The Duke Wrote Ten Rules for the Wife He Would Choose — She Broke Every One Before the Hunt Ball
Chapter 7
Theme:
Font Size:
24px
When my grandmother told me to write down what I required in a wife, I wrote down his list exactly, because it was the only description of a duchess I had ever been given. I wrote it so that no woman with any sense would have me. I wrote it so that any woman who could keep it would be warned.Tomorrow is the hunt ball. My grandmother expects me to open it with the woman I mean to marry. I am asking you to open it with me. You may refuse. You may walk out of this room and take the York coach on Saturday. Your 40 guineas are yours, whatever you answer. Nothing I have given you is withdrawn."The library was very quiet. Somewhere below them, a woman laughed at the card table—a thin, high laugh with nothing in it.Rosamund looked at the brown paper.Kept all. She thought of a woman who had ridden since she was five, folding that list into a saddle she would never use. She had written those two words at the bottom so that someone, someday, would know what it had cost.The tenth rule was that she should not be seen to weep. She did not decide to break it: it broke—one tear and then another, running down her face in the candlelight of a duke's library in front of the Duke. She did not wipe them away. She had not cried in front of anyone for eight years, and she found she had forgotten how to be ashamed of it.The Duke did not look away. He did not offer a handkerchief, or a word, or a hand; he simply stood there and let her do it, as if it were a thing she had every right to."I will tell you at the ball," said Rosamund when she could speak. "That is your answer. That is when you will have it, Your Grace."She folded the brown paper and gave it back to him. Then she went upstairs to a room with a fire in it.He stood in the library after she had gone, with his mother's list in one hand. He had said it—all of it—aloud, to another person for the first time in one-and-thirty years. His hands were not quite steady, and he looked at them with something like surprise. He had expected to feel exposed; he had expected the old instinct to close over him like water, the one that told him that anything shown could be used. Instead, there was only a kind of terrible lightness, as though he had set down a weight so long carried that his arms did not yet know it was gone.She had not said yes. She had not said no. She had wept, and she had not been ashamed, and she had looked at him through it as if he were a man and not a title.He went down to the stables in the dark without a lantern. Abbott put his head over the half-door and lipped at his collar."Tomorrow," the Duke told the horse. He found he could not say anything else.