She spent an afternoon with my grandmother going through some matter of household accounts about which my grandmother had a question, which she said Merryn had resolved faster and more pleasantly than any solicitor.
She spent an evening in the library with Edric going through a proposed change to the lease terms for three of the eastern tenant farms. And they disagreed about the second and third terms, and he changed his position on one of them, which was, his steward confided to me in private, the first time in recent memory he had changed his position on anything unless the original position could be demonstrated to have been factually wrong.
She did not accommodate herself to his life with the frictionless adaptability of a woman performing the role of future duchess. She was herself: forthright, practical, interested in the estate's soil and its books and its tenant families with a directness that made his steward regard her with something approaching awe.
She argued with Edric about things—not sharply, she was not built for sharp, but steadily, in the way a person argues who expects to be heard and intends to make her point clearly, and expects the same in return.
He listened, which was for my brother both remarkable and, I thought, long overdue.
She did not ask him what the fashionable world thought of her. She did not wonder in that visible, anxious way whether she was managing the impression she made. She seemed to have very little energy to spend on worrying about impressions, which was perhaps a natural result of having spent her life in circumstances that did not reward the effort.
She was simply Merryn Fairfield, and she was either enough or she wasn't, and she seemed to have accepted both possibilities without drama and to be prepared without bitterness for either outcome.
It turned out she was more than enough.
Edric made his intentions known before Christmas: formally, carefully, with all the proper steps observed. He called on my grandmother first in the French cardinal's chair and told her what he intended to do, and she received the intelligence with the composed pleasure of someone who has been expecting a particular letter and is not surprised to find it arriving exactly when she thought it would.
She said, "It is about time."
He said, "You arranged the whole thing."
She said, "I arranged an introduction. You managed the rest yourself, which is as it should be."
He went to Atterstoke the following week. The visit lasted three hours and covered the formal question, the practical considerations, the proposed settlements, and at some length the drainage scheme for the Drevenmore lower fields, which the Reverend Fairfield found interesting and wished to discuss at greater depth than the occasion perhaps strictly required, and which the Reverend's wife found thoroughly beside the point, though she was too well-mannered to say so until Edric's carriage was out of the drive.
The Reverend gave his blessing. The Reverend's wife burst into happy tears, which she converted, on reflection, into sensible practicality about the notice that would need to be sent, and about what would be required in the way of a trousseau, and about whether Mrs. Hargreaves in the village would be the right person to speak to about the dress, and about all the other urgencies that attend a matter being joyfully concluded.
Miss Fairfield was at Drevenmore for Christmas. Edric asked her in the morning room on the 23rd of December, which is where the whole business had come so close to ending in September, and where he had found her ready to leave with her bag packed and her letter written.
I thought it right that he chose that room. I think he did, too.
She said, "Yes."
He stood very still for a moment after she said it, and then he said, "My grandmother will be insufferable about this."
"She will deserve to be," Miss Fairfield said.
When my grandmother was told, she received the news in her high-backed chair with the expression of someone who had been expecting this report and had arranged her schedule accordingly. She said, "Good." She folded her hands in her lap. She looked at Edric with a look I had only seen her direct at things she loved most, and she said, "She is exactly what you needed. I told you."
"You told me to be civil," Edric said.
"That was the opening instruction. There were subsequent chapters." She looked at Merryn, and something in her face softened—not into sentiment, exactly, but into the kind of quiet recognition that passes between two people who have each, in their own fashion, understood from the beginning what this was really about. "Welcome to Drevenmore, my dear."
Merryn crossed the room and sat beside her, and said something quietly that I did not hear. And my grandmother's hand moved to cover hers with the sure, unhurried warmth of someone giving the thing they have been intending to give all along.
I watched my brother watch them. I have thought about that moment often since: the precise hour when the 12-year posture finally let go, when you could see the man that had been behind it the whole time looking at a woman who had not wanted his title or his power or his social position, and a grandmother who had known from a single April afternoon at a charitable committee what neither of them yet had the information to see.
She really should have been a general.
The wedding was in February, modest by ducal standards, which still meant a cathedral and 200 guests. Because some things were immovable, and the Duke of Drevenmore could not marry in a parsonage, however much the new Duchess might have preferred the simplicity of it.
The cathedral at Havewick was decorated in winter white and pale gold. And the Reverend Fairfield performed the service with the dignity of a man who has been conducting ceremonies for 30 years and finds this one, privately, the finest of them, and managed, to his very great honor, to sit in the front pew with his wife afterward and not comment once on the water drainage of the Drevenmore lower fields.
My grandmother attended in the French cardinal's chair, which four of the footmen carried in from the carriage and positioned in the front beside the family pews, and which she refused to apologize for on any grounds whatsoever. She was dressed in deep blue with her good pearls, and she received the comments of 200 guests with the serene acknowledgement of someone who has not required anyone's opinion in eight decades and does not intend to start now.
She sat at the front. She watched Edric's face as Merryn came down the aisle—watched it with the steady, settled attention of a woman who had seen through to the thing that mattered and waited for it to arrive, and who now had the pleasure of watching it arrive exactly as she had always intended.
Later, when I described to her what I had seen in my brother's face in that moment—the particular quality of it, the way the 12 years of managed distance had simply, quietly ceased to be present—she said, "Yes. I know."
Of course she did. She had known from April.