She came in a chair and she was carried into the church by two grooms and out of it by her brother and she wore blue and she looked at Tabitha in the porch and said, Well, it took him 11 months and I very nearly did not have the patience. And Tabitha laughed and knelt down in her wedding gown on the flagstones and put her arms around her. Cecily lived until the spring. She lived to see Silverwood’s first foal, a gray filly born at two in the morning in a snowstorm with Tabitha and Ambrose both in the box and the Duke of Grantmere in his shirt sleeves holding a lantern and she named it Christmas for no reason she would ever give. And she died in April in the long gallery with the windows open and her brother holding her hand and her sister-in-law reading aloud to her from a stud book because it was what she had asked for.
Ambrose grieved for a year. Tabitha did not try to shorten it by an hour and did not once leave him alone in it, and he learned that those two things are the same thing. The deed was signed on the Thursday before the wedding, on four sheets of parchment, exactly as he had promised. Renfield House and its 1,100 acres remained the sole and separate property of Tabitha Ren to her use absolutely beyond the reach of her husband and his heirs forever. She signed it in her small clear hand and then being a practical woman immediately put the deed in the estate room safe and went out to look at a colt. She kept the name over the gate.
She kept the ledgers and within 3 years the Duke of Grantmere's home farm was the best-run acreage in two counties because the Duchess of Grantmere got up at six and went round the drains with her own eyes and would tell any man to his face exactly how much he was being cheated by the bushel and the great families who had said governess in that particular tone came in time to say, You must ask the Duchess, in quite another one, which she found a good deal more satisfying than being forgiven. He never entirely forgave himself for the hall. She would not let him. It became the great joke of their marriage. He would come in wet from the yard and hold out his coat to her without thinking, and she would take it with a grave little Yes, sir, and hang it on the settle, and he would put his face in his hands.
You will never let me forget it, he said once. Never, said Tabitha, and kissed him. It is the best thing that ever happened to either of us, Ambrose. You walked into my house and you did not see me at all. And then you stayed until you did.
There is not one man in a hundred who stays. He stood in the paneled hall of Renfield House with his wife's hands in his and the fire of applewood burning at the end of it and the ugly china dog on the mantel and the great blue and white bowl of late roses on the table by the stairs and the clock ticking overhead as though it had all the time in the world. I was in a foul humor, he said. I was cold and I was frightened for Cecily, and I had been walking in the rain for a mile and a half. You were, Tabitha agreed.
And I looked at the best woman in England, said Ambrose Vane, and I saw a girl to take my coat. You did. She reached up and straightened his collar the way she did every morning of their lives. And then you looked again. That is the whole of it, my love.
Anybody may be blind once. It is what a man does the second time he opens his eyes.