Grey for a Wedding

Thursday, May 23, 1816

“It is sleeting,” said Mr. Preece, as if he owed her an apology for it. “On the twenty-third of May. I never saw the like, ma’am.”

“My father did, once. He wrote it in his rain book in red ink.” Linnea shook out her skirts in the church porch. “I am glad he is not here to be proved right. He was unbearable when he was right about weather.”

The steward smiled. He was a short, grey-whiskered man of two and fifty, with a soft border voice and a hat he kept turning in his hands. She had spent three mornings pacing out the walled garden with him, and she liked him. He had not once told her that a thing could not be done. He had only asked how many men it would take.

She had walked across from the rectory under Mrs. Tranter’s umbrella, by the path through the churchyard. It went past the new grave under the yew. The turf had not knitted yet. She had stopped there half a minute, and then gone on, because a bride who is late at nine has no excuse when she lives forty yards from the door.

Her gown was grey. Mrs. Tranter had wanted white, or at least lavender, and had cried a little over the ironing. But Zachary Corfield had been dead not four months, and his daughter would not put off her mourning to oblige a licence. Grey was as far as she would go. She wore her mother’s seed pearls with it, and her silver spectacles, and gloves that hid her fingers.

“Are you ready, ma’am?”

“No,” Linnea said. “But I have given my word, and I have had thirteen days to take it back. Let us go in, Mr. Preece.”

He gave her his arm.

She had known St. Milburga’s all her life. She knew which flagstone rocked and which pew door stuck. She knew the smell of it, damp stone and candle wax and old hassocks. She had never before come up the aisle with every head turned toward her.

The church should have been empty for a wedding by licence on a Thursday morning. It was more than half full. The village had heard, as the village always did, and had come to see the Duke outside his own gates.

He was standing at the chancel step with Oakes a pace behind him.

He wore black, very plain. He stood with his feet a little apart and his hands at his sides. To face the altar he had to have his left side to the nave, and so the patch and the scar were toward two hundred people. He did not turn from them. She saw how straight he held his shoulders, and she guessed what it was costing him.

In the castle pew, raised a step above the rest, three heads showed over the carved door. Crispin sat very upright. Pip had got hold of the door top with both hands and was looking over it like a sentry. Beside her there were only a few fair curls and the brim of a small black bonnet, pressed into Nurse Onions’s side.

Pip saw her and scowled. Linnea was coming to understand that it meant several different things. She thought this one was a greeting.

Then she was at the step, and Mr. Preece had let go of her arm, and the Duke was beside her.

He turned his head and looked at her once. His face told her nothing. He nodded, very slightly, as an officer might to another before something began.

Mr. Aldridge opened his book.

He was a lean, brown-faced man of four and forty, quick in his movements, who had ridden over from his lodging in Ludlow in this weather and had mud on his boots under the surplice. In the vestry on Tuesday he had said to her, “I am turning you out of your house and marrying you out of it in the same month, Miss Corfield. I hope you will let me do the second handsomely.” She had liked him for it.

He read well, plainly and quickly. It was not her father’s voice, and she was grateful, because she could not have borne it if it had been.

“Who giveth this woman to be married to this man?”

“I do,” said Mr. Preece, rather loudly, and went red.

The sleet struck the south windows like thrown gravel. She heard a child’s voice in the castle pew say something, and a hush from Nurse Onions.

The Duke said his vows in the flat voice he had used on her stovepipe, but he said them to her face. When her turn came, her own voice was steadier than she expected. She promised to obey him, and wondered briefly what he would say if she told him that she had no notion of doing it before breakfast.

Then Oakes passed the ring, and the Duke took her left hand.

She had drawn off the glove. Her hand was cold and his was warm and dry. She had half expected his to shake, since her own was not quite still. It was as steady as a man’s hand could be. He held her fingers the way she held a brush, firmly and with no grip in it.

“With this ring I thee wed,” he said after Mr. Aldridge. “With my body I thee worship.”

His voice did not change over the words. She felt the heat climb into her face all the same. There was a door between their rooms with a key on her side, and here he was, saying this to her in front of the whole parish because the Prayer Book left him no choice.

The ring went over her knuckle without a check. It fitted. He must have got one of her gloves from Mrs. Hobday, and it was strange to think of him measuring her finger in an empty glove.

She had scrubbed her hands for a quarter of an hour that morning. There was still a line of green under her thumbnail. His eye rested on it, and one corner of his mouth moved a little, on the side without the scar.

He let her hand go a moment after he might have.

Mr. Aldridge pronounced them man and wife, and that was all. The Duke did not kiss her. He did not so much as lean toward her. He offered his arm, correctly, and she laid her hand on a black sleeve with a good deal of muscle under it, and they followed the rector into the vestry.

The register lay open under the little window. She had filled in its pages herself, often enough, for her father. She dipped the pen and wrote Linnea Corfield for the last time, and looked at it.

“It is a good name,” the Duke said quietly beside her. “I am sorry to cost you the use of it.”

“I shall keep it on a title page, I hope.”

He took the pen and wrote Brackenhope, in a square black hand. Mr. Preece signed below, and then Mrs. Hobday, who had come in on tiptoe in her best bombazine and had plainly been crying. Owen Preece. Winifred Hobday.

The housekeeper laid down the pen, turned, and sank into a curtsy.

“I wish you very happy, Your Grace.”

Linnea understood, a second late, that the words were for her.
***
Dinner was at two, at the schoolroom table, and this time there were five chairs.

It went no worse than she had been told to expect. Crispin reported that he had brought the funnel in by the fire at eight, as she had said to do with snow, and that the sleet had melted to less than a tenth of an inch. He had written Sleet in his weather column and underlined it. Tabitha ate her pudding with her eyes on the Duke the whole time, and went round by the wall to leave the room.

Pip put down her spoon and asked what she was supposed to call her now.

“What would you like to call me?”

“You’re not Miss Corfield. And Nurse says we mustn’t say Your Grace to you because it’s silly in a family.”

“Nurse is quite right. I shall not answer to Your Grace from anybody under four feet high. You might try Aunt Linnea, and see how it wears.”

Pip tried it under her breath, with deep suspicion. The Duke was looking at his plate. Linnea could not tell whether he was amused. She thought he might be.

Afterwards Mrs. Hobday took her along a passage on the first floor, with her keys in her hand.

“These have been shut since Her late Grace died, in the year nine,” the housekeeper said. “Seven years, and a fire lit in them twice every winter to keep the damp off, and that was all. I’ve had the girls in for a fortnight. I hope you’ll find them aired.”

There was a sitting room, a bedchamber and a dressing room. The hangings had been yellow silk once and had faded to the colour of straw. Everything smelled of beeswax and lavender, with something colder underneath that a fortnight had not quite driven out. A fire burned in each grate. Her own trunk stood at the foot of a very large bed, looking as if it had come to the wrong house.

Linnea went to the window first. She could not help it.

It looked down into the walled garden. She could see the old orangery along the north wall, with its tall arched windows, where the pots were to go on Monday. She could see the bare plot she and Mr. Preece had marked out with pegs and twine, thirty-six feet by fourteen. Sleet was lying grey along the tops of the walls.

“Was this done on purpose, Mrs. Hobday?”

“The Duchess of Brackenhope has always had these rooms, Your Grace. But His Grace did ask whether the garden could be seen from them.” The housekeeper smoothed the edge of a curtain. “He was a boy in this room, many a time, on that stool by the fire. Her Grace used to read to the two of them. Lord Edmund never would sit still.”

She said it simply. Then she crossed the bedchamber to a door in the panelling beside the chimney breast.

“That is His Grace’s dressing room beyond. The key is on this side, and there is no other. His Grace desired me to tell you so particularly.”

There was nothing in her face at all. Linnea thought that thirty years in a great house must teach a woman that.

“Thank you. I shall do very well now.”

When she was alone she stood and looked at the door. It was an ordinary door, painted white, with a brass lock plate. The key was large and old, and it had been oiled.

She turned it. The bolt went home with a clack that seemed to her as loud as a dropped pan.

She stood with her fingers on the cold brass and felt her ears burn. He had given her his word, standing among her flower pots, with the back of his neck red. He had sent his housekeeper to say it over again. And she had answered by shooting a bolt in his face on her wedding day, like a girl in a novel. She was eight and twenty. Nobody had ever tried a door of hers in her life.

She turned the key back. That was just as loud.

On the far side a floorboard creaked, once. Then there was nothing.

Linnea left the key where it was and went to unpack her paint box.
***
The bed was too wide and too soft. She lay in it and heard the stable clock strike eleven, and then the quarters after it.

She was thinking about the rectory stove. Mrs. Tranter’s boy had promised to feed it at ten and at six, and she had counted out the lumps for him herself, from the good coal that the Duke’s money had bought. He was a careful boy. She still could not lie quiet.

No sound came through the white door.

At a few minutes before twelve she got up, put on her wrapper and her spectacles, and lit a candle at the fire. A book would be better than the ceiling. She knew the way to the library.

There was a light under its door already.

She nearly went back. Then she thought that if she began by creeping about his house to avoid him, she would be doing it at fifty. She knocked and went in.

He was at the long table, standing, with both hands flat on a map. There were more maps spread from end to end, held down at the corners with books and an inkstand and a candlestick. He was in his shirtsleeves. His coat hung on a chair and his neckcloth was gone, and his shirt was open at the throat.

He straightened and reached for the coat.

“Pray don’t,” Linnea said. “I am in a wrapper with my hair in a plait. If we are to be formal, I shall have to go and dress, and it is midnight.”

His hand stopped. He had begun to turn, too, that smooth quarter turn to the right. She saw him catch it and bring himself back to face her square across the table. The candles lit the black silk and the long scar. They also lit the hollow of his throat, which she had not seen before, and which she found she was looking at.

She looked at the maps instead.

“I came for a book. I could not sleep.”

“Is the room cold?”

“The room is very comfortable. I am not used to it yet.” She came nearer. “Do you never sleep either?”

“Not much. It is an old habit. One learns it on picket.” He glanced down at the table. “These are the farms. There are forty-five of them. I have not looked at them properly since I came home, and Mr. Pargeter has told the Lord Chancellor so.”

They were beautiful maps, drawn in ink and tinted by hand, with every field named. She bent over the nearest. The Corve ran down it in blue, and the meadows on either bank were washed pale green.

“What are the pencil crosses?”

“Hay.”

“Oh,” she said. “Hay.”

There was a silence. The fire shifted.

“The water meadows have been under three times since March,” he said, with the air of a man who had been asked to make conversation at gunpoint. “Preece says the grass is six weeks behind. There will be nothing to cut at Midsummer.”

“No. There would not be. Grass wants warmth to grow, and it has had none.” She heard how that sounded, and winced. “I beg your pardon. You know that grass wants warmth. Everybody knows it.”

“I know how much hay six hundred troop horses eat in a week. I have bought it, begged it and stolen it in three countries. I never once thought about how it was grown.” He rubbed his jaw. “I find I am a duke with forty thousand acres who cannot say when a field should be mown.”

“I cannot either. I know how to keep one plant alive in one pot. A meadow is some millions of plants and no pot at all.”

“Then we are equally matched.”

It was nearly a joke. She looked up, and found his eye on her, and looked down again.

“My father kept the rain for this parish for twenty years,” she said. “I have his books. The summer of ninety-nine was like this one. I was eleven, and I remember him saying that they did not cut the Corve meadows until August, and that half of it rotted in the cock. If you had your father’s accounts for that year, you could see what the farms did, and what it cost them. It might tell you what is coming.”

He was quiet a moment. “That is a sensible thing to do.”

“You need not sound so surprised, Your Grace.”

“I am not surprised. I am annoyed that I did not think of it.” He paused. “And I think that must stop.”

“What must?”

“‘Your Grace.’ You cannot say it across a breakfast table for the next forty years. The servants will say it to both of us. We shall never know who is being spoken to.”

“I have been called it eleven times since nine o’clock,” Linnea admitted, “and each time I looked behind me for someone else. What am I to say instead?”

“I have a name.”

“I know your name. I wrote it out on a marriage licence.” She pushed up her spectacles. “I do not think I can use it yet. I have known you seventeen days.”

“No,” he said, and she heard relief in it. “Nor I yours. Not yet.”

“Then what?”

He considered it, as he seemed to consider everything, like a problem of supply.

“My mother called my father ‘Duke,’ to his face, all her life. He called her ‘Duchess.’ I thought it very cold when I was a boy. I am not sure now that it was.”

“Duke,” she said, trying it.

“Duchess.”

It was absurd, the two of them at midnight over a map of meadows, trying on names like hats. She felt a laugh coming and bit it back. Then she saw that the unscarred corner of his mouth had moved, as it had over her green thumbnail, and she let the laugh go after all. It was short and breathless, and it was the first sound of the kind she had made in that house.

He did not laugh. But he looked at her a little longer than the conversation needed, and the back of her neck was warm when he looked away.

“The rent books for ninety-nine will be in the study,” he said. “My father kept every year on the same shelf. I will find it for you now, if you like, and you may have it with your father’s figures in the morning.”

“I should like that.”

He took up a candlestick and went down the room to a door she had taken for a cupboard. It opened on a smaller room, lined with ledgers. She followed him as far as the threshold with her own candle in her hand.

He set his light on the desk and turned to the shelves. The flame steadied, and the wall above the desk came out of the dark.

A single picture hung there, in a narrow black frame that looked new. It was a hand-coloured engraving of a Cape heath, a stout upright stem with its leaves in close whorls and, at the top, a hanging cluster of long scarlet flowers, each one swollen like a small lamp. At the foot she could read the lettering without going any nearer. Erica cerinthoides. Plate 52. Z. Corfield del.

She knew every flower in it.

Out of sixty-four plates, he had chosen that one. He had put it where he would see it each time he lifted his head from his work.

Behind her the library clock struck twelve. Linnea stood in the doorway with the candle burning down toward her fingers, and she went very still.
***