"An heir."
She was silent for a moment.
She had not sat down. He had not, in his coldness, thought to offer her a chair, and now he saw that she had stood through the whole of his proposition with her chin level and her gloved hands folded—a small, shabby figure in a room built to humble emperors, and that she had not been humbled in the least.
The firelight—he had at last had the fire lit against the cold when he heard her carriage on the drive—caught the line of her jaw and the steadiness of her gray eyes, and the Duke of Wintersea, who had ceased some months ago to notice anything about the living world, found that he was noticing her.
"You have made me a very plain offer, Your Grace," she said. "I will give you a very plain answer in return. But first, I will give you my terms, for you spoke as though all the terms were yours, and they are not."
He raised an eyebrow. No one set him terms. He had been a duke since the age of nine and dying since the autumn, and between the two conditions he had grown accustomed to a world that did precisely as he wished, and then mourned him for it.
"Your terms," he repeated.
"If I am to be your wife," said Marguerite Ellery, "then I will be your wife, sir, and not a broodmare you have bought to save your acres. I will not be installed in a distant wing and visited like a duty. I will dine with you. I will sit with you. I will be told the truth of your affairs and consulted upon them, for if I am to be the mother of the man who holds this estate, then I had better understand it.
And if you are dying"—here her voice did not soften exactly, but it steadied, the way a hand steadies on a rail—"then you will not do it alone in this cold room with the curtains drawn, pretending it does not frighten you. You will let me sit with you. That is my price.
Rank and fortune I will take, since you press them on me and my sisters have need of them, but I will not take a marriage that is a transaction and nothing more. I have seen too many of those. They are a kind of slow death in themselves, and you, sir, have not the time to spare for two of them."