"She knew before I did. She told me on the day we went to Lyme." His forehead rested against hers. "She said, Adrian, that girl reads a postmark as other people read faces. You had better learn to be readable."
"And are you?"
"I am trying," said the Viscount of Dunmere. "It is slow. But I find that I have an excellent teacher."
They were married at Michaelmas, quietly, in the little church at Dunmere, with the limes turning gold along the drive.
The Dowager, who was brought in a chair, wept throughout the service and said afterward that she had never enjoyed a wedding so much. Mrs. Grice, in a new grey silk, was observed to smile twice. Mr. Pell, who had been retired with a handsome pension and a cottage in the village, sat in the back pew and blew his nose like a trumpet. Colonel Fenwick came from London, and stood at the Viscount's side, and made a long and affecting speech afterward, which nobody remembered except the part about the Madeira.
And in the front pew, on the left, in a gown of lavender silk that she had been allowed to choose herself, sat a small grey woman with a lace cap and a great white shawl, holding the hand of the old blind lady beside her, and looking at her son with a face that had not stopped shining since June.
The house at Dunmere had been opened that summer, room by room, shutter by shutter, as though a long winter had at last been allowed to end. The crape had come down from the knocker. The east wing had been aired. In the room of clocks, the seventeen clocks had been wound, and on the first day, at the Dowager's particular request, they had been set, for the first time in living memory, to strike exactly together.
It was the most extraordinary sound. Clara had stood in the door, in her new black-and-lavender, with her husband's arm round her, and listened to the whole old house chime at once, a great, full, ringing, golden hour, and had found, to her great surprise, that she was crying again.
"You must stop doing that," Adrian had murmured in her ear.
"I cannot help it."
"I find that I do not mind," he said. "I find I rather like it."
On the morning after the wedding, the post came as usual at eleven.
She took it in the study, which was hers now, by a special instrument of the Viscount's, and which she had refused to let anyone else touch. She cut the string. She sorted the bundle on the great black desk with the quick small movements of a lifetime: a bill, a card, a circular, a note from the Duke of Somerset, an invitation from a lady in Bath.
And, near the bottom, a small square letter, folded thin, directed in a firm, rather angular, very slightly unsteady hand.
To my wife, Clara, Viscountess Dunmere. The Study.