The Duke Banished His Bride on Their Wedding Night — Years Later He Crossed England to Win Her Back

The carriage will be at the door at 6, said the Duke of Corval to his wife of 9 hours. You will not come back to this house. She was standing by the fire in her wedding gown with her hair half down because the maid had been dismissed, and there had been no one to finish taking out the pins, and she turned round very slowly.

Julian, she said, you will go to Ravensmere. It is a house of my mother’s in Cumberland, 400 mi from here, and it is yours. the deeds are drawn. There is a housekeeper, a man for the horses, and 1,100 a year, which you may spend as you please and need not account for. He heard his own voice come out of him, even unreasonable, like a man reading a lease.

You will be the Duchess of Corval. Nothing is taken from you. You will simply not be here. Else Beth did not move at all. What have I done? Nothing. Whatever. Then you have done nothing, said Julian. And you will do nothing. And that is the arrangement. Your father wished this marriage. My father promised it to him on his deathbed and I have kept the promise and the thing is done and the lawyers are satisfied.

He turned to the window so as not to look at her. But I do not want a wife. I never wanted one. I told your father so and he did not believe me. And I have discovered that a man may be honorable and still be a liar. Because I stood in that church this morning and said words I did not mean in front of 400 people.

And now I am going to be honest with you, madam once, for the only time. Do not call me madam. I know that you fancy yourself in love with me, said the Duke of Corval. The fire snapped. He had not planned to say it. Afterward, for years afterward, he would go back to that room and stand in it and search for the moment at which he could have stopped, and he never found one, because the truth was that he had wanted to say it.

“There was something in him in that hour that had wanted to put its hand flat on the one soft place he could find and press.” “You have fancied it since you were 17,” he said. Since the summer you came to Corv with your father, and I spoke kindly to you in the orandry because you were crying, and you have carried that one hour about with you for 6 years like a keepsake.

I have watched you carry it. You looked at me across the aisle this morning as though the whole of your life were beginning. He made himself turn round. Cure yourself of it, else Beth. It will not be returned. Not this year, not in 10 years, not ever. and I would rather be brutal with you tonight than let you spend 40 years waiting at the top of my stairs for a man who is not coming up them.” She stood there.

She was 23 years old. Her father had been dead 8 months. She had no mother, no brother, no fortune, and no living soul in the world except the man standing in front of her in his wedding clothes. And Julian Ferah’s sixth Duke of Coral looked at a white face and told himself with the tremendous cold clarity of a man doing a wicked thing for a reason he has polished that he was being kind.

You will hate me, he said, and that will be a mercy. It is the only thing I have to give you. Elbeth Caro, Elth Farah’s Duchess of Corval, 9 hours married, put up her hand and quite steadily took the last pins out of her hair. Very well, she said. Elspth. No, her voice did not shake. That was the thing he would remember.

In all the years afterward, what he could never get out of his head was that her voice had not shaken. You have said what you wished to say. You have been very clear, and I am not stupid, and I will not make you say any of it twice.” She laid the pins on the mantel, one by one, in a little row. “I will be ready at 6.

There is no need to leave before. There is every need,” said his wife. You have told me you do not want me in this house. I have never yet stayed where I was not wanted, and I do not propose to begin on the first morning of my marriage.” She looked at him then, and her gray eyes were dry, and there was something in them that he did not recognize, and would not be able to name for 5 years. Goodbye, Julian.

You will want for nothing. No, said Elbeth. I shall not. And she went out and shut the door softly. And he stood alone in the great bed chamber of Corval, with the fire burning and 11 candles lit and a row of hairpins on the mantel, and told himself that he had done the only decent thing available to him. The carriage went at 6.

He watched it from the library window, standing well back, where he could not be seen. It went down the avenue in the gray light, with the frost on the lime trees, and the rooks going up, and it took the turn at the lodge, and it was gone. He did not go up to his room. He sat down at his desk and wrote to his steward about the drainage in the west meadow and his hand was perfectly steady and he wrote three pages.

He had been 11 years old when he learned what a marriage was. His mother had married his father for Corvel and said so not to Julian, to her sister in the yellow drawing room. On an afternoon in June, when the door was open and a boy was sitting on the stairs outside with a book, he remembered the exact words. He remembered them better than he remembered her face which had faded, whereas the words had not faded at all in 29 years.

He is a dull, decent, doting creature, and I would not cross the road for him, and he has given me the finest house in the west of England, and if I must be bored, I had rather be bored in a palace. and his father, who was dull and decent and did do, and who had adored that woman with a helpless, humiliating, lifelong tenderness that the whole county had laughed at, had died at 54 with her miniature in his hand, having spent 30 years knowing exactly what she thought of him and loving her.

Anyway, Julian had watched it. Every year of his boyhood, he had watched a great man be made small by loving a woman who did not love him, and he had made himself two promises. on the night of his father’s funeral at 19, standing in the crypt at Corvale with a candle in his hand, that he would never be that man, and that if he ever found himself loved by a woman, he would kill the thing at once quickly, before it could take root for her sake, he told himself, and for his, because he had seen what came of letting it grow.

He had kept both promises on the 7th of November in the great bed chamber in his wedding clothes. It had taken him 9 minutes. The first year was easy. He told himself so, and he arranged his life to prove it. He went to London for the session and to New Market in the spring. He sat on three committees. He improved the drainage in the West Meadow, and then the whole of the West farm, and then the entire southern half of the estate, and the Duke of Corval acquired, in that year a reputation as the most industrious landlord in the

county, and the coldest man in it. His steward sent quarterly reports from Ravensmere. Julian read them standing up in about 11 seconds and put them in a drawer. The Duchess is in good health. The house is in good order. There has been no application for any further sum. The second year was easy too in a different way.

He grew used to the fact that he was a married man whom nobody had ever seen with his wife. The county talked and then the county stopped talking. By the end of that year, he found that people had settled on a story that the Duchess of Corvale was an invalid or a recluse or a little mad, and that it suited everybody, including him, and that he could not correct it without telling the truth.

In the third year, he began without admitting it to read the reports twice. The Duchess is in good health. The Duchess has taken the home farm into her own hands, the tenant having died. The Duchess has purchased four fell ponies. there has been no application for any further sum. In the fourth year, he noticed something that he had been not noticing for a long time.

He got out the drawer and he laid all 14 quarterly reports on the desk in front of him in order and he went through them and it was true there has been no application for any further sum. 1,100 a year settled on her hers absolutely and in four years she had drawn according to his own bankers precisely nothing not one shilling the money had sat in the account at couchs and grown quietly like something in a locked cupboard and his wife had lived in a bare house in Cumberland on the rents of 160 acres of poor upland pasture and had not asked

him for a penny Julian sat at his desk for a long time then he did a thing he had not done in 4 years he wrote to her. He wrote a short, correct, cold letter in which he observed that the settled income remained undrawn and that this was doubtless an oversight and that he had instructed the bank to remit it to her quarterly without application.

She wrote back within the fortnight, “Your grace, I am obliged to you, but there is no oversight. Ravensmere pays for itself. I am able to live very well upon what I earn from it, and have no occasion for more. Please instruct the bank to leave the money where it is. It is not mine and I do not wish it.

E Ferris, it is not mine and she did not wish it. Those were her words near enough and he could not get out from under them. He read that letter perhaps 40 times over the following month. He read it in the morning at his desk and at night by the fire. He read it in the carriage going up to London. And every time he read it, the same thing happened in his chest.

And it was not anger, though for a long while he did his best to call it that. She had not written a word of reproach. She had not asked him for anything. She had not in four years sent one letter, made one appeal, come one mile south, or given the world one single thing to gossip about. And she was living on 160 acres of poor grass in the north of England and rearing pawnies, and she did not want his money.

The Duke of Corval had spent four years telling himself that he had been cruel in order to be kind. And somewhere in the fourth year, sitting alone in the largest house in the west of England, with his wife’s handwriting in his hand, he began very slowly the way a hard frost begins to come out of the ground to understand that he had simply been cruel.

In the autumn of the fifth year, a letter came to Corvale from the Vakar of Ravensdale. It was addressed to the Duke and it was written in the careful copper plate of a poor clergman writing above his station and it thanked his grace with much warmth and at some length for the new school in the Dale.

Julian rid it twice and then rang for his steward Tras. Have I built a school in Cumberland? Tras, who was 60 and had served the family for 40 years and had learned in five to say as little as possible on this one subject, looked at his boots. Not to my knowledge. Your grace, then who has? There was a pause. Her grace, I believe, said Tras, has been at it these two years.

She sold the ponies at Appli last September and the September before, and I understand the price of them went into the roof, and the master stippened. He cleared his throat. The school master is a young man from Kendall. The children are 41. Her grace teaches the girls on Thursdays. The clock ticked on the chimney piece.

You have seen it, said Julian. I have your grace. In June, when I went up about the boundary, you did not tell me. Know your grace. Tras lifted his head, and there was something in the old man’s face that Julian had never seen there in 30 years, and did not care for. Your grace has never once asked me what it is like there in 5 years.

I have gone up every June and come back every June and given you the report and your grace reads it standing up and puts it in the drawer and I have never yet been asked a question about it. So I have not offered, Julian said very quietly. Ask what you like. I don’t want to ask anything.

The steward’s voice was not respectful now. It was old and tired and had known him since he was in short coats. But I’ll tell you something since you’ve opened the door and then I’ll take my dismissal if you want it. She came out to me in the yard in June with her sleeves rolled and her arms wet to the elbow because a mare was foing and there was no one else to do it.

There was a lame old man holding the lantern and a girl of 14 from the village and that was the whole of the household. And she asked after the corval tenants, every one of them by name. Old Mrs. Bidwell’s leg, whether the Heartley boy had got his place at the mill, whether the Ford cottages had been rehatched, because she’d walked past them once 5 years ago on the morning of her wedding, and she remembered that the thatch was bad. Tras’s jaw worked.

She’s never set foot on the place since, and she keeps them all in her head like a woman keeps her family. Get out, said Julian. Your grace. Get out, Tras. Not dismissed. Only get out. He sat in the library until the fire died. The attorney’s letter came in January. It was from a firm in Kendall, and it was addressed to his grace’s man of business, and it was so scrupulously polite that it took Julian three readings to understand that he had been shot through the heart.

Her grace, the Duchess of Corval, desired to purchase the house and lands of Ravens from his grace, out and out, at a valuation to be fixed by any surveyor his grace should name. Her grace was in a position to pay the sum in full. Her grace wished it to be understood that she made no claim of any kind upon his grace’s estate, past, present, or future, and that upon completion of the purchase she would relinquish all right to the settled income of £1,100 peranom, which she had never drawn and did not desire.

Her grace was aware that the law did not permit her to renounce her rank, and regretted it. Her grace begged that the matter might be concluded without correspondence between the principles, without correspondence between the principles. She did not want to write to him. She wanted the thing done through lawyers, so that she should never again in her life have to see his handwriting.

Julian sat with the letter in front of him for a long time. Then he turned it over and found on the back a note in his own man of business’s hand, added as a mere matter of information in a small dry legal script. I am informed there is an expectation in the district that her grace may in time seek a suit of nullity, the marriage being, as I understand, unconsummated. A Mr.

Adam Sherwin of Kendall, a woolen merchant of substance and excellent character, has been much at Ravensmere these 18 months. The room went very quiet. He got up. He walked to the window and stood there looking out at the park where the frost lay under the lime trees, and he waited for the rage. It did not come.

What came instead, and it took him unawares, and he had to put out a hand to the shutter to steady himself, was a perfectly clear picture of a woman he had seen once, at 17, crying in an ory, and of that same woman, 28 now, with her sleeves rolled and her arms wet to the elbow, laughing at something a decent man from Kendall, had said to her in a stable yard, she would be happy.

That was the thing. Adam Sherwin, wool and merchant of substance and excellent character, would be good to her, would take her to Kendall and give her a warm house and children and a name that was not attached to any story, and she would be happy, and she would deserve it, and it was very likely the best thing that could possibly happen to her.

And Julian Ferris stood at the window of the library at Corval and heard himself make a sound he had never made in his life. He rang the bell. Tras, what is the road to Cumberland in February? Trask coming in with the coal stopped dead. Bad your grace. Very bad above Lancaster. There’s snow on the fells this fortnight past and the coach was 3 days at Shap in the new year.

How long by post chase? 6 days if you’re lucky. Eight. And on horseback. The old man set down the scuttle very slowly. Your grace cannot mean to ride to Cumberland in February. How long, Task? 9 days, said the steward. 10. If the horse holds and the weather doesn’t kill you, he straightened. It’s 420 mi. Have Orond saddled at first light, said the Duke of Corville, and send my things after me by the coach and Tras.

He was already at the door, the Ford cottages. Get the Thatchers up there this week, all 11. I want it done before I come back. He rode out of Corval at half 6 on the morning of the 4th of February in the dark alone. He was 37 years old and had not ridden more than 20 m at a stretch in 10 years.

And by the third day he could not close his right hand, and by the fifth he was sleeping 4 hours a night in ins that smelled of wet wool and toll, and eating standing up in yards while they changed the horse. He went up through the middle of England. He went through the black manufacturing towns with their forests of chimneys and their red glare in the sky.

He went over the moors in a sleet that came at him level like grapeshot. He crossed the sands and the passes and the long dead miles where nothing lived but curus. And the country got harder and older and poorer with every day. and he thought about a carriage going north over these same roads in November, 5 years ago, with a girl of 23 inside in her traveling clothes, alone, 9 hours married, going 400 m to a house she had never seen because the man she had loved since she was 17 had told her that he did not want her in his. He had put her

in that carriage. Nobody had made him. There had been no villain, no plot, no wicked uncle, no ruinous secret. There had been a boy of 11 on a staircase and a man of 32 with a theory and a cold clear head and 9 minutes. On the eighth day the horse went lame at Kendall and he bought another a heavy boned gray that knew the fells better than he did.

On the ninth day it began to snow. He came into the dale at 4 in the afternoon with the light already going and Ravens was ahead of it. a long low gray house of stone under a slate roof with a buyer attached and a walled fold and one crooked sycamore and a light in the kitchen window. It was the smallest house he had ever owned.

It was smaller than the stable block at Corval. There were sheep in the fold and a lamp lit in the buyer. Smoke went up straight from the chimney into the falling snow. Somewhere behind the house, a dog barked twice and stopped, and a woman’s voice said something to it, and the dog was quiet. Julian Ferris got down off the gray horse in the yard of the house where he had exiled his wife, and stood there in the snow in a great coat he had been wearing for 9 days.

Unshaven, filthy, with his hands so cold he could not feel the res, and found that he did not know what he was going to say. The kitchen door opened. She came out with a lantern in a plain woolen gown and a shawl and a pair of patterns holding the light up against the dusk. A woman he would not have recognized at 50 yards, brown and weathered and stronger through the shoulders, her hair pinned up anyhow, a smudge of meal on her cheek.

She stopped three steps from him and lifted the lantern higher and looked at him for a long moment. And the Duchess of Corval said in a voice as level and pleasant as a woman speaks to a stranger. Yes, what is it you want, Elth? He said, “I know who you are. She did not lower the lantern. I asked what you want.

The snow came down between them to speak to you. You had a wedding night to speak to me,” said his wife, “and you were extremely clear, and I have not needed anything explained since.” She turned her head. There’s an inn at Ravensdale, 4 mi down. Turn left at the Beck. They’ll take the horse else. You will not come into this house, said the Duchess of Corval, at 6:00 in the evening in the dark, uninvited, and be alone with me in it.

I have lived here 5 years, and I have a name in this dale, and it is a good one, and it is the only thing I have ever earned, and I am not going to have it talked about for you.” Her voice was perfectly steady. Good night, your grace. and she went in and shut the door. He rode the four miles to Ravensdale in the dark with the snow in his face.

And the inkeeper’s wife, who did not know him from Adam, gave him a room over the kitchen with a truckle bed and a jug of hot water. And Julian Ferris, sixth Duke of Corval, lay in it, and shook with cold and exhaustion and something else, and did not sleep at all. He was back at Ravensmeir at 8:00 in the morning. She was in the fold with the sheep.

She looked up and looked at him and went on with what she was doing. He got down and tied the gray to the gate and took off his great coat and laid it over the wall. “Your wall is down,” he said at the top corner. “I saw it from the road.” Elth straightened with her hand in the small of her back. “It’s been down since the Martima gale,” she said.

“And the man who could have built it up is 81 and has the rheumatism. and the man who could have paid for it to be built up is standing in my yard. Then I will build it up, she laughed. It was a short, hard sound without any warmth in it at all. You, she said. A dry stone wall. Show me how. No.

Then I shall do it badly, said Julian. And it will fall down, and I shall do it again. He worked on that wall for 9 days. It was the hardest labor he had ever undertaken in his life. And he did it in a February on the fells with the wind coming off the tops like a knife. And he did it wrong twice. The whole face of it came down in a slither, and he had to begin again from the foundation.

And the second time he sat down in the snow among his own ruin, and put his head in his hands. The old man with the riumatism came up on the fourth day and watched him for 20 minutes in total silence and then said, “Those not sorting thy stone, bigot bottom, lad.” Long ones threw and went away again. Julian sorted his stone.

The Dale watched him. He knew that. He was aware in a distant way that a duke building a drystone wall in a Cumberland field in February was the most extraordinary thing that had happened in that valley in a hundred years and that they had all come. The school master, the smith, the girls from the school, half the shepherds off the tops and stood on the road and looked and gone away and told everybody. He did not care.

He had stopped caring somewhere between Lancaster and Kendall. She brought him a can of tea on the sixth day and set it on the wall and walked away without a word. And he drank it standing in the wind with his hands cracked and bleeding, and it was the best thing he had ever tasted in his life.

On the ninth day he finished the wall and it stood. And he went down to the house and knocked at the kitchen door. It is done, he said. It is the ugliest wall in England, and Ridding says it will stand a h 100red years, and I did not pay a man to build it. Elizabeth looked past him up the field at the wall. Then she stood back from the door. “Come in,” she said.

“You are letting the heat out.” He sat in her kitchen. There was a settle by the fire and a scrubbed table and a dresser with six plates and a dog under the table who put its chin on his boot and looked up at him with enormous confidence, and the whole room was about the size of the linen closet at Corval, and it was warm.

El Beth put bread and cheese and a mug of ale in front of him and sat down across the table with her hands folded. Say it, she said. You have ridden 400 miles and built me a wall. Say what you came to say and be done. Julian pushed the plate away. I was wrong, he said. Yes. There was no reason.

That is what I have come to tell you. Because I think you may have spent 5 years hunting for one, and I do not want you to spend another day at it. There was no fault in you. There was no secret. There was nothing wrong with you at all. His voice was not working properly. My mother married my father for the house.

I heard her say so when I was 11, and I never forgot it. And I watched my father love her for 30 years and be made small by it. And I swore over his coffin that no woman would ever do that to me. And then I married a girl who looked at me across a church as though her whole life were beginning. And I was frightened. El Beth. That is all.

That is the whole of it. I was so frightened of being my father that I did to you in 9 minutes what my mother did to him in 30 years and I told myself it was mercy. The fire ticked. The dog sighed. I know, said Elbeth. He looked up. You knew? I worked it out in about the second year. She said there was not a great deal else to do.

She turned the mug a little on the table. It is not a very clever puzzle, Julian. A man does not say a thing like that to a woman because he is cold. He says it because he is terrified. I understood you a long time ago. She raised her eyes and they were steady and terrible. That is not the same as forgiving you. No. Do you know what the first year was like? No, said Julian.

Tell me. And she did. She told him about the first winter in that house with no fires laid in the room she did not use and the housekeeper who pied her which was worse than anything and about the letter she wrote to him in the January 11 pages everything all of it and carried in her pocket for a month and finally burned unscent in that great because if she had sent it and he had not answered she thought she might have walked into the tarn.

She told him about the second year when the rage came and she went out on the fell in a gale and screamed at the scar until she had no voice and came home and found she was hungry and ate and understood that she was going to live. She told him about the day the tenant of the home farm died and she went down to the widow and found there was nobody to bring the hay in and she brought it in herself and slept 11 hours and woke up happy and did not know why.

And then it stopped. She said, “What did the waiting?” She said it quite simply. One morning in the fourth year, I was crossing the yard with a bucket in each hand and I realized that I had not thought of you in 8 days. Eight whole days, Julian. And I stood in the middle of that yard and I cried like a fool. And then I laughed and I have been all right since.

She looked around the little kitchen. This is my life. I made it out of nothing in a house you gave me to get rid of me. And every single good thing in it is mine. The school is mine. The ponies are mine. The dog is mine. That dreadful wall you have built is now. God help me mine. Her chin came up.

And I am not going to give it away and go 400 m south to be a duchess in a house where I was told to my face that I was not wanted. I am not asking you to. She stopped. Julian took out the packet from inside his coat where it had ridden 400 m and put it on the scrubbed table and pushed it across. Raven smear, he said, the house, the land, the fold, the school, and the two farms up the dale that go with it.

Conveyed to you absolutely not sold. I will not take your money. And before you tell me that is pride, I know it is. It is the last piece of it I have got. And you may allow me one, it is yours. It cannot be taken back. It does not depend on your answering me or receiving me or ever speaking to me again. Elbeth did not touch the packet. There is a second paper, said Julian.

It instructs my attorneys to give you every assistance in any proceeding you may wish to bring and to oppose nothing and to pay for all of it. If you wish to be free of me, and there is a man in Kendall, I am told of excellent character. And if he is good to you, then I will. his voice went and he waited and got it back then I will drink his health madam and mean it and never come north again.

The snow ticked against the window. And if I burn both papers, said Beth at last. What then? Then I shall be at the inn at Ravensdale, said the Duke of Corval, for as long as it takes. For as long as what takes, he stood up. He was shaking and he let her see it. I do not want a duchess, he said. I have no use for one. I want the woman who is in this kitchen.

I want to be told about the ponies and the school and the heartly boy at the mill. I want to know what you thought about on the fell in the gale. I want to build the other three walls and I want to be shouted at when I build them badly. And I want for the rest of my life to be the man who is allowed to carry the second bucket.

His hands were flat on her table. I love you, Elth. I have loved you since about the third year and I have been a coward about it for two more and I know exactly what my word is worth because I gave it to you in a church and broke it before the candles were out. So I am not asking you to believe me. He straightened. I am asking you to let me stay and watch.

Elthas sat in her kitchen for a long long moment with her hands folded on the table. Then she got up and went to the window and stood looking out at the ugly wall on the hill with her back to him. The lamping starts in 3 weeks, she said. Julian did not dare speak. It is the worst month of the year, said his wife. It is cold and it is wet, and it goes on all night, and there is no glory in it whatsoever.

And I have done it alone for four years with one lame old man. She turned round. Her eyes were wet, and her chin was up, and she was he saw it at last, and knew it for what it was, and would have gone on his knees on the flags if he had thought he could get up again. She was allowing herself very cautiously to hope. If you are still here in 3 weeks, you may carry the second bucket.

That is all I am promising you. Do you understand me? That is all. Yes, said Julian. You will be at the inn at Ravensdale by dark every night, and this Dale will have nothing to say about me. Yes. And I may still send you away, said Elth in April. He was at Ravensdale by dark every night for 11 weeks. She did not send him away in April.

He was there through the lamping, all of it, 21 nights on the fell in the sleep with a lantern, and he lost two ews and saved nine. And on the last night of it, he sat down in the buyer at 4:00 in the morning with his back against the wall, filthy to the shoulder, and his wife sat down beside him on the straw, and neither of them said anything for a long time.

And then she put her head on his shoulder and went to sleep. He did not move for 2 hours. He hardly breathed. The lantern burned down, and the sky went gray over the fell, and a blackbird began somewhere in the sycamore. And the Duke of Corval sat in a Cumberland by with straw in his hair and a sleeping woman’s weight against his arm, and was for the first time in his life entirely happy. They kept Ravensme.

They spent every spring in it all their lives and their children learned to walk in that yard and were taught to sort stone by an old man with the rimatism who lived to be 91 and Corval in the south got the rest of the year and never quite forgave the north for it. The school in the Dale has 41 children in it still.

It is called the Duchess’s school and always was and there is not a soul in that valley who could tell you the name of the man who paid for the roof because he did not. And on the 7th of November every year for the rest of their marriage, Julian Ferris came to his wife wherever she was in the fold in the kitchen in the long gallery at Corvale with the whole county at dinner and took her hand and said the words he had not said in the church.

She never once let him off it. She never once wanted