"She Won't Last a Month Here," the Duke Told His Butler — By Summer She Ran the Whole House
Chapter 24
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Silas Probin went home to Marrow with his post-horses unrepaid; his trustee's account would not, in the end, bear an honest man's looking at. When Juliet turned five-and-twenty, three springs after she first walked up the Lark Court drive, £4,000 came into her own hands at last, clear and free: she gave the whole of it into the estate for the tenants' cottages. It was hers to give; a thing you give freely is the one kind of wealth no one can ever take.They were married quietly at Lark Court Church, where Cecily lay, in the second week of that high summer. The Dowager Duchess came on her grandson's arm and wept exactly once; she pronounced it the outside limit of what any sensible woman should allow herself. She lived two years more to see the house full again; she died in her chair in the south parlor on a bright autumn morning, her spine straight to the last.That was the one grief the summer could not mend. It is the way of houses: the dead do not come back because the living have learned to be happy. But the gray mare grazed sound and easy in the near paddock; Cecily's stillroom labels were kept in a drawer in the young duchess's own hand; her ball was given every summer. She was not, in the ways that could be managed, forgotten.On a warm evening at the end of that first summer, the Duke of Northwell came looking for his wife. He found her where he had half known he would: in the library, in the chair by the fire. The great honest account book lay open on her knee; a single candle burned. She was not reading it; she was only sitting with it, the way a person sits with something that has come right at last."You have run the whole house into good order," he said from the doorway. "There is nothing left to save. What will you do with yourself now, Duchess?"Juliet looked up at him across the low fire—level and gray-clear and unafraid. It was the way she had looked at him from the wet gravel on the first hour of the first day, when he had told his butler she would not last a month."I shall find something," she said. "I always do. I cannot bear waste, you know. It is my besetting sin." The almost smile. "Come and sit down. You were drowning in the doorway again."He came and sat down. The candle burned. The house breathed around them: honey-colored, honest, and full—a house that had been holding its breath for a very long time and had finally, that summer, been allowed to let it go.She had come to Lark Court to disappear. She had, in the end, been the most thoroughly seen woman in the county. And she had found, to her own great surprise, a thing she had never guessed: being seen by the right person was not the danger she had spent her whole life fearing; it was the only safety worth the name.