They Banished Her to the Country to Forget the Duke — Three Days Later, His Carriage Arrived
The gravel cracked under wheels that had no business being on Ashridge’s drive at that hour. Imagigen heard it before the maid did. She was kneeling in the garden with her sleeves pushed past her elbows and her hands black to the wrists with new April earth, and the sound came across the lawn the way distant cannon does when the wind carries it wrong.
She knew the shape of it. Country wheels were lighter. Tradesmen’s carts had iron rims that clattered. This was of a bat town built traveling carriage on a long suspension, taken at speed by horses that had been pushed through more than one staging post, and it was coming up the avenue toward the house.
She rose so quickly her trowel turned in the bed. The bright morning sun struck the wood of the gate. The smell of warm grass and bruised mint lifted from the ground. Her breath caught sharp in her throat and she pressed one hand to her shoulder to steady it. Miss Hattie was already running out from the kitchen door, her capiscu, one ribbon loose.
Miss Imagigen, there’s I heard at the gate, four horses, a crest on the door. Miss, it’s a it’s a don’t. But the maid said it anyway because she was 16 years old and too thrilled to remember her place. It’s the Duke of Ashbborne’s carriage, miss. I saw the wheels in town the night before they sent you down. 3 days.
3 days since her uncle’s footman had handed her into the postchase at dawn with her trunk strapped behind and the family solicitor riding beside her as far as Hampshire. Three days since she has been told in her uncle’s library, and in his exact words, that the country air would help her forget her infatuation, and that if she did not forget it on her own, her cousin’s house, and a year of fresh milk and church on Sundays, would do the forgetting for her, three days since she had vowed, between Kingston and the
first change of horses, that she would not weep, would not write to him, would not even speak his name aloud in front of her aunt because she was not a girl in a poem. And she had learned at 15 that tears unwitnessed are only salt. Three days and a carriage at the gate. The wind moved through the warm dust on the gravel and the smoke of a small kitchen fire drifted across the lawn.
She felt the cool iron of the trowel still in her grip and the soft earth pressed against her fingers. Tell Aunt Elellanena,” she said, and was surprised that her voice came out quite steady. “Tell her at once. Then go to my room and find me a clean apron. I am not meeting anyone with dirt on my hands.” “Miss, the carriage is nearly at the door.” Then he will wait.
She had no apron in the end. She wiped her hands on the inside of her sleeves and crossed the lawn with her hair half down from the wind and her cheeks burning from the sun and from something else. And she reached the gravel sweep at the front of the house just as the footman in dark blue livery sprang down to put out the step and the door of the carriage was opening from the inside.
Adrienne Hartwell, 9inth Duke of Ashbornne, stepped out of his own carriage onto the gravel of a borrowed county he had no business being in, and looked at her across 12 ft of swept stone, as though he had ridden the entire way, only to find the place where she was standing. He was dusty from the road. His traveling coat, normally an expensive sober dark green that suited his coloring, was stre with gray from the chalk roads of two counties, and there was a smear of mud along the cuff, where he had wiped his glove on it without
thinking. His crevat was crooked, his hair, which she had only ever seen brushed back with severity, was disordered by the wind, and by however many hours he had spent with his head out of a window. He looked, in short, like a man who had not slept and had not stopped, and the only thing about him that was entirely composed was his face, and that was composed only because he had locked it in place the moment he saw her.
Miss Wescott, your grace, she did not curtsy. The gravel was uneven, and she did not trust her knees, and besides, she was angry. You have come to the wrong house. The honorable Mister Hulcom’s seat is 6 milesi further on near Petersfield. I have come to the correct house. Then you have come to it under a misapprehension because I am not at home. He did not smile.
The corner of his mouth moved very slightly. the way it did in his library when she had said something that should not be said in a duke’s hearing and he was choosing not to hear it. But he did not smile because he could see as she could see that her hands were shaking. Lady Elellanena knows I am coming.
He said that stopped her. She does not. She does. I wrote from Guilford. The letter would have come yesterday. The door of the house opened behind her, and she heard her aunt’s slippered step on the threshold, and the small soft sound her aunt always made when she was about to say something that had to be said carefully, and did not yet know what it would be.
Imagigen, Aunt Ellanena said. She did not turn round. Imagigan, dearest, I had a letter. You knew. I knew yesterday. I did not tell you, child, because I had not made up my mind what to do with him when he came. Send him away. That is not a thing one does to a duke at one’s own door. One does it, said Imagigan.
When the duke has come to make a fool of one’s niece. The Duke heard that because he was meant to, his face did not change at all. But the footman, who had heard worse in the same family within a fortnight, looked down at the gravel, and made himself useful with the carriage step. Aunt Elellanena came down two of the shallow stone stairs and stopped, because her gout would not let her do more, and held out a hand to Imagigen without looking at the Duke at all.
Imagigen, come inside. your grace. The housekeeper will show you to the small parlor, and there is bread and cold meat if you have not eaten, and I will receive you after I have spoken with my niece. You may consider yourself my guest until I have done so. You may not consider yourself anything more.” The Duke bowed very slightly to Aunt Eleanor.
It was the bow he gave his own grandmother in church. Madam, 2 hours your grace, after which I will tell you what is to be done with you. He inclined his head again and stepped aside, and the housekeeper, who had appeared, as housekeepers do at the precise moment they are required, led him under the portico without saying a word. Imagigen did not move.
She watched him pass within 3 ft of her without looking at her, his traveling coat brushing the edge of her sleeve. and she felt the disturbed air of his passing as though it had been laid against her skin. Then her aunt’s hand closed on her elbow and walked her by the smallest pressure into the house. The morning room at Ashridge faced east, and the spring sun came in low and white across the carpet at that hour, and Aunt Elellanena sat in her wing chair with her hands folded over her cane and waited. You are angry,” she said at
last. “I am furious.” Aunt Elellanena did not look up from her hands. With him or with me or with your uncle? With all three of you? With the post boys who let him through with the spring for being too warm? With my own hair for coming undone? Aunt Elellanena. What is he doing here? He came to apologize, I imagine.
For what? For having the bad taste to write to me before my uncle’s permission was given. for having had the worst taste to call upon me at our London house when half the household knew I had been forbidden visitors. I do not want apologies. I want him to go away. Do you? Imagin sat down very suddenly on the small striped sofa and put her face in her hands.
No, she said into her palms. I want him to go away and I want him to have ridden through the night because he could not bear three days. And I want both of those things at once and I cannot have either of them because if he goes away I shall die and if he has ridden through the night then my uncle will come within the week and my uncle does not come into the country for tea. No, said Aunt Eleanor.
He does not. Imagin lifted her face. Her aunt was looking at the window not at her. Aunt Elellanena, what aren’t you telling me? The older woman did not answer at once. She turned her cane between her hands very slowly. It was rosewood with a silver knob that had belonged to her late husband, and Imigan had seen her turn it like that at exactly two moments in her life.
The morning the news came of Imigan’s mother’s death, and the afternoon she had been told her own daughter would not survive the winter. Imagine. She said, “I had a second letter yesterday, not from the Duke. From my uncle, from your uncle.” Saying what? Aunt Elellanena lifted her eyes from the window at last and met Imagigens, and her face was the face of a woman has decided that an unkindness today is a smaller wound than a deeper unkindness in 6 weeks time.
saying she said that Mr. Hulkcom will be calling here within the fortnight and that I am to receive him as your suitor and that you will be married to him before midsummer. Imagin’s hands went cold so fast she felt her fingers prickle. He cannot. He says he can. On what grounds? On the grounds that he is your guardian, that he is in debt, and that mister Hulkcom has settled with him.
Settled what? 5,000 a year and the cancellation of certain notes of hand. The room did not actually move, but the carpet seemed to tilt very slightly, the way a deck tilts when the wind hits the wrong side of a sail. Imagigan heard her own breath stop and start again. She heard a blackbird on the lawn outside.
She heard distantly a man’s voice in the small parlor at the other end of the house asking for water for his horses. And the housekeeper answering with the comfortable rhythm of a country servant who has not yet been told whether to like him. Aunt Elellanena, she said, did my uncle send me here to be forgotten, or did he send me here to be sold? Both, child. And the Duke.
The Duke, said her aunt, looking at the rosewood cane and not at her, is I believe the only person of consequence in England who learned of it in time to do anything about it. Imagigan sat very still on the striped sofa for what felt like a long time, and was probably only the space between two breaths. I will see him, she said.
In 2 hours, I told him. Now, my dear, now Aunt Elellanena, he has not eaten. Bring him bread in the morning room. I will see him at once. She did not pace while she waited because pacing was for women in plays. She stood at the window with her hands behind her back and looked at the row of new hawthorn buds along the lower hedge and counted them.
There were 38 on the first three ft of hedge. She counted them twice, and the second time she had to start over because her hand had begun to tremble against her wrist, and she had lost track. He came in alone. Aunt Elellanena had spared them that much. He had washed. His hair was damp at the temples and pushed back.
his coat changed, his crevat reset by someone, probably his valet in the carriage on the drive up because she could not believe he had let the housekeeper near him in the 10 minutes she had granted. He looked for the first time since she had met him in October. As though he did not know precisely what to do with his hands, he took two steps into the room, stopped, and bowed.
Miss Westcot, how long have you known? He did not pretend not to understand. He stood quite straight in the center of the carpet. Since the evening before last, your uncle’s man of business spoke too freely at Whites. I left London at dawn. Why? Because I would not have you marry Hulcom. That was not the question.
The question was, why you? My uncle has not given his consent. He has in fact expressly forbidden you the house. You could have written to my godfather in Bath. You could have written to my cousin Westcot in the Lords. You could have sent for the bishop who has known me since I was six. You have written instead 200 miles in 3 days to my aunt’s house in Hampshire alone with a crest on the door.
And you have given my uncle precisely the scandal he requires to break me without scandal of his own. Why? I was afraid for you. You are a duke. Dukes do not ride through the night. They send I sent. I sent a letter to your godfather 4 days ago. I sent a second to Lord Strathmore last night from Guilford. I will continue to send. I came in person because I would not trust your uncle’s reach to leave my paper alone.
and I would not have you sit in this house for one more day, not knowing what was being done in London with your name.” She turned from the window. The leather of his glove on the chair back caught the bright light. A soft warmth from the fire pressed against her skin, and the dust on the silk of the curtains lifted as the wind moved through the open sash.
He was nearer than she had expected. He had not crossed the carpet, but the room was small, and her own step had brought her round, and they were 3 ft apart, and her hands were no longer behind her back. “You should not have come,” she said. “I know you have made it worse. I know my uncle will be on the next coach.
He will tell every drawing room from Mayfair to Eaton Square that I have eloped. And there will not be a milliner in London who will sell me a ribbon by Tuesday. He will not tell them you have eloped because by Tuesday I will have lodged an objection with the court of chancery against his guardianship on the grounds that he has used your father’s estate to pay his own debts.
that he proposes to marry you to a man whose only contribution to your settlement is the discharge of those debts. And that there is in fact a deed of trust executed by your late mother in 1809 which removes him as your guardian entirely upon your 3 and 20th year. She stared at him. I am 2 and 20. You will be 3 and 20, he said on the 2nd of August.
How do you know that? because you told me in your aunt’s drawing room in London on the 5th of February when I asked you whether you would attend the Strathmore concert in June and you said you would be too old to be presented at it. I asked you what you meant. You said you would be three and 20 in the summer and would not be presented at anything ever again.
I went home and put it in a book. You put my birthday in a book. I put a great many things in books, Miss Wescott. It is one of the unromantic facts of having been brought up to manage land. She laughed. It startled them both. It came up out of her chest like something she had not used in a week, and her hand went to her mouth too late, and she heard herself laugh again, a small, dry, shocked laugh that had nothing to do with happiness, and everything to do with the fact that he had written her birthday in a ledger.
“I am sorry,” he said, “for what? For not telling you in London what I had heard about your uncle? I had heard rumors for 6 weeks. I waited. I told myself the rumors were ordinary Clubland malice. I should have come to you with them. I did not because I did not know whether you would believe me and because I was afraid you would believe me and would not forgive me for being the bearer of the news. Adrien, she said, and stopped.
It was the first time in the 8 months they had known each other that she had used his name. He heard it. She heard him hear it. The room got very quiet. You came, she said. Yes. She heard her own breath catch on the next word and steadied it. You came knowing that by coming you would give my uncle the perfect scandal. Yes.
You came knowing my godfather will support him at first because my godfather hates anything that smells of haste. Yes. She turned her face fully to him. Then you have ruined me. I have given you a fortnight, he said, which is what I came to do. In a fortnight, your godfather will have read my letter.
In a fortnight, Strathmore will have answered. In a fortnight, the deed of trust your mother executed will be on a table in front of a king’s council. You will not be ruined, Imagigen. You will be free.” She did not answer at once. The blackbird on the lawn had moved into the lower hedge and was working at something in the hawthornne and the small bright sound of it carried into the room.
She listened to it for a long moment. She watched the hawthorn move where the bird had gone in. And if you are wrong about my godfather, she said, then I marry you myself by special license in your aunt’s drawing room on Sunday morning. And your uncle may say what he likes. You will not. I will without my consent. With your consent, Miss Westcot.
Without it, I will sit in your aunt’s small parlor and write letters until you tell me to leave. And then I will go, and the trust deed will still be on the king’s council’s table on Monday morning, and you will still be free. You would marry me without a settlement. I would marry you, he said, in your gardening apron with mud on your hands and a trowel in your hair in front of two witnesses in the parish curate.
The settlement is a separate document and you will write your own. She put her hand on the back of the small striped sofa because the room had tilted very slightly again, and this time she was not certain it was the news. “Sit down,” she said, “Miss Westcot. Sit down, your grace. You are very tall, and I cannot speak to a man who is standing over me when I have not had any tea.” He sat.
He sat on the edge of the small striped sofa which had been designed for a woman of Aunt Elellanena’s height in 1788, and his knees came up almost to his chin. And Imagin looked at the absurdity of him crammed onto the sofa, and at the dust still on his boots, and at the way he had folded his hands quite carefully on his thigh, as though he did not trust them on any other surface.
and she sat down in the wing chair opposite him. Tell me, she said, exactly what you have done. I have ordered an objection to be drawn at Lincoln’s inn. I have written to your godfather, to Lord Strathmore, to the bishop of Winchester, who is your great uncle, and to my own solicitor with instructions to call upon your uncle on Friday morning, and to ask in the politest possible terms whether he wishes to settle the matter quietly, or in court.
I have arranged for a cler to ride from London tonight with the trust deed copied from Somerset House. I have left my secretary at Whites where your uncle takes his evening port with instructions to be as visible as possible and to be heard saying nothing of any kind so that your uncle will not know what I have done until Monday. Monday.
Monday is when the objection is filed and until Monday. Until Monday, he said I sit in your aunt’s small parlor and write letters. 3 days. Five. If we count the days, I have already lost. She looked at him. His knees were still up against the edge of the sofa. The son had moved another bar up the wall. “You are very angry,” she said.
“Yes, at my uncle. At your uncle, at myself, at the chair. The chair is too small.” She laughed again, and this time she did not put her hand over her mouth. “Adrien,” she said, “get off the sofa gladly. Stand by the window. You may not pace. The carpet is old. Yet you may stand by the window with your hands behind your back and tell me what we are going to do for the next 5 days because I will not sit in this house letting you write letters while my uncle finds me a husband.
I had thought he said getting up that we might begin by your eating something. The housekeeper says you have not had breakfast. The housekeeper has been here 10 minutes. She is very efficient. She is a spy. She works for Aunt Elellanena. Aunt Elellanena works for everyone. Sit down. Bring me my tea. We have by your own count 5 days.
I do not propose to spend the first hour of them being managed by a housekeeper. He brought her her tea. The cup was warm against her cold fingers, and she pressed her lips to the bitter edge of it. The wood of the small table creaked under his hand. Outside the window, the wind brushed the dust from the stone sill, and a thin smoke rose from the kitchen chimney.
Aunt Elellanena, who had been listening at the door, came in 2 minutes later with a tray of bread and cold ham and a small dish of last autumn’s quint preserve, and put it on the table between them, and looked from one to the other of them, as though she were trying to decide which of them she was more sorry for, and then went out again to write to her brother.
Immeran ate. She had not eaten since the previous evening, and she discovered when the bread reached her mouth that her hands were shaking with something other than rage. Adrienne sat in the wing chair now, because she had moved to the window, and he did not speak while she ate, and the only sound in the room was the blackbird on the lawn.
and the very small efficient sounds of a woman eating slowly because she has remembered what bread tastes like. When she finished, she put the plate on the windowsill and turned round. “How sure are you,” she said, “of my godfather, 3/4 sure, and of Strathors.” “Srathmore loves a fight, and he hates your uncle. He has hated your uncle since they were at eaten together.
He once threw your uncle’s hat into a well. You are not making this up. I am not making this up. I went to school with Strathmore’s younger brother, and the well was a famous fixture of my childhood. And of the bishop? The bishop will do what the trustdeed tells him to do. He is not a fond man, but he is exact. And of the trustdeed? The trustdeed is unambiguous.
Your mother had a Hampshire estate in her own name, settled on her by your grandmother upon her marriage, and she settled it upon you with the proviso that on your 3 and 20th year it would pass entirely out of your father’s family’s reach. Your uncle has known about it since your mother was lost to you.
He has been waiting 18 years to lose his guardianship over you. And his last chance to extract anything from your father’s settlement is to marry you to a man who will pay him for the privilege before August. My mother’s Hampshire estate. Yes. Is in this county. It is 12 mi from this room. She closed her eyes. She had not known. She had been told, vaguely as a child, that there was something of her mother’s somewhere.
She had been told, more clearly, by her uncle that whatever it had been had been used to pay for her schooling, and there was none of it left. She had believed him, because she was 12 when he told her, and she had not yet learned to look at her uncle the way she would learn to look at him at 17. He has been stealing from me, she said.
He has been borrowing against you. He has not yet stolen. He cannot sell what is yours without your hand on the document. And Hulkcom, Hulkcom is in deeper debt than your uncle. Hulkcom believes that if he marries you, he marries the Hampshire estate. Does Hulkcom know about the trust deed? Hulkcom believes the estate is your father’s family’s gift to give.
Your uncle has not told him about your mother’s deed. My uncle is going to be very angry when he finds out he has sold a thing he does not own. Your uncle, said the Duke, with a kind of grim satisfaction she had not heard in him before, is going to be very angry on Monday morning when his solicitor reads him a letter from mine.
I propose until Monday morning that he know none of this. He will know you are here. He will know I am here. He will not know why. He will assume I have come against his express prohibition to make love to his ward in a country drawing room. He will be angry. He may not, however, leave London until Saturday because Lord Hulkcom is dining with him on Friday, and he will not abandon Hulcom before the check has been signed.
There is going to be a check. There was always going to be a check. There has been a check promised since February. Hulcom pays it on Friday. That is why your uncle sent you to Hampshire when he did. He needed you out of London for 10 days while the settlement was drawn. And the check was written.
He believed you would be here with your aunt with no one to write to and no one to write to. and that by the time he arrived in person to take you to mister Hulkcom in Petersfield, you would be too tired to resist him.” She turned back to the window. The blackbird was gone. The garden was empty. The hawthorne buds were exactly where they had been, and the sun had moved one bar of the windows casement higher up the wall.
“He underestimated my hair,” she said after a while. “How so?” He thought that fresh milk and church would make me a country girl. He forgot that I have my mother’s hair. My mother’s hair did not blow about in the wind. My mother’s hair stayed exactly where she put it. I have been wearing my mother’s hair for 3 days, and it has not stayed in place once.
I do not think I am going to be the kind of country girl my uncle had in mind. She heard him stand. She heard him cross the room. She did not turn around, but she felt him stop at her shoulder, near enough that she could feel the warmth of him along her sleeve. Imagigen, don’t. I have not asked anything yet. You will. You will ask in some form whether I will let you act for me. And the answer is yes.
But if you ask it now in this room with me with my back to you, it will be because I cannot bear to look at you. And I will not have you remember that. I will not ask, he said, until you have slept and eaten and put your hair up properly and stood in this room with both feet on the carpet and looked me in the face. I have lost 3 days.
I can wait until tomorrow. Tomorrow? Tomorrow morning, Miss Wescott? After breakfast? In your aunt’s drawing room, in front of your aunt, I will ask you formally for permission to act as your representative in the matter of the trust. and your aunt will be the witness and you will say yes ought no and I will abide by either answer and if I say no then I sit in your aunt’s small parlor and write letters until Monday and lodge the objection in your name without your hand on it and you will be free to do as you please with the consequences and you and I will
go home he said and you will not see me again unless you send for She was silent for a long time. “That is a very expensive promise,” she said at last. “It is the only one worth making,” she turned round. He was 3 ft away, hands behind his back, looking at her with the steady, particular attention he had given her in October across her uncle’s dining table, when she had first said something he had not expected, and she remembered, with a sharpness that surprised her, the way his face had not moved then either, and the way she had
thought that night that she would not mind speaking with a man whose face did not move. Every time a woman said a clever thing, Adrien, stay in the small parlor, eat the bread, write the letters. Do not come into the morning room until I send for you. I am going to walk in the rose walk for an hour because I have not been outside since the carriage came.
And then I will see Aunt Elellanar, and then I will see you at supper. Yes. And do not flatter the housekeeper. She will tell Aunt Elellanar every word. I will be civil and dull. That will do. She went out past him without looking at him because she did not trust her face, and he did not turn his head to watch her go, because he was a man who had been raised on horses and on tenant farmers and on funerals, and he knew when not to look.
The rose walk at Ashridge was in late April only a hedge of bare canes with the new leaf coming out of them in red curls and a wooden bench at the far end where her aunt’s late husband had sat the year of his last illness. It was nothing to look at. It was however walled on both sides by U, and the U was tall enough that a woman could walk in the rosewalk and be entirely invisible from the house.
Imagigan walked the length of it three times. She did not cry. She had decided in the morning room that she would not cry, and Westcots kept their decisions. She walked, and she counted her, and on the third length she sat down on the wooden bench, and put her head back against the U, and closed her eyes.
She thought about her mother. Her mother had been taken by childbed fever when Imigen was four. Imagin could not with any honesty remember her face. She remembered the green of a dress and a particular voice singing in another room and a small bonehandled brush that had been in her hand. She remembered nothing else. Her uncle had buried her mother on a Thursday, and her father had ruined himself slowly and methodically with clarit over the next 11 years, and the household around her had been a long succession of governnesses and one very
kind cook and an aunt who came up from Hampshire once a year and brought her honey. That was her childhood. That was all of it. Enough, she whispered into the empty walk. 18 years, the Duke had said. Her uncle had known about the trustdeed for 18 years. 18 years of school fees paid late. 18 years of being told her gowns were good enough as they were.
18 years of being told at table that her mother had left her nothing because her mother had been taken young, and that she should be grateful her uncle had taken her in. 18 years of being made to feel by small unwounding daily means that she existed by his charity. Imagigin opened her eyes. The u hedge was very still. The sun on the new leaves of the rose canes was a particular kind of red gold she had not seen in London.
The bench under her thighs was warm. Somewhere in the kitchen, 20 yards away through stone. Somebody was chopping something in a steady rhythm. She was not. she discovered angry at her uncle. She was angry at herself. She was angry at the 18-year-old girl who had sat in her uncle’s library in mourning for her father and had let her uncle pat her hand and tell her she was a good girl and that he would manage things.
She was angry at the 20-year-old who had let him sign the lease on her London season. She was angry at the 21-year-old who had let him introduce her to Mister Hulcom at the spring assembly without asking why a man of 43 with a face like a boiled potato had been seated next to her at supper.
She was angry mostly that she had not seen it. The Duke had seen it. The Duke had heard a rumor at Whites two evenings ago and had ridden 200 miles in three days because he could put two facts together. She had lived inside the facts for 18 years and had not put them together at all. She would not, she decided, marry him on Sunday, not because he had ridden 200 m.
200 m was not a reason to marry a man. 200 mi was a reason to thank him, to look him in the face when she did it, and to make sure that whatever was done next was done by her hand and not his, she would marry him. She thought if she still wanted to marry him after Monday, after the trustdeed was lodged, after her uncle had been told, after her name had been spoken in three different courtrooms and four drawing rooms, and she had stood up under it, after she had ridden up to London with her own coachmen, in her own carriage, with her
own money in her own pocket, she would marry him then or not. But she would do it as a woman who owned the ground she stood on, not as a girl in a Hampshire garden with mud on her hands and a duke at the gate. She rose. The shadows on the U had moved by 2 in. An hour had passed.
The Duke had been in her aunt’s small parlor for an hour with bread and a stack of writing paper, and her aunt had not interrupted him, and she did not, on the evidence so far, think he would have used the hour to flatter the housekeeper. She went back to the house through the kitchen garden, picking off a sprig of new mint as she passed, because she wanted something fresh on her tongue.
and she went up the back stairs to her own room and put her hair up properly with her mother’s pins and changed out of her gardening dress into a pale gray afternoon gown that had been made for her in bath last spring and that she had not unpacked from her trunk until that morning. She put on her mother’s small pearl drops.
She went down the front stairs because she was not going to creep about her own aunt’s house. She walked past the small parlor without looking in. She found Aunt Elellanena in the drawing room. He has not flattered Mrs. Pigford, her aunt said without looking up from her embroidery. He has been civil to her and asked her where the writing paper was kept and has not spoken since.
She has come twice into my sewing room to complain that she does not know what to make of him. That is a good sign. I think so. Are we letting him stay for tonight? For tomorrow, for the rest of the week, if necessary, Imagigen, yes, I have written to your uncle. Imagigan sat down on the small striped sofa opposite her aunt.
What did you say? I have said that the Duke of Ashbborne arrived at my gate this morning with his secretary in pursuit of a horse he believes I have for sale, which is not strictly a lie, because Adam has a cult I have indeed been considering parting with, and that I have invited his grace to stay for two nights while he inspects the cult, and that you have been instructed to keep to the morning room and the rose walk, and to take your meals separately. ly.
I have also said that I do not approve of his grace’s arrival, but that I do not propose to send a duke back to London after he has ridden 2 days, particularly when his grace has business with a horse that does not in fact exist. Aunt Elellanar, my dear, you are lying to my uncle. I am lying to my brother, dear. I have done it before.
I did it for 30 years. It is one of the small pleasures of my old age. Imagigan put her hand over her aunts. The embroidery needle pricricked her thumb. She did not flinch. Thank you. Don’t thank me yet. Your uncle is not a stupid man. He will read the letter. He will believe none of it.
But he will, I think, decide that two knights cannot do you any further harm than has already been done, and that he would rather not come into Hampshire personally in pursuit of a duke who has, after all, the resources to ruin Hulcom’s settlement. If it is opposed openly, he will write back. He will write back with great courtesy, and he will arrive on Saturday morning at the latest. Saturday.
Saturday. So you have, my dear, four days. Whatever is to be done in your name with the court of chancery and the trustee and the king’s council, the Duke must do it in 4 days. After Saturday, your uncle will be in this house, and your uncle, when he is in this house, is harder to manage. Did the Duke tell you about the trust deed? He told me in the small parlor with the door open and the housekeeper listening because he did not propose to be alone in a room with me or any length of time and to be accused later of having presumed. He told me everything. He told
me also that he had already taken the liberty of writing to Strathmore in your name. In my name. He has not signed your name. He has signed his own and asked Strathmore to lend his interest. He has written, however, as though the matter is yours and not his. It was, I think, the right tone.
Strathmore is not a man one comes to with a duke’s grievance. One comes to him with a wrong done to a woman, and one waits, and he descends like the wrath of God in a striped waste coat. Aunt Elellanar, you are enjoying this. Her aunt’s needle paused over the linen. My dear, I have not enjoyed anything as much in 20 years. Imagin laughed.
She held her aunt’s hand a little longer than the embroidery wanted. Then she got up because she could hear the housekeeper coming to ask about supper. Supper at Ashidge was at 7. Aunt Eleanor kept country hours and would not have changed them for the king. The Duke ate at the lower end of the long oak table with Immigran at the other end and Aunt Eleanor in the middle. And they did not speak much.
The cook had made a roast fowl and a dish of new peas and a thin pudding of cream and apples, and the Duke ate everything, which was the first thing in the day that had endeared him to the housekeeper. He did not, however, attempt conversation. He answered when spoken to, and was silent when not. He looked at Immigran twice over the candles, and once she met his look, and once she did not.
When the cloth was drawn, Aunt Elellanena rose and said very simply that she would take her tea in the drawing room and that her niece and her guest would have 10 minutes in the dining room and might with the door open take their tea there. 10 minutes, Adrien. Yes, madam. And you, my dear, will come to the drawing room before the clock strikes the half.
I am old and I shall not be kept waiting. Yes, Aunt Elellanena,” she went out. The candles guttered as the door closed behind her. The Duke rose and walked the length of the table and sat down beside Imagigan. For a long moment, neither of them said anything. The fowl was being cleared by the housekeeper’s daughter at the sideboard, and she was being scrupulous about it because she had been told to be scrupulous, and the small, honest sound of a plate being lifted off a polished oak table is one of the loudest sounds in the world when there are only two
people in the room. “Tell me,” he said quietly, about your mother. She had not expected that. My mother, you said in the morning room that you had been wearing her hair for 3 days. I did not understand it then. I have understood it since. Tell me about her. I do not remember her. Tell me what you remember. She looked at him in the candle light.
His face in candle light was not the face he wore in the drawing room. It was a longer, thinner face with shadows under the cheekbones, and his eyes, which she had always thought were gray, were almost black with the candles below them. “She used to sing,” she said. In the room next to mine, “I do not know what she sang.
I remember the green of one of her dresses. I remember a bone handled hairbrush. I remember being lifted up to a window. That is all. That is enough. It is not enough. It is what I have, Imagigen. You are about to walk into a court of law and have your mother’s name spoken 20 times by men who never knew her. I want you to walk in carrying the dress and the hairbrush, not just the deed.
She looked at the table. You are telling me, she said, that I must keep her with me. I am telling you, he said, that on Monday morning, your mother’s signature, 18 years old, will be read aloud by a cler in the court of chancery, and that you must be able to hear it without flinching, because your uncle will be listening for your flinch.
I am also telling you that you do not have to flinch, because the woman who wrote that signature is still in this room with you, and you are her work. She has been your aunt for 18 years in your aunt’s body, and you have been hers in yours, and you have been wearing her hair for 3 days. Her eyes filled. She let them.
She did not put her hand up to them. The Duke did not move. You are very good at this, she said after a while. I have buried a great many people, have you? Both my parents, my elder brother, the seventh Duke, who was my uncle when I was 19. I came into the title not knowing how to write a letter of condolence. I had to learn.
I learned by writing to my tenants. I have written 146 letters of condolence in 11 years. And I have learned only that there is one true sentence, and it is that those who are gone remain in the work of the living, and that the living must therefore do the work properly. Adrien. Yes. She sat down the corner of her napkin she had been folding.
“I am going to marry you, I think.” He did not move. “Not on Sunday,” she said. “No, after Monday, after Monday. With a settlement of my own drawing, with a settlement of your own drawing, and not in my aunt’s drawing room, wherever you like. In the chapel of my mother’s estate, in the chapel of your mother’s estate,” she nodded once.
The candles on the long oak table moved very slightly in some draft she could not feel. That is settled then. Imagigen. Yes. I would like to take your hand. You may. He took her hand. He did not raise it. He held it on the polished oak between them and his hand was very warm and his thumb went once over the knuckle of her smallest finger as though counting it.
And then he put her hand down again and stood up. I will go to your aunt’s drawing room, he said, and I will sit on the other side of the room from you, and I will not look at you because I do not trust myself to look at you in front of your aunt, and I will be a perfectly civil guest until the candles are out. Tomorrow morning after breakfast, I will ask you formally and on Saturday morning your uncle will arrive and he will find you and me and your aunt in a row and we will go up to London together.
Together in my carriage with your aunt as chaperone. My aunt will not like the carriage. Then I will hire her a shayes. You are very expensive. I have not noticed it yet. He bowed very slightly and went out and she sat at the table for a moment with her hand on the oak and her eyes closed. The next morning he asked her in her aunt’s drawing room in her aunt’s hearing and she said yes.
and Aunt Elellanena witnessed in writing on a piece of creamlaid note paper that the Duke of Ashbborne had on the 25th of April requested and received the permission of Miss Imagigen Westcot to act in her name in the matter of her mother’s deed of trust and that no other agreement of any kind had been entered into and Aunt Ellaner signed it twice once in her own name and once as Lady Elellanena Tolbert.
and the Duke folded it into his pocketbook and bowed. Then he wrote letters for the rest of the morning. He wrote at the desk in the small parlor, with the door open, and his secretary, who had arrived the night before from London, sat across from him with a second pen. Between them, they produced 11 letters before noon.
One went to the king’s council, who was to argue the trust deed. One went to the bishop of Winchester who was Immigran’s great uncle. One went to Lord Strathmore. One went to Imagigan’s godfather in Bath. One went to the court of Chancery requesting a date for the lodging of an objection. One went to a particular man in the city whose name Imagigan did not recognize.
One went to the recctor of the parish in which Immerin’s mother’s estate lay, which Imagigen had not known until that morning was 12 miles from her aunt’s door. Three went to people whose names she did not catch. And one which the Duke wrote last in his own hand on his own paper went to Mister Hulcom of Petersfield and Imagigen walking past the small parlor at noon and pausing without quite meaning to heard him dictate aloud to himself the first sentence of it.
Sir, it has come to my attention that you propose to enter into a settlement with the trustees of Miss Imagigan Westcot, whose interests I have the honor of representing in this matter by her express written consent, which is enclosed. She did not stay to hear the rest. She went out into the rosealk because the morning was bright and her hands were unaccountably steady and she counted the new buds on the lower hedge and there were 41.
The first ride to London was made on the second day after his arrival which was a Thursday and was made by the Duke alone because the king’s council could not wait for ladies. He left at dawn. He took his secretary and a sealed packet of papers and Aunt Elellanena’s blessing in the form of a small jar of quint preserve thrust upon his secretary by the housekeeper at the carriage door because the housekeeper had decided overnight that she liked him after all.
He was back at Ashridge on Friday afternoon in time for tea. Immeran had spent the day at her writing desk in the morning room. She had written in her own hand and without help three letters, one to her godfather, one to the bishop of Winchester and one to Lord Strathmore. She had not asked the Duke what to say.
She had asked Aunt Elellanena to read each one before she sealed it. and Aunt Elellanena had read them with the small concentration she gave to a recipe for plum cake and had said only on the godfather’s letter, “Strike out the word humbly. [snorts] You are not humble, my dear, and Strathmore’s brother is not to be deceived.” Imagin had struck it out.
The Duke came in duty again with the same crooked crevat and made his bow at the drawing room door without coming in. Madame Miss Westcot, the objection has been drawn. It will be lodged on Monday morning, and the king’s council will appear. He has read the deed. He says the matter is, in his expression, embarrassingly clear.
He has had three causes this month in which he believed he was going to enjoy himself, and this is the fourth. Have you eaten? At a coaching inn outside Hartford Bridge. Madam, I will go and bathe and present myself at supper. Adrien, yes, Miss Westcot, you have not asked after me. Have you needed me to? No. Then I will ask after you at supper.
I am at present very dusty, and I would not for the world bring my dust into your aunt’s drawing room. He went out. Aunt Elellanena, without looking up from her embroidery, said, “He has improved. I did not think he could. He has not improved. He is asking after the room. It is the same thing, dear, when a man does it properly.
Her uncle’s letter arrived on Saturday morning before breakfast by express, and Aunt Elellanena opened it at the breakfast table without ceremony and read it through twice and laid it down beside her plate. He is coming, she said. When? Tomorrow afternoon. He has business in Winchester that detains him until then. He will be at our door no later than 4.
With Hulkcom, he does not say. I would assume so. Your uncle does not, as a rule, travel alone when he is angry. Imagin put down her teacup. Adrien, yes. Tomorrow afternoon is Sunday. It is. The objection is not lodged until Monday morning. It is not. Then my uncle will be in this house with Hulcom on the very day before he is to be told that the marriage cannot be made. He will.
He will be very angry. He will He may attempt to remove me from the house. He may attempt to. Adrien Emojin. He will not succeed. He will not. She set down her cup. Aunt Elellanena. Yes, my dear. What is the smallest number of people we will need in this house tomorrow afternoon? Aunt Elellanena folded her napkin.
you, me, his grace, his grace’s secretary, the recctor of the parish, my late husband’s cousin who is now the local magistrate, doctor wells from the village in case anyone faints. Two grooms from the stable yard, and Mrs. Pigford, eight, plus the necessary servants. You have thought about this? I have not slept since Wednesday, dear. Of course, I have thought about it.
The rest of Saturday was spent in preparation. The recctor came to tea at 3. He was a small, dry man named Mister Athetherton, who had been the recctor of the of the parish for 30 years, and had buried Aunt Elellanena’s late husband, and had baptized somewhere in the dim past the very tenant farmer, who had run Aunt Ellaner’s late husband’s stable.
He sat in the drawing room with his teacup and listened while Aunt Elellanar explained in 20 unfussy sentences the state of the matter. “You will be required,” she said, “to be in this house tomorrow afternoon at 3, and to witness, if it becomes necessary, any document of consent or refusal which my niece may choose to sign in your presence.
You will not be required to officiate at any service of any kind unless my niece asks you to. You will be required, however, to be a man of the cloth in a country drawing room and to look at my brother in a way that reminds him of his soul. Lady Elellanena. Yes, Smister Athetherton. I have looked at your brother in that way for 30 years, and he has not yet noticed.
Then continue to look at him, Mr. Athetherton and we shall hope that on the 31st year it begins to take. The magistrate came at 4. He was a large man named Mr. Pickering, who was Aunt Ellaner’s late husband’s cousin, and had been a justice of the peace for the county since the year Immigran was born. He sat in the drawing room with his teacup and listened while Aunt Ellaner explained in much the same 20 sentences the same matter.
And at the end of it, he set down his cup and said, “Only, Ellaner, he will not lay a hand on her in my hearing. If he tries, I will commit him.” Thank you, Henry. You should have told me 18 years ago. I did not know 18 years ago. Eleanor. Yes, Henry. None of us knew. Do not carry it alone. We shall sort it tomorrow. Doctor Wells came at 5, was given a glass of cherry, and was told nothing in particular except that there might be need of him on Sunday afternoon.
He nodded, as country doctors do, accepted a second glass, and went home. The Duke spent the day in the small parlor writing letters. Imagigen sat with him for part of it at her own writing desk now moved across the room and they wrote in silence for two hours and at the end of it he reached across the table once to take her hand without looking up and held it for the length of a single breath and let it go.
Sunday morning was bright and cold. There had been a frost in the night that had touched the new leaves on the rose canes with a white edge. and by 10 the sun had taken it off again and the hedges were dripping. Imagigan put on the pale gray gown she had worn for the Duke’s first afternoon and pinned her mother’s pearls at her ears and put up her hair very carefully with her mother’s pins.
She did not look in the glass for longer than was necessary. She went down at 2 and found Aunt Eleanor in the drawing room with Mr. Athetherton and Mister Pickering already seated and the housekeeper laying out tea things at the side table for 8. The Duke came down at a/4 to 3. He wore his second coat, the dark green which had been brushed and his crevat was perfectly tied.
He bowed to the recctor, bowed to the magistrate, and crossed the room to Imagigen without saying anything and stood beside her chair. The carriage was heard on the drive at 4 minutes 3. It was her uncle’s. She knew it by the wheels. There was a second carriage behind it, smaller, also with town wheels. That would be Hulcom.
She rose from her chair before the Duke could put his hand to it. She did not need the help. Aunt Eleanor. Yes, my dear. Will you receive him? I do not wish to be in the hall when he comes in. I will receive him. You will stand at the window. His grace will stand at the fireplace. Mr. Athetherton will sit. Mister Pickering will stand by the door.
We will all be in the drawing room together, and we will all be perfectly still, and he will be brought in to us. He will not find what he expects to find. Imagigan went to the window. She heard the carriage stop. She heard a step on the gravel and her uncle’s voice, low and very controlled, asking the housekeeper a question.
She did not hear the housekeeper’s reply. She heard a second voice. Hulks, she supposed, though she did not turn round, making some comment about the size of the house. She heard her uncle’s tread coming down the hall. He walked as he had always walked with the slow, deliberate step of a man who had decided in his youth to make his presence felt by every floorboard.
The drawing room door opened. Mr. Westcot, ma’am, said the housekeeper. And the honorable Mister Hulcom, her uncle came in. He stopped in the doorway. He saw in this order his sister in her wingchair with her embroidery, the recctor of the parish in the chair to her left, the magistrate of the county standing beside the door with his arms folded, a quite ordinary young woman who was his niece standing at the window in a pale gray gown and a tall man at the fireplace in dark green with his hands behind his back. He looked at the tall man for the
length of three heartbeats. Then he looked at his sister. Elellaner. Brother, what is this tea? Brother, will you take a chair? I see his grace of Ashbborne in your drawing room. You do? He is my guest. He came on Tuesday to its inspector horse of Adams, which on consideration he has not bought, and has been good enough to stay with us through the week.
He arranged the visit some weeks ago. I had thought he had written to you. He had not. That is unfortunate. He had assured me he would. Elellanena. Yes, brother. Send the recctor and the magistrate away. Send my niece upstairs. Send his grace back to London. I have come from Winchester with Mr. Hulcom to settle the matter of Imagin’s marriage, and I should like 5 minutes of privacy in which to do it.
You will not have 5 minutes of privacy in this drawing room, brother. You may have a chair and tea and the company that is in the room when you arrived. If you do not wish to take tea on those terms, you may return to your carriage. Her uncle looked very slowly around the room. Mr. Pickering George, you are armed. I am the magistrate of this county, George.
I am also your sister’s husband’s cousin. I am as armed as the law requires me to be in either capacity. Take a seat. The lady has offered you tea. And his grace, his grace, said the Duke quietly from the fireplace, is my niece’s guest also, sir. I have, in addition, a small matter to lay before you on her behalf, if you would prefer to hear it in this drawing room, rather than read it on Monday morning in a letter from my solicitor.
Imagin turned at last from the window. She walked across the carpet to a point exactly midway between her uncle and the Duke and she stopped and she looked at her uncle without smiling. Uncle Imagigen, Mr. Hulkcom will not be marrying me. You will be silent. I will not. Mister Hulkcom, you have been deceived.
My uncle has informed you that he is entitled to settle the matter of my marriage, in his sole discretion, and that my mother’s Hampshire estate is in his gift to dispose of. He is not entitled to do so. She kept her eyes on her uncle as she said it, but her words were for the man in the doorway. The estate was settled upon me by my late mother in 1809 by a deed of trust which removes it entirely from my father’s family’s control on my 3 and 20th birthday which falls on the 2nd of August next.
My uncle has been borrowing against the estate for 18 years and is in default. Mister Hulkcom did not move. His hat in his hand had gone slightly gray at the brim from being held too tightly. On Monday morning, his grace of Ashbborne, acting on my behalf with my written consent, and with the consent of my aunt as my temporary guardian in residence, will lodge an objection in the court of chancery to my uncle’s guardianship and to the proposed settlement on the grounds I have described.
By Tuesday afternoon, the matter will be in the king’s council’s hands. She turned her head at last to look at Mister Hulkcom directly. Hulkcom, you will, I am sorry to say, not receive what my uncle has promised you. I would advise you to leave this house at once before you find yourself bound by anything you have signed.” She did not raise her voice.
She did not look at the Duke. She did not look at her aunt. She looked at her uncle. and she watched his face go from gray to white to gray again. And she watched Mister Hulcom, who had been standing in the doorway with his hat in his hand, take a step backward into the hall. Her uncle did not speak for 10 seconds.
Then he said, “Who told you this?” His grace. After he learned of it at Whites on Monday evening from one of your own men of business, and on whose authority did his grace act? On my own. in writing. Witnessed by my aunt. Her uncle turned very slowly to Aunt Elellanena. You have witnessed this. I have.
You have signed against your own brother. I have signed for my own niece George. I have not signed against you. You may, when this is settled, present yourself at my door without a sister-in-law. You may not present yourself ever again without a niece. He looked at her for a long time. Then he turned to the Duke.
Your grace, sir. You have spent the week in this house. In this house, in the small parlor, with the door open, with my secretary present, at every conversation involving Miss Wescott, and with Lady Tolbert in the next room. I have not been alone with Miss Westcot at any time. I have not so much as taken her hand without the company of the room.
You will marry her, if she will have me. Her uncle’s mouth tightened. He looked at Imagigan. Will you have him? I will after Monday with a settlement of my own drawing in the chapel of my mother’s estate. You have arranged this between you. We have agreed it between us. We have not arranged it.
The arrangement will be made in writing, witnessed, and recorded. Imagigen. Yes, uncle. You will regret this. When the trust is broken open, you will find that there is less in it than the Duke has told you, and that he has acted not out of charity, but out of greed. He has wanted a Hampshire estate for a year.
He has spoken of it at his club. He believes he can settle his sister there. He has been waiting for a chance to lay hands on it, and has chosen you as the means. When you understand this, you will know that I had your interest at heart, and he had only his own.” She heard him say it. She heard the small kindling thing it was meant to do at the back of her mind.
The small, careful flame, meant to make her look at the Duke and see for one instant a man who had courted her for an estate. The Duke did not move. She looked at him at last. Adrien, yes. Does your sister wish for a Hampshire estate? My sister, who is married to a Suffukk man, owns three estates in Suffukk, and would not willingly leave the county.
I have not spoken of your mother’s estate at any club. I had not heard the name of it until Monday evening. I do not, in any event, propose that your estate be ours. Your estate will be settled on you and on any child of yours in your name by deed of trust executed in the week of our marriage. I will be its tenant if you will let me.
I will not be its master. Uncle Imigen, you will leave this house now. You will leave it with Mr. Hulcom. You will not call upon me or upon my aunt or upon his grace or upon any servant in any of our households until you have written me a letter in your own hand, not your solicitors, explaining with what apology you can muster, why you allowed me to be raised on charity in your house for 18 years when I owned the means of my own keep all that time.
When I have read that letter, I will decide whether you may visit me. Until I have read it, you will not enter any door of mine. He went very white. You are speaking to me, he said, as if you were already mistress of a house. I am mistress of my mother’s house, uncle, as of Monday morning. I should think it best to begin practicing. He left.
He left without saying anything more. and Mister Hulkcom went out behind him, and the housekeeper, who had been standing by the door, with her face perfectly composed, closed the front door after them with such carefulness that Imagigen heard the latch click into place across the length of the hall. Aunt Elellanena put down her embroidery. Mr.
Atheton, yes, Elellanar, will you say a small grace over the tea, please? I find I am rather thirsty, he said. it. The grace was very short. He had been saying short graces for 30 years and had learned like everyone else in the house that the country did not need long ones. Imagin sat down on the small striped sofa.
The Duke sat down at the other end of it. The magistrate took the chair by the door. Aunt Elellanena rang for fresh tea. Mister Athetherton accepted a slice of plum cake. That said the magistrate after a moment was a great deal less unpleasant than I had been led to expect. He has had three days to think about it, Henry.
He came in a temper and lost it again in 2 minutes when he saw who was in the room. That is the trouble with a temper. It is no use against an audience. He will come back. He will come back. He will come back in print. He will write letters to every drawing room he knows. We shall reply in print also. We shall between us ruin his social usefulness in 3 months.
By the autumn he will have retired to his estate in Lincolnshshire. And we shall not hear his name again in London for the rest of his life. I am sorry for him in a small way. He gambled away your father’s library, Elellanar. I know it. I am, as I said, sorry for him in a small way. He did come back in a sense in print.
He wrote three letters that week, two of which Aunt Elellanena answered, and one of which she did not. He called upon Lord Strathmore and was refused at the door. He called upon the bishop of Winchester and was received with great courtesy for 9 minutes and was then dismissed with the news that the bishop had read his great niece’s letter and would on consideration be officiating at her wedding himself in the autumn.
He called upon Imagin’s godfather and was received for half an hour and at the end of the half hour was told by Imagigan’s godfather that the godfather had read the deed of trust on Monday afternoon and that the matter had been in his expression embarrassingly clear from the first paragraph. The lodging of the objection at the court of chancery on the Monday morning was a small thing in the end considering how much traveling and how many letters had been required to make it possible.
The Duke arrived in Lincoln’s inn at 9 with his secretary, his solicitor, and the king’s council he had retained on Friday afternoon. They sat in a panled antichamber for 40 minutes, while a cler copied the last page of the petition in a hand so precise that the Duke, who had watched a great many clarks in his life, said afterwards that he had never seen a man waste fewer strokes of a pen.
Imagigin was not in the room. She was by her own choice at her aunt’s house in Hampshire, sitting at the writing desk in the morning room, with the long sash window open onto the lawn and a cup of cooling tea at her elbow. She had said on the Sunday evening that she would not be present at the lodging because the lodging was a thing of paper and that she would be present instead at every door her uncle had ever sent a letter through until each door understood what had been done.
She had written in her own hand on Sunday night 11 letters, and the Duke had taken them with him in a sealed packet at dawn, and his secretary had delivered them by the morning of Tuesday to the addresses on each cover. By Tuesday afternoon, there was not a drawing room in three counties that had not had the trusted described to it by Imagigan Westcot in her own words.
At a4 10 in Lincoln’s inn, the king’s council rose and walked across the cold polished floor of the anti chamber and went in through the side door to lodge the objection in chambers. The Duke remained on the bench. He had been told he could not enter. He sat for 17 minutes with his hat on his knee and his hands quite still.
At the end of 17 minutes, the door opened again, and the king’s council came out and gave a small, dry nod, which was the Duke knew by now, the nearest thing to a smile he was likely to produce, and said only, “Loded cause set for Friday in 2 weeks. The master will hear it in chambers. You may go and tell the lady.
” The Duke rose, bowed, and was on the road south by noon. He did not stop in London. He went to Ashidge in one stage and arrived at the door at 9 that night in the dark by lamplight and Aunt Elellanar opened the door herself because she had heard the wheels. Lodged, he said, inside your grace. There is soup. The objection was upheld in full on the second Friday of May. The hearing took less than an hour.
Imagin attended with her aunt and her godfather and the Duke and a Hampshire solicitor who had been her mother’s solicitor in 1809 and who on being shown the deed in his own 30-year-old handwriting had become in a single afternoon an old man revived. The master listened to the king’s council for 19 minutes.
He looked through the deed and the supporting documents with the heir of a man who would rather have been at his lunch. He asked Imagin three questions in succession. What was her name? What was her birthday? And was she present of her own will, received three plain answers, and pronounced for the trust before the noon clock had struck in the courtyard.
Her uncle was not present. He had been told by his own solicitor that his presence would not improve his case and had taken the advice for the first time in his life. By the end of May, Immeran had visited her mother’s estate twice, slept three nights in the housekeeper’s wing, walked the orchard, and met the steward, who was a man of 60, who had wept on the doorstep when he learned who she was.
The house was called Marlo. It sat in a fold of the Hampshire Downs above a small stream with a south front of warm greystone and a north front of red brick from a tuda wing that had been swallowed by the 18th century enlargement. And the orchard ran from the kitchen door down the slope to the stream in three long terraces of apple and pear and one stubborn old quint.
The house had been shut since 1809. The shutters had been taken down once a year and the chimneys swept twice a year and the sellers aired. But the rooms had not been lived in. The steward who was named Mister Garrick had kept the place ready as a man keeps a daughter’s coat hanging in the hall because he is not yet able to give it away.
When Imigen walked into the South drawing room on her first afternoon and put her hand on the back of the sofa where her mother had sat to write letters in 1808. Mr. Garrick stood in the doorway with his hat in both hands and did not come in. She did not that day ask to be shown her mother’s bedroom. She asked to be shown the orchard.
Mister Garrick led her down through the terraces and named each tree by the variety and by the year it had been planted. And at the lowest terrace where the stream cut across the bottom of the slope, he stopped beside a particular old apple tree with bark like cracked leather and said only, “Your mother planted this one in the spring she was married, ma’am.
It bears one barrel of fruit a year and has never failed. Imagin put her palm flat against the bark and felt the warmth of the May sun in it. And Mister Garrick, after a moment walked back to the house without her, and left her there for an hour, which was the right thing to do. By the end of June, she had moved into the south bedroom, which had been her mother’s, and had begun work on the kitchen garden, [clears throat] which had been allowed to go to seed.
The kitchen garden was a walled square at the east end of the house, a quarter of an acre, with the lower wall of mellow brick, and the upper three walls of warm gray stone, and it had not been planted properly in 18 years. The first morning she walked into it, she stood for a long time in the middle of the central path and counted what was salvageable and what was lost.
The fruit canes along the south wall had survived. The old pair espalars on the east wall had survived. Everything else had returned to grass and dock and the kind of nettle that takes a quarter of an acre seriously. She wrote out a plan on cream paper at the kitchen table that evening.
By the second week of July, the kitchen garden smelted of warm earth and bruised thyme. The wind moved smoke from the gardener’s small fire across the dry stone wall. Her hands were rough with new blisters, and the soft pulse in her wrist, beat a steady rhythm against the iron of the trowel. She had two men from the village turning the south third of the garden under the steward’s direction.
And by the first week of August, the south third was sewn to early greens for the autumn, and the middle third was being dug. She did the digging, and the warm sun pressed on her shoulder, and the small of her spine. The smell of crushed grass and dust, and the sharp bitter green of new nettle lifted from the ground.
Her breath was loud in her own ear, and her fingers, when she paused, were stiff and dry in the middle third herself. She had decided, in her own private way, that she would not ask of the men from the village any work she had not first done with her own hands in the same garden. The house the house in those first weeks began to remember what it was for.
Immeran had inherited her mother’s habit of opening windows in the morning. Mister Garrick, who had lived through 18 years of closed shutters, found himself standing in the south drawing room at 7 on a Tuesday in early June, with a sash thrown up to its full height, and the smell of the kitchen garden coming through it. He was startled to realize that he had not stood in that room with the window open since the year he had stopped expecting his mistress to come back.
He sent word to the maids that the windows of the principal rooms were to be opened every dry morning between 6:00 and 8 and closed again before the heat of the day. Immeran overheard him give the order on the landing and did not when he came round the corner and saw her say anything. She simply nodded once and he nodded back and that was the end of it.
The dairy was reopened in the third week of June. The dairy maid who had walked across the fields from her sister’s cottage in the next parish on the morning Immigran sent for her was a thin sharpeyed woman of 30 named Mrs. Roer, who had served Immigran’s mother for the two summers before her marriage, on being shown into the south drawing room with her bonnet still in her hand, she took one look at Immeran and said before any introduction at all.
You have her chin, Miss. Imagigan had not been able to answer for a moment. Mrs. Roer, who had learned in 18 years of being a country dairy maid exactly how long to wait, waited. After a moment, Immigran said, “Tell me what we need.” And Mrs. Roer said, “Two cows, a fresh churn, and the south door of the dairy rehung miss.
” And that was the beginning of the dairy. By the end of July, there were three cows, and a calf and butter going up to the kitchen twice a week, and Mrs. Roer sleeping in the room above the dairy as she had done in 1808. The orchard came in slowly. The old trees needed two summers of careful pruning before they would bear properly again.
And Mister Garrick had begun the pruning in May and was prepared to be patient. He took Imagigen with him into the orchard one afternoon in mid July and showed her with his pruning blade the cut that opens a neglected branch to the air and the cut that wounds it past saving. She watched him make six cuts. On the seventh he handed her the tool.
She made a cut. He looked at it and at her and said only again in 5 minutes on the next tree. She made another cut on the next tree. He examined it. He said, “Now, miss, you may prune the lower terrace by yourself, and I will go to the kitchen for my tea, and I will come back in an hour.” He went.
She pruned the lower terrace. When he came back, he walked the row in silence. Looked at each cut and said at the end, “Your mother could not in 1808 have done it cleaner.” She did not say anything. She wiped the blade and gave it back to him and went up to the house and sat in the south drawing room for half an hour with her hands in her lap before she rang for tea.
The Duke came down from London at the end of every week through that summer. He arrived on a Friday afternoon and left on a Monday morning, and his secretary, who had developed a quiet, stubborn affection for Hampshire weather, came with him on every visit. The Duke did not stay at Marofield. He stayed with great correctness at the inn in the village a mile away and walked up to the house each morning at 10:00 in a country coat and with the dust of the road still on his boots and walked back to the inn each evening before the supper bell. He worked in the small
library at the south corner of the house, a room with three south windows and one west with bare oak floors and one turkey carpet that had been folded under a sheet for 18 years and was beaten outside on the gravel by Mister Garrick himself in May. Imagin worked at her desk in the same library. They did not on most afternoons speak much.
The Duke wrote letters concerning his own estates, of which there were three. Imagigan wrote letters concerning her mother’s estate, of which there was the one. Sometimes in the middle of an afternoon, he would set down his pen, walk to the window, look out at the kitchen garden where two village men were digging, watch for a moment, and come back to the desk, and she would, without looking up from her own paper, say a number aloud.
41 on one occasion, 62 on another, and he would say very gravely, “Thank you,” and resume writing. He had asked her on the third visit what she was counting. She had told him it was none of his business. He had not asked again. The summer settled into the house. Mister Garrick aired the rooms in succession, and Imagigan learned the names of the maids and the gardener and the dairymen.
By the end of June, Aunt Elellanena came over from Ashridge on Wednesdays with a basket of preserves and stayed for tea and went back in time for her own supper. The vicar of Marlo, who was a tall, thin man of 40 named Mister Hadley, called once a week, and was very surprised on his second visit to find that Immigran had already read every book in his small village library, and had opinions about most of them.
He took to bringing two books each visit and going home with the previous two. And by August he had stopped praying. The calls were pastoral and was simply visiting a young woman in a country house to argue about Pope. The settlement was drawn in July. Imagigin wrote the first draft of it herself at the long oak table in the dining room with the Duke at the other end of the table writing his own draft in parallel.
They exchanged the two papers at the end of three afternoons and disagreed about exactly seven clauses, none of them important. She kept her name. She kept the estate. She kept the right to bequeath the estate by her own will to any person of any condition, with or without his consent. He kept the right to manage the home farm of his own seat in Burkshshire, which had been his since his 19th year, and the right to refuse any reasonable request, she made of him concerning the management of his three estates.
On the understanding that he would in practice refuse none, the cler, who copied it out for the lawyers, said it was the strangest settlement he had seen in a duke’s hand, and the most reasonable. The lawyers signed it on the 14th of July and the Duke and Imigen signed it on the 15th in the south drawing room of Marlo with the son coming in at the long west window and mister Garrick standing by the door as witness because Imigan had said it would not be properly signed otherwise.
She was married to the Duke of Ashborne on the 17th of September. The morning of the wedding was bright and very still. The first frost of the season had touched the orchard in the night, and by sunrise it was already dissolving from the bark of her mother’s apple tree at the bottom of the slope, and a thin white mist lay along the stream like a fold of laid muslin.
Imagin woke before the maid did. She lay in her mother’s bed in the south bedroom for half an hour with the curtains drawn back and watched the light come up across the ceiling and she thought about nothing in particular and was surprised to find that she was perfectly steady. She rose at 6.
The maid brought her chocolate at 7. By 8 she had bathed and was sitting in her wrap at the small writing desk by the window with her hair loose down her back, drinking the chocolate slowly, watching the steward’s son cross the lower terrace with two pales of water for the kitchen. The chapel of her mother’s estate was small and very plain.
It had been built in 1719 and had been re-roofed once. It seated 40. There were not 40 present. There were her aunt, the bishop of Winchester, Mr. Athetherton, who had been invited and had come, Mister, who had been invited, and had come with his wife, whom he had hidden from polite society for 30 years, on the grounds that she was too kind for it.
the housekeeper of Ashridge, the Duke’s sister and her suffuk husband, Lord Strathmore, in a striped waste coat, Imagigan’s godfather, and the steward, who had refused to sit anywhere but the back pew on the grounds that he was a servant. Imagigan wore a gown of pale green silk that Aunt Elellanena had given her, and her mother’s pearls and her mother’s pins.
She walked up the aisle on her godfather’s arm because she had asked him to give her and because he had not when she asked him said anything at all but had simply nodded and held out his elbow. The bishop married them in 9 minutes by the chapel clock. The Duke’s voice in answering the bishop was the steediest sound she had ever heard him make.
Her own voice when she said her own answers was to her own surprise as steady as his. At the end of the service, when the bishop pronounced them, the Duke kissed her very lightly in front of the entire small congregation, and her aunt’s housekeeper, who had been crying quietly throughout the service into a handkerchief borrowed from Mister Pickering dropped the handkerchief and clapped, which made Lord Strathmore laugh, and after that the small chapel filled up with the kind of noise that very small weddings sometimes times make and that very large ones never quite
achieve. They walked back to the house because the chapel was a quarter mile from the door and they walked it on foot, all of them in the September sun, and the kitchen garden which Imagigan had dug all summer was waiting in the autumn light when they reached it, and the wedding breakfast was set up on long trestle tables under the apple trees.
The Kigen had said the week before that she would not be married in a house and breakfasted in another. And the Duke had said very simply that she would have her breakfast wherever she liked. In April of the following year, Imagin walked in the rose walk of her own house. The rosewalk her mother had laid out in 1808, the year before her marriage, and she counted the new buds along the lower hedge. There were 62.
There had been 38 in Aunt Elellanena’s rose walk a year ago. And the difference was not a difference of season, but of the rose. Her mother had chosen a stronger rose. She heard in the distance the sound of wheels on gravel. She turned slowly and walked back through the kitchen garden, and the wheels came up the avenue, and the carriage stopped at the door, and the Duke, who had been 3 days in London on business of the estate, got out and crossed the gravel to her without dust on his coat this time, because he had washed at the coaching inn at the last
change of horses, and he stopped 3 ft from her with his hat in his hand. You are early, she said. I rode the last stage. I could not wait for the coach. You are very dusty. Not really. I washed at the inn. You are slightly dusty. Yes, Adrien. Yes, take my hand. He took a hand. He did not raise it.
He held it for the length of a single breath in the April sun, and his thumb went once over the knuckle of her smallest finger as though counting it. And then he let it go and bent and picked up the trowel which she had dropped on the path when she heard him coming and put it back into her palm with the handle the right way round. Go on, he said.
I will sit with you while you finish. Then we will go in for tea, she went on. He sat down on the low stone wall behind her with his hat on his knee and his coat thrown over the wall beside him, and she dug with her sleeves pushed past her elbows and her hands black to the wrists with new April earth.
and the blackbird that had nested in the lower hedge in February came down onto the bench at the end of the walk to see whether she had brought anything and the gravel had no more business under wheels for the rest of the afternoon because for the rest of the afternoon there was no one coming up the avenue who was not already in the garden.
If you have ever been told to forget someone in a quiet room by a person who believes they are protecting you and have felt instead of forgetting the small steady knowledge deette that the person you were told to forget is someone who given the chance would ride 200 m to find you. Then you know what kind of story this was.
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