She should have known, then, what it would come to. She did know, she thought afterward. She had known it the way one knows the weather is going to break, in the back of the neck. She simply did not want to look.
It broke on the Thursday.
Lady Ivers left them alone. She did it with tremendous art, discovering that she had left her vinaigrette upstairs and must fetch it herself, and taking Piers with her by the elbow, and closing the drawing-room door with a click that might have been heard in Lincolnshire. Theodora sat at the window table with the light on her face and her heart going like a mill, and watched the Duke of Calderwood watch the door close, and knew.
He did not kneel. She was glad of that, later. He sat squarely across from her, where she could see every word, and he set his hands flat on the little table as if it were a map, and he told her, in the low, even, careful voice, exactly what he had planned.
He had thought about it, he said, as he would have thought about a campaign. He could not go on as he was. He could not take his seat and sit through a debate he could not hear and stand up to answer speeches he had caught one word in four of; he could not dine twelve to a table and laugh at the deaths of bishops' sisters. But with her beside him, he could. She could sit at his right hand at every dinner and read the table for him, low, as she had read the ballroom. She could sit in the gallery on the great days and tell him afterward, word for word, what Selby and the rest had said. She would know before anyone else did when it grew worse. Nobody need ever know. His mother would teach her the house; she would be a duchess, and her family's debts would be nothing, and her brother would never be sent to Hackney, and the school —
"The school," he said, "would be endowed. Properly. Not sixty pounds; six hundred, a building, masters, whatever you liked. As the Duchess of Calderwood's charity. Nobody could say a word against it then. It would last as long as the dukedom."
He stopped. He had said it all. He was waiting, she saw, the way a man waits who has laid his guns very carefully on a target and has no notion whether they will reach.
Theodora found that she was cold all through, from the inside out, as though she had swallowed snow.
"You want me," she said, "to be your ears."
"I want you to be my wife."