannot write it down in a book or hang it on a wall.”

“I can stay.” He came round the side of the bed and sat upon the edge of it, an honest foot of counterpane between them, and he did the hardest thing he had attempted all day, which was todo nothing whatever but remain. “I am, as it happens, unusually accomplished at remaining in rooms. I have practised it thirty years in doorways. No one had ever thought to ask me to do it where it might be noticed, and I find it is a different exercise entirely when someone has. A doorway is a posture of leaving that never quite leaves. You bid me enter this room fully, to cast aside all thought of departure at the threshold. I have longed to do so, I believe, for far longer than I dared acknowledge to myself. Yet I have no skill in this; I shall blunder, I know I shall, and you must resolve to forgive my lack of grace more often than either of us dare believe so.”

“Tell me how it was. The doorways.”

“Cold, mostly. A boy stands in a doorway when he has worked out that the room will not have him and the corridor will not keep him.” He turned his hand over on the coverlet. “You set a place and poured a cup and were looked through like a window. I stood at the edges of my own house and was stepped around like a draught. We have arrived at the same loneliness, you and I, by opposite roads. Either a great comedy or the only reason this matrimony has a hope of working. I have not decided which.”

“Both, I should think. The best of things are generally both.” She was quiet a moment. “Tell me one thing you wanted, as the boy in the doorway, and did not get. Not the large thing. A small one. The small ones are always the truest.”

“A second helping.” He surprised himself with how readily it came. “There was a rule in a cold house, my mother deceased and the place run by people who were not paid to be fond of me that a boy did not ask twice at table. Alaric asked three times and was indulged for it. I learned to be full on a single helping as a matter of policy, and I am one and thirty years old, and I still cannot ask for more bread at my own board without first rehearsing the sentence.”

“Then I shall set the bread by your hand before ever you have to ask for it, every morning, for the rest of our lives, and you will not rehearse the sentence again.” She said it simply, as a fact already arranged. “It costs nothing, and asks nothing, and settles no account. Your settlement could never have caught a thing so small. That is exactly why it is worth the giving.”

“That is the first time in my life anyone has offered me a thing I did not know how to want until it was already held out.” He had to look at the coverlet to say it. “You will have to go slowly with me, Renae. I am a grown man learning to be wanted, and it is undignified, and I find I do not care.”

“Nine years I set his place every evening, and he never said the food was good. I do not think he tasted it. He certainly never tasted a single thing that I had touched. The cruelty people imagine, the shouting and the rest of it, I could have named that and fought it. There is no fighting a man who simply does not see you are in the room. You begin, after a while, to wonder whether you are. I used to move a chair an inch from where he liked it, only to find out if he would notice it had been touched by a living hand. He never did. He had the chair put right by a servant and never knew the question had been asked.”

“I taste everything.” It was out before he had weighed it, the saying new. “It is the curse of one given nothing. He notices every crumb he is finally handed. You will find me an embarrassingly attentive husband, Renae, in all the small ways no one ever taught me were beneath a duke’s heir to mind.”

“The duke’s blessing. Let the warmth into the house. I have been turning it over since the vicar read it out. It is a strange thing for a father on his death bed to ask of a wedding, when most of their kind ask only for grandsons to secure the succession, and a strict adherence to propriety.”

His hand went still on the coverlet. “He asked the same of me the night before, in fewer words and a harder voice. He toldme not to make you pay for what I was never given. I did not ask how he knew there was a bill to pay. A man learns to see the shape of a thing, I expect, once he is preparing to leave this world and has given up pretending about the rest of it.”

“And will you? Make me pay.”

“I will try not to, and I will fail at it now and again, in the wrong order and a day late, as I fail at everything that was not taught me young. The failing is not the danger. The danger is whether I notice it in time to mend it, and whether you will tell me plainly when I have not. That is the fifth of your terms, and the one that frightens me most, for it asks you to go on watching me closely enough to catch it.”

“I have spent ten years watching men closely enough to catch what they wanted before they had named it themselves. It is the one skill my first matrimony left me that I have never once resented.” There was the ghost of the old dryness in it. “I shall turn it on you, my lord, and you will discover it is a great deal less comfortable to be read than it ever was to be obeyed.”

“I find that I want to be read. It is the most alarming single discovery of a thoroughly alarming day, and I have signed a matrimonial settlement in the course of it.”

She drew the nightgown closer at the throat. “May I tell you the thing I am most afraid of, since you have been so free with yours tonight?”

“It seems only fair, and there is nowhere I would rather be than at the foot of this bed hearing it.”

Her voice went very even, the voice she kept for the books. “That I shall grow used to being seen, and come to need it, and that then you will revert. Men do. The attentive ones above all. They are attentive while a thing is new and a campaign to be won, and then it is won, and they put it away in a drawer with the other won things, and the woman in the drawer may not complain, having been won so very attentively. I survived beinginvisible the first time because I never once let myself be truly seen. I am not certain I should survive it twice, having been let out into the light and grown fond of it.”

“Then we have come to the true bargain at last, and it is a deal harder than the one Fenwick drew up.” His hands stayed at his sides, though keeping them there cost him. “You are asking me never to win you. To go on courting a wife I already hold, every grey morning, with no prize waiting at the end of the courting but the courting itself. It is the only labour anyone has ever set me with no figure attached to its completion, and I find, to my very great alarm, that it is the only work I have ever actually wanted to do.”

“Then we shall both be working, my lord, at the one trade neither of us was ever apprenticed to. I make you no promise that I shall be good at being seen. I have unlearned a very great deal of practice at it.”

“We shall be ungainly together, then, and tell no one, and go on presenting a flawless front to the county, who would not believe either of us capable of ungainliness in any case. It is the one mercy of a fearsome reputation. Nobody troubles to look behind it for two frightened people learning, rather late, to share the one fire, and very likely to quarrel before long about which of us has drawn the chair nearer to it.”

When the candle had burned to a stub she leaned towards him, and he met her the rest of the way, and the kiss was the first thing either of them had offered the other with no clause set behind it and no debt laid before it. It was brief, and unhurried, and tasted of nothing he could have entered in any book. Then she lay down, and he lay down beside her, above the coverlet, still in his shirt, and held the hand she gave him, and neither reached for anything further, because the further was not the point and they were both, for once in their lives, in plain possession of the point.

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