The Duke Opened the Wrong Letter on His Wedding Day — It Was Never Meant for Him to Read

The red wax cracked under his thumb, and the Duke of Rushmere read the first line of a letter that was never meant for his eyes. My dear Ambrose, it is done, and she has not said a word in her own defense. Crispin, ninth Duke of Rushmere, stood at the writing desk in his dressing room with the low golden sun of an October morning falling across the cream laid paper, and did not for a moment understand what he held.

He was dressed for his wedding. His valet had gone down to fetch the carriage cloaks. The cravat at his throat was tied with a precision that had taken three attempts, and the signet ring on his hand was still cold from the case. In 1 hour he was to stand in the church at Rushmere Lodge and marry a woman he had never once addressed with kindness.

He had opened the packet because it bore his solicitor’s hand on the cover, and because a man of business who sends papers on a wedding morning generally has something in them worth a minute’s attention. The settlement drafts were there, folded and tied. And loose among them, sealed separately, wrongly, carelessly, a single sheet had slipped into the same cover, a private letter written in a small, quick, feminine hand and addressed to no one at all upon its outer fold.

He should have set it down. A gentleman sets it down. He read on. You will laugh when I tell you how neatly the trap shut. The note in Everard’s hand cost me two evenings practice and a very fine pen, but it fetched her out of the house at 11:00 at night as though I had rung a bell for her. The poor creature would walk into a fire if she believed her brother stood in it.

You had only to be at the Heart and Feather, and the Widow Prossit had only to look through a doorway at the right moment, and by Sunday the whole county had her ruined, and by Michaelmas the Duke had her colored. Do not pity her. She has kept her mouth shut and will keep it shut because I hold the little forged bill her brother put his name to.

His true forgery, my dear, not one of mine. And she would rather be called a wanton by every soul in England than see that puppy hanged or transported. It is the most convenient conscience I ever met with. So, the settlement is signed Tuesday. Rushmere pays the trust into her name, and her name, by the guardianship deed our uncle so obligingly left me, answers to mine until she is five and twenty.

5,000 to you the week after, as agreed, and you will take yourself to Boulogne and stay there. Burn this.” Crispin did not move. The clock on the chimneypiece struck the quarter. Somewhere below a maid was singing, and a dog barked in the stable yard, and the world went on being an ordinary world, and the Duke of Rushmere stood in a shaft of morning light with his wedding gloves on the desk beside him, and felt the floor of his life tilt slowly and completely over.

He read it again. He read it a third time, and this time he read it the way he read a ledger that would not balance, with his jaw set and his finger moving line by line, hunting the error, praying for the error. There was no error. Lucosta Marchmont had not ruined herself. Lucosta Marchmont had been ruined, deliberately, by the cousin who had the keeping of her, for the sum of money that would come to her on her marriage.

And she had known it and said nothing, and let the county spit its verdict at her, and let him, God forgive him, let him say what he had said to her in her uncle’s drawing room six weeks ago. He remembered every word of it. That was the worst of it. He had a soldier’s memory for his own bad ground.

She had been standing by the window with her hands folded, in a gray gown that had been turned at the cuffs, and she had knocked away from him once. Sabina had done all the talking, Sabina in her lilac silk dabbing at dry eyes, saying how the old contract between their fathers must be honored now above all, now that poor Lucosta’s name was gone, saying how kind his grace was, how noble, how the family would never forget it.

And Crispin, who had been dragged from Rushmere by a lawyer’s letter and an obligation 20 years old, had listened to it with a cold, curling contempt and had said, at last, directly to the girl herself, “Understand me, madam. I will honor my father’s bond cuz I do not break my word, even when it was given for me by another man.

You shall have my name and my house and my protection, and you may spend what you like. You shall not have anything else of mine.” I do not intend to pretend in private to a regard I do not feel, and I will not be made a fool of twice. And Lucosta Marchmont had said, in a voice as level as a laid table, “That is a very fair bargain, your grace.

I shall not ask you for anything.” He had thought her brazen. He had thought, he had actually thought, standing in that room, “Here is a woman who has thrown herself away and means to be paid for it.” He had gone home and told his Aunt Honoria that the girl had not even the grace to blush, and Honoria had looked at him for a long moment over her tea and said, “Or she has not the strength left to.” He had not understood her.

He had poured himself a brandy and not understood her. She had not blushed because she was not ashamed. She had not defended herself because a boy’s neck was in the noose of it. She had not asked him for anything because she had already learned, at 22 years old, that asking got her nothing. The Duke of Rushmere set the letter down on the desk very carefully, as a man sets down something that may yet go off, and found that his hands were not quite steady. He had believed it.

That was the thing that would not be got round. Nobody had made him believe it. No one had forced the story down his throat. The county had handed it to him and he had taken it because it was easier to marry a woman he despised than to marry one he might have to look at properly, because a bond discharged in contempt costs a man nothing, and a bond discharged in tenderness costs him everything. He had wanted her guilty.

He had been glad of her guilt. It had let him keep his heart in his pocket like a watch he had no intention of winding. And all the while she had been walking through it with her chin up and her cuffs turned, protecting a brother who did not deserve it from a cousin who deserved nothing at all. “Your grace.

” His valet pulled her in the doorway with the cloaks over his arm. “The carriage is come round. Mr. Tolliver asks whether” Tolliver? Crispin turned. His voice, he heard with distant interest, was perfectly even. “Send him up.” “And Polter, is Griggs in the yard?” “He is, your grace.” “He is to saddle the gray and be ready to ride hard. Not to the church.

He will have his direction in 5 minutes.” Polter, who had been 40 years in that house and had never once asked a question, bowed and went. Tolliver came up two stairs at a time, a lean, anxious, entirely honest young man who had been the Duke’s secretary for 3 years, and who took one look at his master’s face and stopped dead on the threshold. “Read that,” said Crispin.

He watched the young man read it. He watched the color go out of Tolliver’s face and then come back into it all at once, hot and mottled, and he thought, “Good. Let there be one more man in England who knows.” “Your grace,” Tolliver said hoarsely, “this is this is is a felony.” “This is a conspiracy It is a conspiracy to sell a woman,” said Crispin, “and I am the purchaser.

” “Yes, I had gathered.” He took the letter back and folded it, and the crack of the paper was very loud in the quiet room. “Now attend to me, because we have 50 minutes and I want three things done in them, and I want them done exactly.” “Yes, your grace.” “First, this came in my solicitor’s packet. Enderby did not send it.

Enderby would not enclose a stranger’s letter in my settlement drafts if his life hung on it, and the hand is not his clerk’s either. It was put into that cover by someone in the Marchmont house who was doing three things at once and thought all covers alike. I want to know who carried the packet from Marchmont Hollow to Enderby’s chambers, and I want him found this morning, and I want him kept sober and civil and in a room until I send for him. Yes, your grace. Second.

There is a Mr. Ambrose Knightly somewhere within 20 miles, and unless I have wholly mistaken his sort, he is at the Heart and Feather at Fenno Cross with his boots on the fender, waiting for 5,000 lb. Griggs will take two grooms and my compliments. Mr. Knightly is not to be touched, not to be threatened, and not to be permitted to leave.

Tell him Crispin’s mouth moved, not quite a smile. Tell him the Duke of Rushmere wishes to increase his offer and will discuss it with him at noon. He will wait. His kind always waits if you dangle the purse a little higher. Tolliver was writing on his cuff. And the third, your grace? Third. Crispin looked down at the letter in his hand, at the small, quick, pretty hand, at the crumbs of red wax scattered on the blotter like something spilled.

There is a bill of exchange with Everard Marchmont’s name upon it, forged or otherwise, and Sabina Marchmont has it, and it is the only rope she holds. Send to Enderby. He is to come to the wedding breakfast with his clerk, with the guardianship deed our late Mr. Marchmont so obligingly left, with the trust papers, and with every letter that has passed between his chambers and Marchmont Hollow these three months.

And he is to bring Bow Street with him and leave them in the passage, not in the room. In the passage. Tolliver looked up. Your grace, forgive me, is there time? The ceremony is at 11:00. There is time, said Crispin, because I am going to be married at 11.” The young man blinked. “You You still mean to go through with it?” And the Duke of Rushmere, who had risen that morning to marry a woman he had convinced himself he could despise in comfort for the rest of his life, picked up his gloves from the desk and pulled

them on finger by finger, and found that his heart was beating like a drum before a charge. “Mr. Tolliver,” he said, “I have never in my life meant to go through with anything so much.” The church at Rushmere Ledge was a small gray Norman thing with a leaning porch and a yew older than the tower, and half the county had crammed itself into it to watch a duke marry a ruined woman.

Crispin knew what they had come for. They had come to see him do it with a face like a man swallowing physic. They had come to watch her walk up that aisle with the whole parish’s contempt down before her like a carpet, and to tell one another afterwards, over cold ham, that it was a great condescension in his grace, and that of course the creature had angled for it, and that Sabina Marchmont was a saint to have stood by such a cousin at all.

He came up the path with the sun on his shoulders and every head turning, and he heard the whisper run along the pews the way wind runs across barley. Sabina met him in the porch. She was got up beautifully, lilac again, and a bonnet trimmed with silver, and her gloved hands out to him as though she were welcoming him into her own house.

“Your grace, what a morning God has given us.” “I have been with her since 7:00. I have done all I could to make her fit to be looked at, but she would not have the pearls I offered, nor the lace. She will be plain, she says. She will have nothing that is not her own.” A little sigh, a little tilt of the head. “I fear she means as a reproach to us all, but we must be patient with her, must we not? After everything.

” The Duke of Rushmere looked at his bride’s cousin for For of three heartbeats. He could break her here, he thought, on this flagstone in front of them all. It was not a metaphor. He felt it in his shoulders, in the flat of his hands, that appetite for ruin, and he held it and looked at it and put it down because a man who strikes too early strikes only once, and he wanted this woman not merely struck but dismantled in daylight, before witnesses.

With the papers on the table, so he did the hardest thing he had ever done in a church porch. He bowed over Sabina Marchmont’s hand. “Miss Marchmont,” he said, “you have been everything to her that you could be. I have only lately understood how much.” And Sabina, who was clever but not so clever as she believed, glowed.

He went in. The organ was wheezing something out of tune. The pews were a garden of feathers and rustling silk, and every face in them was pointed at the door behind him waiting for the show. He took his place at the chancel step beside the Reverend Pardo, and his aunt Honoria in the front pew gave him one look.

She had a way of looking that went through a man like a needle through gauze, and he did not have time to answer it because the organ found its feet, and the doors opened, and Lucasta Marchmont came up the aisle on the arm of nobody at all. He had not known she would come alone. She had no father to bring her. He had known that. What he had not troubled to consider in all the weeks he had spent being noble at her was that no man in the county would give his arm to a woman with her name, and so she had simply come by herself the length of that aisle,

through that silence, at a steady and unhurried walk. Her gown was white muslin, well made and quite plain, without a flounce or a ribbon or a jewel anywhere upon it. Her hair was dressed simply, a few strands escaping at the temple. She wore no pearls. She wore no lace but a narrow band at the wrist that was worn thin and mended at one corner, and he understood, with a lurch under his ribs that it had been her mother’s.

She carried a small bunch of Michaelmas daisies that she had plainly picked herself out of a hedge. She did not look at the Poos. She did not flinch at the whisper. She came up the aisle of that church like a woman walking to the scaffold with her accounts settled and her conscience clean and her chin was up and her face was perfectly calm and Crispin standing where he had meant to stand as a cold and dutiful man discharging a debt felt something break open in his chest that he had spent 38 years keeping shut. She reached the step. She turned

to him. And for the first time since the beginning of the whole wretched business, she hesitated because he was looking at her. He watched her see it. He watched her take in his face and not know what to make of it and go carefully still the way a creature goes still when the rules of the world have changed and it does not yet know in which direction to run. “Your grace.” She said very low.

He said, “Miss Mart, I have been a fool.” Her lips parted. Behind them the Reverend Pardo cleared his throat and began and Crispin turned to the book and the ceremony ran on over them like water. He heard almost none of it. He heard his own voice make the responses steady, audible to the back of the church. He heard hers quiet but not one word of it faltering not even at the vow of obedience which she gave him with the plainness of a woman signing a treaty she does not expect to be honored on the other side. And when it came to the

ring, he found he could not do the thing he had planned. He had meant to put it on her hand and be done and let the county see it done coldly cuz that was the bargain and she had said she would ask him for nothing. Instead he took her hand and held it. Her fingers were cold. They were also he noticed roughened at the tips.

She had been mending her own clothes and worse than mending, those were the hands of a woman who had been doing work in that house that no gentlewoman ought to have been doing. Sabina had not merely ruined her. Sabina had been using her. He slid the ring on. It was his grandmother’s, a heavy old thing, and it hung loose on her thin finger, and he closed his own hand around it to keep it there.

With this ring, he said, and the words came out of him not as a formula, but as an oath sworn on a field, I thee wed. With my body I thee honor, and with all my worldly goods I thee endow. Lucasta Marchman looked up at him. He would remember that look until the day they laid him in the aisle he stood in. Not gratitude, she had none left to give anybody. Not hope, quite.

Only a kind of wary, exhausted astonishment, as though a door she had heard bolted years ago had made a small sound on the other side. Then it was over. Then the register, and the vestry, and the crowd pressing out into the churchyard, and Pardo beaming. And Sabina’s voice pitched carefully to carry.

So generous, so very generous of his grace. And Crispin, with his wife’s hand on his arm, walked her out into the low golden light under the yew and did not let go. The carriage was waiting. He handed her up and got in after her and shut the door, and the Rushmere grays took the hill, and for a mile neither of them said anything at all. Then Lucasta said, without turning her head from the window, you may say it now if you wish. There is nobody to hear.

Say what? Whatever it is you have been holding behind your teeth since the porch. Her voice was quite steady. You looked at me as though you had found something out. If you have found something out, your grace, I would rather have it from you than from the papers. Look at me. She turned. He had never seen her eyes properly, he realized.

Gray and rimmed red at the lids, and utterly without defense. And she had hidden that from a whole county for 11 weeks by the simple trick of never letting anyone stand close enough. Crispin drew the letter from his breast and laid it in her lap. He saw the exact instant she knew the hand. She did not cry out.

She went white to the mouth and put one finger on the top of the page and read it. And he watched his wife of 10 minutes read the whole architecture of her destruction in her cousin’s pretty script, and he thought that if he lived to be 90, he would never forgive himself for the six weeks he had spent believing the other story. At the end, she folded it once and held it in both hands in her lap like something that might still be taken from her.

“Where did did you get this?” she said. “It was misdirected into my solicitor’s packet this morning. I broke the seal an hour ago in my dressing room dressed as you see me.” He heard his own voice roughen and let it. “Madam Lou Costa, I have been to church and made you my wife, and I have not yet said the one thing I owe you, so I shall say it now, and I shall not dress it up.

I believed them. Not Sabina only, the whole filthy tale. I came into your uncle’s drawing room six weeks ago having already tried you and hanged you in my own mind, and I stood there and told you that you should have my name and nothing else of mine, and I was proud of myself for it. I thought I was being just.

” He looked at his hands. “I was being a coward. It is a great deal easier to marry a woman one despises.” The carriage swayed. Outside the hedgerows went by gold and rust. “Why did you not tell me?” he said. “One word. One word to me in that room, and I would have “You would have what?” It came out of her not angrily, but with a terrible tiredness, and then she caught herself and shut her eyes.

And when she opened them again, she said more quietly, “Forgive me. That was unjust. But you asked, so I shall answer. I did not tell you because you had already decided, your grace, and I have learned what it costs to argue with a man who has already decided. And because Sabina holds a bill with my brother’s name upon it, and Everard is 19 years old and a fool and mine.

And I will not buy my good name with his neck. I have counted the price. I counted it in June. I did not think the price would include being looked at every day for the rest of my life by a husband who thought me a She stopped. Say it, said Crispin. No, said the new Duchess of Rushmere. I have said enough true things this morning. He was silent a moment.

Then he leaned forward and took the letter gently out of her hands and put it back inside his coat. There are 200 people sitting down to breakfast in my hall, he said. Your cousin is among them, and she is at this moment being congratulated on her Christian forbearance. Mr. Ambrose Kirtley is under my groom’s eye at Fenno Cross and will be brought to me at noon.

My solicitor is on the road with the guardianship deed, the trust papers, and every letter that has passed between his chambers and Marchmont Hollow since July. Lucasta stared at him. I am going to take her apart, said Crispin, in front of all of them before the ices are served. And I am going to need to know one thing from you first, and must answer me truly because everything I do in the next hour hangs upon it. Ask, she whispered.

That bill, he said. Did your brother sign it? Yes, said Lucasta. God help him, he signed it. 400 pounds in our father’s name to a money lender in Kelbridge, and he cried like a boy of 10 when he told me. Her hands twisted once in her lap and then were still. So you see there is nothing to be done. If you pull her down, she will pull him down after her, and she will do it out of spite alone. She has told me so.

She said it over the breakfast cups in July buttering her toast. The carriage came round the last bend, and Rushmere Hall stood up out of the park with all its windows blazing gold. “Who introduced him to the money lender?” said Crispin. Lucasta’s head came up slowly. He said, “A boy of 19 in the country with no acquaintance in Kelbridge and no notion how such things are contrived.

Who put the man’s name in his way? Who told him it was nothing, that gentlemen did it every day, that his father’s name on a bill was a formality, and the thing would be quietly retired before anybody was the wiser?” She had gone very white again. She said, her voice failed her, and she started again. She said Everard had been at Kelbridge races.

She said she had heard of it from a friend. “She had heard of it,” said Crispin, “because she made it.” He took her hand, took it deliberately in both of his, and held it hard enough that she felt it. “Madam, she did not find a rope lying about and pick it up. She plaited it. She has been plaiting it since the day your uncle’s will was read, and she made your brother a felon so that she might make you a mute, and she made you a mute so that she might sell you to a man too proud to ask a single question.

Every strand of it is hers.” He let out a breath. “And in 1 hour, before 200 people, she is going to be made to say so.” At the great door, his aunt Honoria was waiting with her stick, and behind her the hall was a roar of voices and silver, and somewhere in the middle of it, in lilac, Sabina Marchmont was receiving congratulations.

Crispin handed his wife down. He did not release her hand. “Stay by me,” he said. “You need say nothing. You have said nothing for 11 weeks, and it has cost you the earth, and I will not ask you to spend one word more. Only stand where they can see you.” Lucasta looked at the door and at the noise beyond it and at him.

“Very well,” she said. They went in together. He let the breakfast run its course. He let them eat and toast the bride with that thin, amused, glancing kindness that is crueler than open scorn. And he sat at the head of his own table with his wife on his right and watched Sabina Marchmont hold court at the middle of it.

And he was outwardly the coldest and most correct man in Berkshire. At a quarter past 12, Taminion stood at his shoulder and said one word. The Duke of Rushmere rose. The room went quiet by degrees, the way a room does, the near end first, then the middle, then a laugh at the far end cut off in the middle of itself.

200 faces turned up to him bright with wine and expectation. They thought he was going to speak of duty. Some of them, he knew, had a wager on the word. You have come a long way, said Crispin, to see a duke do a charitable thing. I am sorry to disappoint you. There is no charity in this house today. There is only a debt, and I mean to pay it in full before you.

And it will take rather less time than the Isis. He nodded to the door. Enderby came in first, gray and dry and carrying a Japan box, his clerk behind him with a portfolio, and behind them, between two Rushmere grooms, a fair, handsome, sweating gentleman in a very good coat, who took one look at the length of that hall and the 200 faces and stopped as though he had walked into glass.

This, said Crispin pleasantly, is Mr. Ambrose Kightly. Some of you have heard his name. Most of you have repeated it. He is the man with whom my wife is said to have disgraced herself at the Heart and Feather at Fenno Cross on the night of the 26th of June. He looked down the table. Mr. Kightly, before we go on, you have my terms in writing, and you have signed the deposition before my solicitor.

And you understand that I will hold to my side of it exactly as long as you hold to yours. Say it to the room. Kightly’s throat worked. He did not look at Sabina. That, more than anything was what told the room. I never touched her, he said hoarsely. I never so much as spoke to her before that night.

I was paid to be in that passage. I was paid to have the door open. It was He wet his lips. It was all Miss Marchmont’s contriving, every part of it. She wrote the note in the boy’s hand. She hired the Prossit woman to look in and to talk of it after. She promised me 5,000 out of the marriage settlement and a passage to Boulogne.

And she wrote to me not four days ago to say so. The sound the room made was not a gasp. It was lower and uglier than that. Crispin took the letter from his breast and laid it on the cloth, and the broken red seal showed against the white linen like a stain. “This came to me this morning,” he said, “in error, in my own solicitor’s packet, carried down from Marchmont Hollow by a footman named Dabney, who is at present in my steward’s room, and who will swear to the carrying of it, and to a good deal else besides. It is in Miss

Marchmont’s hand. Half of you have had notes from her. You know the hand as well as I do. Mr. Enderby will read it, and then he will read the guardianship deed under which she has had the keeping of my wife’s person and my wife’s fortune these two years. And then he will read the item of 5,000 pounds which she caused to be written into my marriage settlement as a debt of honor owed by the Marchmont estate.

And when he has done, I shall ask this company one question, and then you may all go home and talk of it.” And I hope you will talk of it a great deal. Enderby read. He read it as such men read everything, without a scrap of feeling, which made it a hundred times worse. And the beautiful, quick, pretty sentences went out over the silver and the flowers and the ruins of the wedding cake.

The trap shut so neatly, the two evenings’ practice with a very fine pen, the poor creature who would walk into a fire, the most convenient conscience the writer had ever met with. Burn this. Somewhere about the middle of it a chair went over. Sabina Marchmont was on her feet, and Crispin, watching her, saw the exact moment the thing she had been for two years came off her face like a mask sliding, and what was underneath was not a devil at all, but something much smaller and much worse. A woman who had been quite

certain she was cleverer than everybody in the room discovering in public, at a wedding breakfast, that she was not. “It is a forgery,” she said. “He has had it forged. He has.” She swung round on the table, on all those faces, hunting one that was still hers. “You cannot take the word of a of a creature like that, of a man who has been bought.

” “I have not bought him,” said Crispin. “You bought him.” “I have merely offered him a cheaper bargain than the one you made, and he has taken it because that is what your kind of man always does. And you ought to have known it, for you chose him yourself.” He rested his knuckles on the cloth and leaned into them.

“Now, my question. It is not for you. It is for them.” He looked down the length of his own hall. “11 weeks,” he said, “this woman walked through your parishes and your assemblies and your churchyards with her name in your mouths, and not one of you asked her whether it was true. Nor did I.

That is my share of it, and I shall carry it, and I do not expect any of you to forgive me for it because I have not yet found a way to forgive myself. But you will not, any of you, ever again say in my hearing that the Duchess of Rushmere angled for this house. She was hunted into it.” His voice did not rise.

It went instead very quiet, and the quiet carried to the last man at the last table. “She is my wife. She was the best of you before she was, and she is the best of you now. And the next tongue that touches her will answer to me for it in whatever form the offender likes best. There were offices in the passage. He had put them there himself.

But it was Lucasta who rose, Lucasta in her plain white muslin with the mended lace at her wrist. And it was Lucasta who said in that level voice that he now understood was not coldness at all, but the last plank of a woman keeping herself afloat, “Send her out of England, not to the courts. Not to the rope.

After what she did to you?” Said Crispin low. “After what she did to me?” Lucasta did not look at her cousin. She looked at her husband. “I have spent 11 weeks learning what it is to be destroyed by other people’s certainty, your grace. I find I have no appetite for destroying anybody. Let her be poor, and let her be known, and let her live with it.

That is enough. That is more than enough.” And in the room which had come to see a duke condescend to a ruined woman, sat in absolute silence while the ruined woman gave her enemy her life. Sabina Marchmont left England before the month was out with 60 pounds a year, which was Lucasta’s doing and not his. Ambrose Knightly went to Boulogne and was never heard of again.

The bill with Everard’s name upon it Crispin took up himself and paid in full to the man in Kelbridge, and then he laid it on the fire in his own library with the boy standing beside him watching it curl white to the lips. And what he said to Everard Marchmont in that room was said quietly and took 11 minutes, and the young man came out of it a different creature and went into the navy in the spring and did rather well. And then there was his wife.

He did not go her that night, nor the next. He had married a woman who had been sold, and he would not be one more man collecting. Instead, he began eight and 30 to court his own duchess. It went slowly and it deserved to. He learned the shape of her days. He found her one morning in the muniment room with the estate ledgers open and a pencil behind her ear and discovered that she had a head for figures that put his agent to shame and he’d not take the books away. He gave her more.

He rode out with her. He watched her turned cuffs vanish one by one and did not say a word about it. And when she came down in December in a gown of gray silk with his grandmother’s pearls at her throat, he found he had to look away for a moment at the fire. He told her the truth in January in the long gallery with the snow light coming in.

“I want to say a thing badly,” he said, “so I shall say it plainly. You have not forgiven me and you are right not to. I dismantled your cousin because a letter fell into my hands, not because I believed you. I never gave you the chance to be believed. That is the sin, Lucasta, and it is mine and no amount of paying off bills and burning them will lift it.

” She was quiet a long moment. “No,” she said, “it will not.” And then, turning to him, “Ask me now.” “Ask you what?” “Ask me whether it was true.” Her chin came up the way it had come up the length of that aisle. Nobody ever did. Not one soul in England. Ask me. The Duke of Rushmere looked at his wife and his throat closed and he had to make himself do it.

“Lucasta,” he said, “was any part of it true?” “No,” she said, “none of it. Not one word.” “I believe you,” said Crispin. “I believe you and I would believe you against the whole world and if the whole world swore to the contrary tomorrow, I should still take your word and let them hang me for it.” And she began, finally, after 7 months, to cry quite silently, standing straight as she did everything.

And he crossed the gallery and put his arms about her and she let him and for a long while there was nothing in that great cold room but the snow light and the two of them. He married her again in the spring in the little gray church at Rushmere Lodge with no one in it but the Reverend Pardo, his aunt Honoria, and a naval lieutenant home on leave.

She wore the plain white muslin. She carried Malcolm’s daisies because he had asked for them, though they were out of season and had to be coaxed under glass all winter by a gardener who never understood why. And when the Duke of Rushmere took her hand at the chancel step, he did not say the words in the book first. “I did not choose you,” he said.

“I was given you, and I took you in contempt, and I have spent every day since trying to earn what I was handed. There it is. That is the whole of my account.” His voice went “Loch Asta, I love you. Say I may go on.” His wife looked up at him with her gray eyes shining and put her other hand over his, over the ring that had once hung loose and now did not.

“You may go on,” said the Duchess of Rushmere, “for the rest of your life, Crispin, and I will hear it every morning, and I shall never once be tired of it.” And he never gave her cause to be.