‘You Are Far Too Clever to Find a Husband,’ Her Father Said — She Smiled; the Duke Was Listening

You are far too clever to find a husband, Sir Marcus Thorne said, and laughed as though he had paid his daughter a compliment, the Duke of Norbury, seated at the man’s right hand, and wishing himself anywhere else in England, set down his glass. He had come to Marchfield Hall to buy a horse. He had endured courses of watery soup and warmer flattery for the privilege, and he had spent most of the evening calculating how soon he might decently call for his carriage.

He had not until that moment so much as troubled to look at the young woman seated across the table. He looked now. She did not flush. She did not fold. She lifted her chin a very little and she smiled a small private unhurried smile as if her father had said something true and inconvenient and slightly beneath her notice, and she answered in a voice as clear as struck crystal.

Fortunately, Papa, I was not looking for one. Somewhere down the table a fork rang against porcelain. Lady Thorne made a soft strangled sound and allaric vain, ninth Duke of Norbury, who had been called the coldest man in three counties and had earned every syllable of it, felt something shift in his chest with the unwelcome finality of a bolt sliding home.

Verity her mother breathed, “Mama, you will apologize.” “For what precisely?” Miss Thorne asked, and reached for the sort with perfect composure. Papa observed that cleverness is a hindrance to matrimony. I agreed with him. I cannot see how agreement is an offense unless the offense lies in the agreeing rather than the thing agreed to, in which case the fault is in the ear and not the tongue.

Norbury coughed into his napkin. It was not a laugh. He had not laughed in company in some years, and he had no intention of beginning at a table where the fish had been served lukewarm, and the master of the house was angling for his patronage. But it was near enough to a laugh that Sir Marcus turned to him with the desperate brightness of a man watching his owner party go up in flames.

You must forgive her your grace, she reads. Does she? said the Duke. Far too much. If you can credit it. My late brother filled her head with it before he had the decency to die and leave the mess to me. Sir Marcus refilled his own glass without offering the decanter. I have told her a hundred times, a woman who argues is a woman who dines alone.

And yet, said Miss Thorne serenly, here I am dining with six people I did not invite. The Duke lifted his glass to hide his mouth. She was not beautiful in the way the season taught men to want. Her gown was 2 years out of fashion and had been turned at the cuffs. He noticed such things, having spent his life among people who wished him not to.

Her hair was dark and imperfectly pinned. One strand of it escaped and lying against her throat, and her eyes, when at last they came to rest on him, were gray and steady, and entirely unimpressed. That was the thing. That was what undid him, though it would take him a fortnight to admit it. Everyone in England was impressed by the Duke of Norbury.

Mothers were impressed. Bishops were impressed. Men who despised him were impressed against their will and showed it by despising him more loudly. Miss Veritythornne looked at 40,000 a year, a title that predated the tutors, and a face that had been described in a scurless print as handsome as a locked door, and she plainly thought another one.

“You disapprove of me, Miss Thorne,” he said. The table went silent. Lady Thorne’s fan stopped. I do not know you well enough to disapprove of you. Your grace, she said. Disapproval is a considered position. I have only a first impression, and first impressions are cheap. Mine cost me nothing and are worth what they cost.

And what is it this worthless impression? She considered him. She actually considered him, took her time about it, the way a man might consider a horse he had no intention of buying. That you are bored, she said. that you have been bored for a long while and that you have decided boredom is a kind of superiority because the alternative is to admit that you are lonely.

The clock on the mantel ticked 11 times before anyone breathed. Verity her father roared you asked papa or rather his grace asked and I have long thought that a question is a door and that is discortis to be invited through a door and then stand in the frame. Sir Marcus rose half out of his chair, leave the table.

Certainly, she laid down her napkin, folded it, and stood. She inclined her head to her mother, to the vicar, to the two neighbors who had come to go at a duke, and last of all to Norbury, and here, here, for the first time. Something flickered in her face that was not composure at all. It was a kind of tiredness, as though she had had this evening before in other rooms, and knew exactly how it ended, and had merely wished once that it might end differently.

“Good night, your grace,” she said. “I hope the mayor suits you. Her near hind is weak, whatever the groom tells you, and my father knows it.” And she was gone. The Duke of Norbury did not buy the mayor. He rode home under a thin moon with his collar up in his mind, for the first time in years, thoroughly and unmanageably occupied.

Behind him, Marchfield Hall dwindled to a smear of yellow windows. Ahead of him lay Norbury Castle, 40 rooms and one occupant, and a library his grandfather had built and his father had never opened. He was lonely. The insolence of it, the accuracy of of it. He was still thinking about it at 3:00 in the morning, standing at his own window with a book he had not read a line of, when he understood, with the sinking clarity of a man watching a wave come in that he was going to have to see her again, he made himself wait 4 days. He told

himself it was courtesy, it was cowardice, and he knew it was cowardice, and knowing it did not help. On the fifth morning he rode to Marchfield and found her not in the house at all, but in the lane beyond the orchard wall. sitting on a star with her boots muddy to the ankle and a book open on her knee and a look on her face of such absolute absorption that she did not hear a duke and a 16-hand hunter until they were 10 yards off. She looked up.

She did not scramble down. She did not blush or babble. She simply closed the book on her finger and said, “You did not buy the mayor.” I did not. Papa’s very cross. Sir Marcus said the Duke dismounting may take his crossness and drown it in the Malmus port he has been passing off as the good stuff. Which of us do you suppose he tried to cheat first, me or you? Something moved in her face, the beginning of a smile suppressed at birth.

That is a disloyal question. It is a truthful one. You may decline to answer it. I declined to answer it,” she said, and the smile got away from her at last. And it was, he would think of it, a great deal afterwards, the most alarming thing he had ever seen. It transformed her. It made a nonsense of the turned cuffs and the badly pinned hair.

It was like watching a shuttered house throw open every window at once. He led the horse to the wall and looped the reen over a post and stood in the lane like a man who had no earthly idea what he was doing there which was very nearly the case. What are you reading? She turned the spine towards him without a word.

He read it and looked at her and said that is a very bad translation. It is an appalling translation. She agreed with feeling. The man renders every particle as though Greek were a language spoken by drunkards, and he has cut the whole of the third speech, because he found it indelicate. I have been correcting him in the margins for a week.

It has become the great labor of my life. My uncle left me his Greek, but he did not leave me his library, and my father sold the lexicons for a pointer that turned out to be barren, which I consider a judgment. The Duke of Norbury stood in a muddy lane in a coat that had cost more than the thorn’s carriage and heard himself say, “I have a lexicon.

How pleasant for you. I have nine. I have my grandfather’s Greek and my great uncles and a Herodotus with the pages uncut.” And a copy of the third speech that is not appalling, and none of it has been touched in 30 years, because the men of my family collect books the way they collect debts of honor for the look of the thing. He paused.

He was not accustomed to speaking so much at once. It is all being eaten by damp and by moths, and I have a librarian who is 81, and has confused the poets with the historians, and does not care to be told. Miss Thorne had gone very still. Why are you telling me this? Because you will pretend not to want it, said the Duke.

And I would rather you did not. It is a waste of both our time, and I have a great deal of time and very little idea what to do with it. but I suspect you have less.” She looked at him for a long moment. The wind came up the lane and moved the loose strand of hair against her cheek, and she put it back without noticing she had done it, and he watched her do it, and he thought, “I am in a great deal of trouble.

You are offering me your library,” she said slowly. “I am offering you the use of it.” There is a difference, though I confess I am not certain at present that I could tell you what it is. My father would never permit it. Your father, said Norbury, would permit me to walk his roof and set fire to it if I asked him prettily and let him tell the neighborhood I had done it.

That is not a compliment to him, and I do not offer it as one. But it is the truth, and I think he would rather have the truth than the compliment. Verity Thorne closed her book. She looked down the lane towards the house and up at the gray sky and finally at him and there was no impertinence in her face now.

None of the bride armor she had worn at the table. There was only a woriness so old and so patient that it made his chest ache. People are not kind to me your grace, she said quietly. They think me a curiosity. They set me talking to be amused and then they go away and repeat what I said and laugh.

I have learned to be amusing about it because the alternative is to mind and minding is a great deal of work. If you have come to be amused, I would take it as a kindness if you went away now before I begin to hope. The Duke of Norbury had faced down a dwelling pistol at 15 paces without altering his breathing.

He found that he could not at this moment quite managed to speak. “Come on Thursday,” he said at last roughly. “Bring your pencils. the margins of my books are in worse case than yours.” And he mounted and rode away without once looking back, because he did not trust his face, and because he had begun dimly, disastrously to understand what was happening to him.

His steward was waiting in the munament room when he returned, with three tenencies to sign, and a dispute over a boundary ditch that had been running since the reign of the late king. Your grace rode to Marchfield. I did. Did we bomb air after all? We did not, said the Duke, taking up the pen, and if Sir Marcus Thorne calls, you will tell him I am from home, and you will keep telling him so until Thursday, at which Hower, his daughter, will be admitted to the library, and he will not.

The steward, who had served the family for 30 years, and had never once seen his master’s face do what it was doing at that moment, said very carefully. The library, your grace, the library. It has not been opened since the old Duke’s time. Then it is high time it was aired, said Norbury, and signed his name so hard that the nib went through the paper.

He gave orders that afternoon that would have astonished the county had the county heard them. The library fires were to be lit and kept in. The rotted matting was to come up. The 81-year-old librarian was to be penched handsomely and told with all courtesy that his labors were at an end. He wept and was given the lodged cottage and a case of the good port, and went away contented.

The 12 windows on the west front were washed for the first time in a decade. And when the maids had done, the light came into that long room the way water comes into a dry channel. and the Duke of Norbury stood in the middle of it with his hands behind his back and could not for the life of him have told anyone what he was feeling, only that it was not boredom, only that he had spent 19 years in this house being a monument to his own name, and that a girl in a mended gown had looked at him across a table of watery

soup and named him lonely, and he had not been able to get the word out of him since. It sat in his chest like a stone in a shoe. He turned it over at night. He tried with the discipline of a lifetime to be angry about it and found that he could not manage even that. He was too busy calculating how many hours remained until Thursday, a calculation he performed four times before dinner and despised himself for on each occasion.

He was the 9th Duke of Norbury. He owned 9,000 acres, two boroughs, and a house in town. He had refused three hereses, buried both his parents dry-eyed, and been described in print as handsome as a locked door. And on Wednesday night, he lay awake in the dark like a boy before a fair, listening to the rain, and remembering that she had asked him to go away before she began to hope.

Well, it was too late for that. It was, he suspected, turning his face to the wall with the grim resignation of a man who has heard the ice crack and knows precisely how deep the water is beneath him. a very great deal too late for that. She came on Thursday. She came in the same turned gown in a hired gig with a boy from the village driving, and she stood in the great hall of Norbury Castle and did not gasp at the ceiling or the armor or the van on the stairs.

She looked at the tapestry above the fireplace with a throne and said, “That is hung backwards. It is not. It is. The light falls from the left in every other panel of the series. Whoever hung it has reversed this one, which is why the shepherd appears to be blessing a sheep with his left hand, which no shepherd in the 15th century would have been painted doing, she tipped her head.

It has been backwards for a hundred years, I should think. Everyone who came here was too polite to say so. The Duke looked at the tapestry. He had walked beneath it every day of his life. Nobody, he said, has ever been polite to me. They have merely been afraid. that is politeness with better manners. He led her to the library.

He had not expected to enjoy it. He had told himself, riding home from the lane, that he had done a decent thing for a girl who had been badly used, and that the transaction would be brief and dull and end in his conscience being quiet, which was all he wanted from his conscience. She stopped in the doorway and made no sound at all.

The library at Norbury ran the length of the west front, two stories of it, a gallery on iron brackets, 12 windows and 40,000 volumes, and a smell of leather and dust and cold ash. Rain was coming across the park. The light was the color of puter. Verity Thorne stood in the doorway with her hands at her sides, and the Duke of Norbury watching her saw her mouth tremble once and firm again.

Oh, she said, that was all. But he had heard men beg and women weep, and he had never in his life heard anything we think with so much in it. The Greek is on the north wall, he said when he could. The lexicons are behind the ladder. Nothing has been cataloged since 1794. Everything is in the wrong place. It will take you a year.

She turned to look at him and she was smiling and her eyes were wet. Good, she said. She came twice a week and then three times and then it stopped being a thing that either of them counted. It was a scandal, of course. It was a scandal from the second week. And by the fourth the county could speak of nothing else, and Sir Marcus Thorne, who had raged for a full day, and then done the sums, began to tell people at market that his daughter was engaged upon a very great scholarly work for his grace.

A very great work indeed, and to hint that an announcement might be looked for. The Duke heard of it. He did nothing, he found, examining himself with the cold thoroughess he applied to everything that he did not mind. What he minded was Tuesdays and Fridays when she did not come.

She worked at a long table beneath the third window. She wore an apron over the shabby gown and tied a cloth over her hair against the dust, and she made lists in a hand so small and neat it looked like a printed thing. And she argued with dead men in the margins of their own books. And she talked. Lord, how she talked. She talked to herself when she believed she was alone.

She talked to him when she remembered he was there. She talked to the books and scolded them. And once he came in and found her holding a volume of sermons at arms length as though it had bitten her, saying, “You do not believe a word of this, you dreadful little man, you were paid by the page. Miss Thorne, she did not jump. She had stopped jumping in the third week.

Your grace, did you know your great uncle wrote to a French book seller for 30 years and never once paid him? That does not surprise me. It is all here in the end papers. He kept the account in Latin, presumably so the servants could not read it, which suggests a low opinion of the servants and a high one of himself. She set the sermons down.

You are standing in the doorway again. I am at liberty to stand where I like. It is my house. You have been standing in the doorway for 3 weeks, said Verity Thorne, not looking up. You come in, you stand, you say something forbidding, and you go away. I have been counting. Yesterday you stood for 11 minutes.

The Duke of Norbury discovered that he could still be made to feel like a boy of 19. You might, she went on, turning a page. Sit down. There is a chair. It is your chair. It is in point of fact a very fine chair and has been used by nobody for the whole of this century and I think it is lonely. He looked at the chair.

He sat down in it and that was the beginning of the best autumn of his life though he did not know it then. He knew only that the rain came on and the fire was lit. And she read aloud to him from the third speech in a translation of her own that was so much better than the printed one that he made her write it out.

and that when the light failed at 4:00, she would put her chin on her hand and look at the fire and say the most extraordinary things quietly as if to herself. I think grief is a kind of debt, she said once. One goes on paying it long after one has forgotten what one borrowed. Who taught you that? Nobody.

I worked it out. That is what one does when one is not permitted to speak at dinner. He had been 11 when his mother died, and 12 when his father informed him that a vain did not weep, and 38 when a girl in a borrowed apron told him without knowing she had done it, exactly what had been the matter with him for 26 years. He began to bring her things.

It was, he understood, perfectly well, absurd. Dukes did not fetch. He fetched. He fetched a lexicon down from a high shelf because the ladder was rotten. Then he had the ladder mended and fetched things anyway. He brought her a lamp because the light was bad at her table. He brought her a shawl because the library was cold and pretended it had been his grandmother’s and was of no value and it was in fact new and had been sent from London and she knew it and looked at him for a long moment and said nothing at all and wore it every

day thereafter. He gave orders that the fire in the library was to be lit at 8, whether Miss Thorne was expected or not. And in the first week of November, on a morning of hard white frost, she did not come, nor on the Thursday, nor the Monday after. He rode to Marchfield on the Tuesday, and Sir Marcus met him in the hall with a face like a man selling something.

Your grace, an honor, an honor, you’ll take Madera. Where is your daughter? Ah, Sir Marcus’s eyes slid. The fact is, your grace, there has been an offer. A very handsome offer from Mr. Colby of Fen Hollow. You’ll know the name 40 years in the wool trade, a widowerower, a most respectable man, and I have accepted on her behalf.

She is upstairs composing herself. Girls do take these things hard at first, but she’ll come round. She has no fortune and no looks to speak of, and she is four and 20. And I told her plainly that a woman who argues dines alone, said the Duke of Norbury. I recall something in his voice made Sir Marcus stop talking.

You will send for her,” said the Duke. “Your grace, you will send for her now.” She came down the stairs slowly, and he saw at once that she had been weeping, and that she had washed her face, and put up her hair, and meant to be seen weeping by nobody, least of all by him. She stopped three steps from the bottom, which put her eyes level with his, and he understood that she had done it on purpose, and his heart turned over.

“Your grace, Miss Thorne, your father tells me you are to be married. My father tells of many people a great many things. Do you wish to marry Mr. KBY of Fen Hollow? Verity, her father said warningly. She did not look at him. She looked at the Duke and she was very white and she said, it does not signify what I wish.

There are no lexicans in this house, your grace, and no fires lit at 8. And a woman of four and 20 with £100 and an unfortunate habit of speaking is not asked what she wishes. she is told. I have known that since I was 15. I had merely lately allowed myself to forget it. That was my doing. Yes, she said it was. And the anger in it, the clean, bright, terrible anger of it, went through him like a blade because she was right because he had opened a door for her and let her stand in the frame and then gone home to his 40 rooms and thought himself generous.

Mr. Colby, he said, is 61. He buried two wives. His sons are older than you are and they will not thank you for coming and he does not read. I am aware of the whole of Mr. Colby. Then say no. I have said no. Her chin came up. I said no on Saturday and again on Sunday and I have said it every hour since and my father has informed me that I may say it until the banza read for all the good it will do and he is quite correct. She drew a breath.

So if you have come to be amused your grace, you have come at a very poor time. The Duke of Norbury looked at her for the space of three heartbeats. Then he said, “Sir Marcus, leave us. I really cannot leave us,” said the Duke without turning his head, and there was a quality in it that had emptied rooms at Westminster.

And so Marcus Thorne went out of his own hall like a man walking backwards from a fire. The door closed. The hall was cold and smelled of damp plaster and old dogs. Verity Thornne stood on the third stair with her hands folded and did not come down. I am going to say this badly, said the Duke of Norbury.

You say most things badly. It is one of the few restful things about you. Then have the goodness to be quiet and let me be bad at it. She shut her mouth. She looked for the first time since he had known her, frightened. when you came to my table in June, he said, I had not spoken a word in 8 years that was not a transaction.

I bought, I sold, I voted, I signed. I was 38 years old, and I had been a duke since I was 19. And I had come to believe that the coldness in me was the whole of me, that it was the point of me, and that any man who found it unpleasant merely wanted something he had failed to get. He paused. You said I was lonely.

You said it across a dinner table in front of a vikar to a man who could have ruined your father with a letter. And you were right. And you knew you were right. And you did not care what it cost. You say so. It cost me a good deal, she said unsteadily. I was sent to bed without my dinner. At 4 and 20. Miss Thorne, I am sorry. I make jokes.

It is what I do instead of the other thing. I know what you do instead of the other thing, said the Duke. I have been watching you do it since June, she went very still. I have sat in that library, he said, and I have listened to you argue with dead bishops and correct dead translators and tell my great uncle<unk>’s ghost precisely what you think of his accounts.

And it has been the only hour of any day of my life that I have ever been sorry to see end. You have made a nuisance of my own house to me. I go into rooms you are not in, and they are wrong. I dine at a table you do not sit at and it is intolerable and I have dined at it alone for 19 years and never once noticed until you were absent from it.

Your grace I am not finished. I am very bad at this and if you interrupt me I shall have to begin again and I have not the constitution for it. He took a step nearer the stairs. Your father says a woman who argues dines alone. He is a fool. I would rather be argued with by you at breakfast than agreed with by the whole of the House of Lords.

And I say that as a man who has had a great deal of experience of both, and I do not know which of the two has bored me more. Her hands folded had begun to shake. I do not want a hostess, said the Duke of Norbury. I have a housekeeper. I do not want an ornament. I have a gallery full of them, and they are all of them hung backwards.

I want the woman who told me the truth in front of a vicar. I want the woman who cried in my doorway because a room had books in it. I want you, Verity. And I have wanted you since the night you told me my mayor was lame and my soul was empty. And I have spent 5 months telling myself that a man of my age, and my temper had no business laying a thing like this at the feet of a girl who had already been made to feel small by everyone else in her life.

He stopped. The whole clock ticked. “That was my cowardice,” he said. It nearly cost you to Mr. Colby. Marry me. She did not speak. I am aware, he went on when he could bear the silence no longer that this is a poor bargain. I am 10 years too old for you, and my disposition is not amiable, and I have not laughed in company since, since your father’s dinner in point of fact, and I coughed to disguise it, and I have been ashamed of the cough ever since.

The library is yours. Whatever you answer, that is not a bribe. I have already had the deed of it drawn in your name, and I did it in September, when I had no more hope of this than of flying, because I could not endure the thought of that room going back to the moths when you were done with it.

You did what? She whispered. It is a very large library. It is a very small thing to give. And Verity Thorne came down the last three stairs and stood in front of him and put both her hands flat against his chest as though to be certain he was there and looked up at him with her face wrecked and shining and said, “You are the most impossible man in England. I am aware.

” You stood in that doorway for 11 minutes and said nothing. I am aware of that also. Do you know what I thought? Her voice broke. I thought he is being kind to a curiosity. I thought he will grow bored and go to London and I shall have had one autumn and I shall live on it for the rest of my life and it will be enough and I will not let myself hope for more because I have hoped before and I have always been the joke at the end of it. She stopped.

She pressed her lips together hard, and then I would look up and you would be there every day, standing in the doorway like a great glowing chimney and saying nothing at all. “I was afraid of you,” said the Duke of Norbury. She laughed, one wet, entirely undignified laugh. “Of me bitterly.

You are the only person alive who has ever looked at me and seen a man rather than an income. Do you imagine that is a comfortable thing?” He lifted his hands at last and covered hers where they lay against his coat. Say yes, Verity. I have run out of ways to be clever about it. Yes, she said. Yes, you dreadful silent chairsitting man. Yes.

And the Duke of Norbury bent his head and kissed her in the cold hall of a shabby house, with her father listening at the door and pretending not to, and the frost thick on the windows, and 40 years of his own silence going out of him like water out of a broken jug. They were married in the spring in the chapel at Norbury on a morning of such absurd blue weather that the Duke who did not believe in signs caught himself believing in one.

Sir Marcus Thorne wept ostentatiously in the second pew and told everyone within reach that he had always encouraged the girl to read. The county came to stare and stayed to be charmed, which was a thing that happened around the new duchess with a regularity her husband found endlessly privately amusing.

The bride wore ivory silk and her mother’s poor pearls, having refused the Norbury diamonds on the grounds that they were vulgar, historically inaccurate, and she suspected paste, a suspicion the family jeweler confirmed with great embarrassment a fortnight later, whereupon the Duke laughed so long and so loudly that a footman came running.

The tapestry in the great hall was rehung the right way round. The library was cataloged in three years, published in seven, and the Norbury catalog is consulted by scholars still, and bears on its title page the name of the woman who made it. She fought him over that. He was implacable. It was the only argument he ever won, and he won it by the simple expedient of having the plates cut before he told her.

And on winter evenings, when the fire in the long room burned down, and the rain came across the park, the Duke of Norbury would look up from his chair, the lonely chair. She called it still, though it had not been lonely in years, and watch his wife at the table beneath the third window, arguing in a whisper with a dead bishop, one strand of hair escaped and lying against her throat.

Sometimes she would feel him looking and glance up and lift an eyebrow. You are staring all Alaric. I am. It is very disconcerting. I am trying to be scathing about a man who died in6002 and you are looking at me at me like a spananiel. Come here, he would say, and she would come and settle on the arm of the chair, and steal his brandy, and read him her scathing sentence aloud, and be praised for it extravagantly, immodderately, in a way that had made her weep the first dozen times, and now only made her put her forehead against his and call him

ridiculous. “You are far too clever to find a husband,” a foolish man had once told her, over a badly cooked dinner. She had not been looking for one. She had found instead the one man in England with the wit to be undone by her mind and the courage to say so out loud. And he told her so in words every day of their life together, because he had learned very late what it cost to leave a true thing unsaid.

And he never made that mistake