"No."
"Why not?"
"Because I have nothing to say it with," he said. "Every other man in England who says it has a house to say it in. I have a yard, a horse who will not last another winter, and 411 books that you saved, and I did not."
"231," said Verity.
"You will finish the rest," he said, "if you will come." And then he said it because he had been a soldier and knew when a thing had to be gone at. "I have been in love with you since the 20th of March. You stood in my stable door and told me no in front of three men. I have had 7 months of it and I have not slept much."
Verity took a long breath. "Then here are mine," she said. "My terms."
"Say them."
"I will not stop working. Not to be a duchess, not for the county, not for anybody. The library takes two years, and I shall want a press at Old T and a room with a north light, and there will be a ticket in the back of every book I finish with my own name on it, the way my father's is in 40 books in this town. Verity Thornburn, binder. Not the Duchess. The binder."
"Done," he said.
"And Kit Gower is to go to the grammar school at Winderby, and it is to come out of the estate and be written down in the book where anybody may see it."
"Done."
"And you will teach me to ride because I have fed horses for a year, and I have never sat on one, and I will not be the only woman in that house who cannot."
Something moved at the corner of his mouth. This time it went the whole way and it took 10 years off him. "That one will cost you," he said. "You will be very sore."
"I have been sore before." She let go of the bench. "Dominic."
She had never said it. She had not said it in her own head. It came out into that small room and sat there and the whole of the last 7 months turned over and settled the other way up.
"Yes," he said.
"Yes," said Verity.
They were married on the 12th of October in the church at Nether Oldtown by license with 11 people in the church and the whole village outside the door.
Almeida died in the February following in the night in his own box of being 23 years old. They buried him at the top of the lime road under the thorn tree. It took four men a day and a half in frozen ground, and there was a good deal of talk in Winderby about the expense of it. The Duke paid the men himself and did not explain.
The quarries came in at £840 the first year and rather more the second. Matthew Thornburn was articled in the spring of 1819. He is, at the time of writing, setting out the line of a branch canal in Staffordshire. He has never once thanked anybody for anything, which his sister says is the surest sign he is happy.
Miss Brindle married two years later a widowed banker in Liverpool of 44, a plain, sensible man who wrote to her every day he was away from home. Lady Perpetua, who lived to be 85, always said it was the best arranged marriage she ever heard of, and she said it without any irony at all.
The library at Oldtown was finished in the November of 1820, 411 volumes. In the back of the last of them, and of everyone before it, there is a small printed ticket, an inch by two: Bound at Old T by V Thornburn.
And there is a column in the morning post for the 16th of October, 1818. It says that a marriage has taken place at Nether Old Town between his grace the Duke of Glenn Moore and Verity only daughter of the late Isaac Thornburn of Winderby bookbinder.
Two lines of print. Two lines of print for a house and a name and the rest of two people's lives. Somewhere in Winderby it went round a parcel and the rain came down on it and a tradesman used it for what it was worth.
Meanwhile, 12 mi off at 5 in the morning, the lid of the corn bin in the loft at Oldtown still wants two hands to lift it. There are two people who lift it.