He had thought the trial was a hardship to be endured. He understood now that it was a gift, and that she had given it to him precisely because she did not yet believe he would recognize it as one.
The six weeks did not begin gently.
On the third day, having put his elbow through the windowpane, the Duke of Vernham discovered that a great house being closed for the winter is not a matter of drawing curtains and locking doors, but a vast, dusty, aching labor of shrouding furniture in holland, of climbing to check the state of a hundred windows against the coming frosts, of walking the tenanted farms to settle accounts before the roads grew bad, of accounting for every candle and every sack of flour so that nothing should be wasted or spoiled in the empty months.
Beatrix did all of it as a matter of course, having done it every autumn for years, and she set him to it beside her without ceremony. And Lucian, who had never in his life performed a single act of physical labor that was not sport, found himself, by the end of the first week, sore in muscles he had not known he possessed, and to his own considerable astonishment, happier than he had been in a decade.
There was a freedom in it he had never tasted. No one was watching. No mother angled a daughter at him across a ballroom. No politician sought his ear. No tradesman bowed too low. No one in the whole cold, empty house wanted a single thing from the Duke of Vernham, because there was no Duke of Vernham here. There was only Lucian in a plain coat with dust in his hair, being told by a clergyman's niece that he had shuttered a window crookedly and would have to do it again.
"You are enjoying this," Beatrix accused him on the 10th day, catching him whistling as he coiled a length of rope.
"I am appalled to discover that I am," he admitted. "I keep waiting to be bored, or to resent it, or to remember that I am a duke and this is beneath me. None of it comes. I banked a fire this morning entirely by myself, and I was more pleased with the fire than I have ever been with any honor the Crown has given me. What is happening to me, Miss Callowell? Have you bewitched me?"
"Certainly not. I have merely deprived you of everything that made you miserable and given you honest work and honest company, which is what half the great men in England are dying for and none of them will admit."
She was up a ladder as she said it, fastening a shutter, and a strand of hair had come loose across her face, and there was dust on her cheek. And Lucian, holding the foot of the ladder and looking up at her, was struck so hard and so suddenly by the plain fact of loving her that he forgot to breathe.
She was not beautiful in the way the season prized. She was better than beautiful: she was entirely, unimprovably herself, and he wanted to spend the rest of his life at the foot of her ladder, handing up whatever she needed and being told he had done it crookedly.
The evenings were the danger. In the daytime, there was work enough to keep a decent distance, but when the light failed, there was nothing to do in the great dim house but sit by the one lit fire and talk and read. She made him read aloud Marcus Aurelius at her insistence, in revenge for his having called the Stoic tedious, and he read badly at first and then well.
And once, he stopped in the middle of a passage and said, "He is not tedious. I called him tedious at 19. He is only a lonely man trying very hard to be good, which at 19 I could not recognize because I had not yet been lonely."
Beatrix, sewing by the fire, did not look up, because if she had looked up, he would have seen everything, and she was not ready for that.
"No," she said very quietly. "One cannot recognize it until one has been it."
"Have you been lonely, Beatrix?"
The needle paused. "I have been alone a great deal," she said carefully. "It is not the same thing. Alone is only a circumstance. Lonely is when you begin to want a particular person's company and cannot have it. And I have been very careful all my life never to want any particular person's company, precisely so that I should never be lonely. It has served me admirably." She resumed her sewing. "Until recently."
The fire ticked in the grate. Neither of them said anything for a long moment, and the unsaid thing sat between them, warm and terrible.
"Do not," she said at last, though he had not moved, "say anything. It is not the third week yet. You promised me six. If you are the man I am beginning to fear you are, you will hold to the whole six and let me have my proof. Because a woman who has guarded herself as long as I have does not surrender to a feeling in the third week by firelight. She surrenders, if she surrenders at all, to evidence: to a man who came and stayed and worked and did not run, all six weeks, with nothing to gain and no one watching. Give me my evidence, Lucian. Do not cheat me of it with a pretty speech now."
"Six weeks, then," he said, and his voice was not quite steady. "You shall have every hour of them. But I give you notice, Beatrix Callowell, that at the end of the sixth, I intend to say every gallant thing I have been swallowing all at once, and you will have to listen to the entire backlog."
She laughed—a real laugh startled out of her—and covered it with her hand, and the sound of it in the great empty house was the finest thing Lucian Marable had ever heard.
She had been counting on him to run. He did not run.