The Duke Wrote Ten Rules for the Wife He Would Choose — She Broke Every One Before the Hunt Ball
Chapter 6
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"Six," he said to the horse. "She has broken six of them, and the house is still standing."He took the list from his breast pocket in his own hand and folded it again without reading it.On the sixth day, Rosamund wrote to Mr. Aldridge, solicitor of Stonegate in York. He was the second trustee of the £60 a year her father had left her; her aunt was the first. In eight years, she had never been shown an account of the trust; asking had seemed like a debt she could not afford. Now there were 20 guineas in her trunk.The ninth rule was that she should keep no correspondence her husband had not read. She had no husband; she thought the rule applied all the same.The Duke was in the hall when she brought it down for the post. He held out his hand for it; she thought he meant to read the direction. He turned it face down, laid it in the bag on top of his own letters, and closed the flap."Nobody reads my post bag," he said.On the seventh day, she found the other list. The groom had the old green sidesaddle on its peg to oil it."There's a pocket in the flap, miss. I never knew it was there."He handed her a paper folded small and soft, the way paper goes when it has been carried for years. The ink had gone brown:She shall not hunt.She shall not speak of money.She shall not contradict a gentleman.All ten, word for word, in the same order, in a man's hand 30 years older than the one Miss Wexford had read from. At the bottom, in a small slanting hand, a woman had written two words:Kept all.Rosamund thought of the drawing room on the first afternoon, the Duke at the window with his back to the room. She had thought it was contempt, but they had never been his rules: he had copied them word for word from a list his own mother had kept in her saddle for 30 years. He had not invented them; he had inherited them, and he was proud of them.That was what she believed, walking back to the house in the dusk. She was wrong.He found her in the library at 9:00 that evening while the house was at cards. The brown paper lay open on the table in front of her."The groom found this in your mother's saddle," she said. "I thought you should have it back."He looked at it as a man looks at a letter he has dreaded for years."You copied them," she said. "Every word. Your father wrote them and your mother kept them, and wrote it at the bottom as if it were a thing to be proud of.""She was not proud of it," said the Duke. He put both hands flat on the table, either side of the paper, and looked at it rather than at her. "My father wrote those rules the week he married my mother," he said. "She kept every one of them for one-and-twenty years. She did not hunt, though she had ridden since she was five. She did not laugh, and I did not once hear her laugh in my life. She did not contradict him—not at table, not anywhere. He trained me the same way, rule by rule, until I could stand in a full room and show nothing.