"Stay Out of This, You're Only the Governess," His Fiancée Snapped — The Duke Stood in the Doorway
Chapter 10
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"I have one more duty to perform, Miss Fenwick," he said at last. "It is the first I have ever looked forward to."She did not pretend to misunderstand him. She stopped on the path and said with great steadiness, "Your Grace, I have no family, no fortune, and no name that anyone in that dining room had ever heard before March.""You have the one thing this house lacked for six years," said the Duke. "My children say you are theirs. I should like very much to be allowed to say the same.""They say it because they are five.""They say it because it is true." He took her hand, which he had never done. "Lydia, I am not asking you to be the Duchess of Merivale, though you will be. I am asking you to stay for good with all of us."She had kept her countenance before a raised hand and before 30 people. She lost it now, and he saw it go, and it was the loveliest thing he had ever watched."Then I will stay," she said. "Rupert."It was the first time she had said his name, and he kissed her under the hawthorn while the twins shouted somewhere ahead and the dog barked at nothing. When they came back along the path, Thomas looked from one face to the other and said with enormous satisfaction:"I told you. Ours."They were married in the chapel at Merivale in September of 1816, with the twins scattering the last of the summer's flowers and the old nurse weeping into a handkerchief the size of a tablecloth. The Earl across the river did not come—nobody expected him to—and the quarrel over the millrace was ended that winter in the dull way such things are usually ended by lawyers. Lady Arabella was married two years later to a baronet in the far north who was said to have no nursery and no wish for one, and she was never again invited to Merivale nor to any house where its friends dined. Her mother wrote once kindly to the new Duchess, and the Duchess answered her kindly, and there the matter rested.Five years on, in the spring of 1821, the twins were nearly 11. Thomas had a tutor and a pony and a settled opinion that he would be a physician as well as a duke, which his father had not yet found the heart to contradict. Charlotte had a small brother of three who followed her everywhere, and the nursery held a new cradle, and in it a daughter with the Fenwick chestnut hair.On the first mild morning in March, the Duchess of Merivale went down to the chapel wall with her children and came back across the marble floor of the great hall in muddy boots, with her arms full of daffodils and water running down the front of her gown.Her husband stood in the doorway of the morning room and watched her come."I am afraid I saw everything," he said."Then you had better come in," said the Duchess. "They're for you."