Page 65 of A Bride for the Ruthless Duke

“Very well, Your Grace.”

“There is a thing I have only lately come to see, and I will say it the once and not return to it.” He was quiet a moment. “For nine years I have fought this man the way I fight everything in my life, from behind a wall, through agents, with what I am pleased to call policy, never once in the open where it might cost me something to be seen doing it. And it has answered handsomely. I have beaten him at every turn, and he despises me the more for it, because he has never once been able to find the hand that did the beating. I am beginning to wonder whether a life conducted entirely from behind walls is a victory at all, or only a very comfortable and very long sort of hiding.”

“That is rather above my office to judge, Your Grace.”

“It is above mine as well, plainly, since I have contrived to reach five-and-thirty without noticing it.” He almost smiled, and there was no humor in it. “Hold the campaign. Buy the land. We will fight the earl in daylight, when the daylight will not also fall across my wife.”

“And the river land?”

“Buy it back. Quietly, through agents of our own, at whatever it costs, and ask me no questions about the price. I want every acre he has taken off my people back in my people’s hands before he knows it is going.” That, at least, gave Theodore something near satisfaction. “Begin with the Burtons’ fields. They are to have their own ground under them again, and they are never to learn it was ever in doubt.”

When Pearce had taken his leave, Augusta came in without knocking, which she did when she had something to say that she did not mean to be told to keep.

“She rode this morning,” Augusta said. “Over the south ridge, with Hibbert behind her, and came back with color in her face for the first time in a week. She has been in the garden since, in an old apron, quarrelling with Coyne about the frost. I thought you would wish to know that your wife has decided to live after all.”

“I am glad of it.”

“Are you? One is not always able to discern.”

“You might tell her so yourself. It would carry rather more conviction from you than from a breakfast tray.”

“She does not wish to see me.”

“You have not the smallest notion what she wishes, Theodore, because you have never once asked her, because asking would mean standing in a room and waiting upon an answer you could not arrange in advance, and you would sooner be flayed in the market square.” She sat, uninvited, and arranged her shawl. “She ordered me out of her room five days ago, did you know that. Told me to leave, in as many words, and a great deal more besides. It was the best afternoon’s work I have done in a twelvemonth.”

“You provoked her on purpose.”

“Of course I provoked her on purpose. A grief that has gone still wants a stick put into it to make it move again, and I had run out of gentler sticks.” Augusta looked at him steadily. “In the very act of ordering me from her presence, she said something that has occupied my thoughts ever since. I feel you had better be made acquainted with it, however little you may thank me for my pains.”

“Then perhaps do not say it.”

“She said she was finished being managed by people who care for her.” Augusta let it sit. “And she said that you send a maid to her door three times a day to ask whether she wants a book or a higher fire, and never once come yourself, because even your kindness must be handed down through a servant so that you need never stand in a room with her and risk her having a feeling where you can see it.”

Theodore said nothing at all.

“I have known you since you were an hour old,” Augusta said, more gently. “I held you before your mother did. So believe me that I mean it kindly when I tell you the girl has the whole of you in one sentence, and that she brought it to a conclusion within a fortnight, lonely and frightened and half starved, which is more than your tutors managed in twenty years at a great deal of expense.” She rose. “You watched her sit at that window for a week and did not go to her. A man does that for one of two reasons, Theodore. He does it because he does not care, or he does it because he cares so much that he dare not. You have never in your life been a man who did not care. Work out the rest yourself. You are clever, when you trouble to be.”

He did not answer her, because there was no answer that was not either a falsehood or a confession, and he had never in his life made the second, and found himself, of a sudden, very tired of making the first.

“Silence is your answer, then? So be it.” Augusta gathered her shawl with evident satisfaction. “A man who has run clean out of clever answers is a man on the very edge of doing something honest. See that you do it, Theodore, before the girl decides, quite reasonably, that she has waited long enough for you and stops waiting.”

She left him with it.

He sat a long while after she had made her exit in the cold neat order of his study, with Carrow’s packet face down on the desk and the fire burned low, and he made himself do the thing he had spent a great many years not doing, which was to look squarely at what was in him and call it by its name.

He had chosen her before there was any debt to be settled between her house and his. A season ago he had stood in a shabby morning room and watched a girl pour tea for the brother who was selling her, watched her keep her chin level and her hands steady while her whole life was bartered across a desk in front of her, and somewhere in that half hour he had decided he would have her, and had dressed the wanting up afterward in the decent language of rescue and convenience because the bare fact of it frightened him more than anything had frightened him in years.

Upstairs, pressed between the leaves of a book on his shelf, lay a violet from her wedding bouquet, put there the night of the wedding and called, ever since, a sentiment of no consequence.

There was the mare bought for her with no reason given, and the wall raised around her against her brother that she had never been permitted to glimpse, and the spring violets sent up to her room with no card, and the daily messages carried by a maid, and the ride into the dark to save her from ruin followed by a week of silence she could only ever have read as judgment.

Every last thing he had felt for the girl had reached her by the agency of another, through a servant or a barred door or a senseless beast or an unsigned card, so that he need never once stand in front of her with his face uncovered and say a true thing aloud and watch what it did to her.

She had named the whole of it in a single sentence, throwing an old woman out of a room. He had bestowed his heart upon his wife. He had become utterly devoted to her, and he now discerned, since the morning room, before he possessed any right to harbor such a sentiment. Throughout their matrimony, he had been content to pass that affection to her only through the meagre gap beneath a locked door; for he, who looked upon any other terror unmoved, lived in absolute fear of exposing his own heart.

He went to the shelf and took down the book and opened it. The violet was there, pressed flat and gone the brown-purple of old wine, the color long drained out of it but the shape of it was perfect still, a small withered flower he had carried through three months of matrimony the way a man carries a live coal in his pocket and pretends he does not feel the burn.

He looked at it a while. Then he closed the book and set it back on the shelf and did not lift the flower out, because the flower had never been the point of the thing. The point was the woman three floors below him who had spent a week believing herself a burden in a house whose every cold corner he had quietly been warming for her, all the while, without ever allowing her to detect the truth.