He arrived at the great echoing house the week Lady Ashcombe left for the coast in a plain coat with one servant and one horse, and he presented himself in the hall like a man reporting for duty.
Beatrix, who had privately wagered with herself that he would last three days, handed him a ledger and a stub of pencil, and the Duke of Vernham sat down at the long deal table in the steward's room and, frowning like a schoolboy, began to add up columns of figures.
He was terrible at it. He was terrible at nearly all of it. He put his elbow through a windowpane he was trying to shutter and had to have his hand bound. He tallied a rent account three times and got three different answers, each of them wrong.
He offended the tenant at the mill by addressing him with the Duke's careless grandeur and had to be sent back by Beatrix to apologize, which he did stiffly, and then—she watched this happen—less stiffly, and then, sitting on an upturned bucket in the man's kitchen, quite humanly, listening to a miller explain the price of grain until the miller was won over entirely.
He learned to carry his own bag. He learned to bank a fire, and to read a rent roll, and to hear in the accounts of the estate the lives of the people they represented. And in the long evenings, when the light failed and there was nothing to do but sit by the one lit fire in the vast dim house, he read to her Marcus Aurelius at her insistence.
Something had happened over six weeks that neither of them had planned: the armor had come off, both suits of it, and what was underneath had turned out to fit. She stopped waiting for him to fail; he stopped performing altogether. There was no one to perform for. In the empty house, stripped of title and audience and everything that had ever made him doubt his own worth or hers, they became simply Lucian and Beatrix—a man and a woman who argued about Stoics and shuttered windows together, and laughed in the dust and the cold more than either had laughed in years.
On the last night, the house was closed, the ledgers were balanced—she had balanced them, he had helped, which was different, and he knew the difference now. They sat by the fire in the empty drawing room, holland covers ghostly over the furniture, and Lucian set down the book.
"The six weeks are finished," he said. "You said if I still wanted you at the end, I might ask again."
"I did say that." Her voice was not steady. She had known this was coming, and had dreaded it and hoped for it in equal, terrible measure.
He did not kneel. He knew her too well now for theater. He simply looked at her across the low fire, ink on his cuff and a healing cut on his hand, no duke at all, only a man who had learned to add sums and bank fires and apologize to millers and read a lonely emperor aloud.
"Beatrix Callowell," he said, "I have spent 15 years being wanted for everything that is not me, and I had begun to believe there was nothing else in me to want. You did not want any of it. You wanted me to add my sums correctly, and stop showing off my nervous horse, and read to you in the evenings. And in wanting so little, you made me for the first time want to be a man worth wanting. I am not asking you to fall into the well. I am asking you to let me stand in it with you, where the world cannot see us and cannot make either of us pay, and be for the rest of our lives exactly what we have been these six weeks. I have never in my life waited for anything. I have waited for you, and I find it is the only thing I have ever done that felt like being alive. Marry me. Not the Duke—me."
And Beatrix, who had a ready answer for everything, who had never in her life been at a loss for a dry word to hold the world at a safe distance, found that she had no words at all.
She set down her sewing. She crossed the small, warm circle of firelight in the great, cold house, and she took his bound-up hand in both of hers, and the tears she had refused to shed for 6 weeks came at last, and she was not ashamed of them.
"You put your elbow through a window," she said, half laughing, "and you cannot add, and your horse is still overbred, and I am going to spend the rest of my life correcting your Latin."
"Yes," he said.
"Yes," she said. "You dreadful, dear, impossible man, yes."
Lady Ashcombe, returning from the coast to find her niece betrothed to the Duke of Vernham, was so overcome that she had to be revived with sal volatile, and then boasted of it, as predicted, for the entire decade that followed.
Society was scandalized, and then gradually fascinated. The uncatchable Duke of Vernham had been caught, and by a poor niece who had told him to his face that she was not interested, and who continued, even as his Duchess, to correct his Latin at dinner in front of the guests.
He did not mind. He had spent half his life being told what he wished to hear, and he had found it a kind of starvation. Now he was told the truth every day by a woman who had married him for no advantage at all, and would have been happier, she frequently reminded him, with a good book and a quiet window—except that she had discovered, to her considerable inconvenience, that she preferred his company to both.
"You are the exception," she told him once, years on, at a window in the gold end of an afternoon, the two of them watching the light lie long across the lawns. "The book was Marcus Aurelius. He was very good, and I chose you over him, which is the highest compliment I have ever paid a living man. So, do try not to let it go to your head."
The Duke of Vernham, who had never learned to add a column of figures correctly and never would, put his arm around his wife and counted himself, without any difficulty at all, the richest man in England.