The Letter

You move the cup to your right hand. Slowly, as if your wrist were tired.

"How clever of you, Mr. Knell," you say. "I'd never have thought of the ink."

"Most people don't, Miss Linley." He smiles like a kindly uncle and writes nothing down. That's worse. A man who writes things down might forget them.

Then Ambrose comes up the stairs two at a time, sees you both in the corridor, and stops.

"Knell," he says. "You've met."

"Just now, Your Grace. Miss Linley was admiring her study."

Ambrose looks at you. At the green room, the walnut desk, the key on its ribbon. Something shy crosses his face, quick as a bird.

"Is it right?" he asks.

"It's perfect," you say, and you mean it so much your voice cracks.

He nods once, satisfied, and takes Knell away to the library. You stand in your perfect room and hold the key so tight it leaves a mark.

You marry him eleven days later, on the third of May, at St George's, Hanover Square.

It rains in the morning and clears at ten, and the sun comes out over the portico just as your carriage stops, which your mother takes as a personal favor from God. You wear ivory silk that Minnie chose and the Severn pearls that arrived in a velvet box the night before with no note at all, only a slip of newspaper margin that said: Your mother will ask if they're real. They are. S.

The church is full. Half of it came to see whether the Frost Duke would actually turn up.

He turns up.

"Last chance to run, Ava," Perry murmurs at the door, and you pinch his arm hard enough to make him yelp.

He's standing at the altar in a dark blue coat when you come down the aisle on Perry's arm, and when he turns and sees you, the whole church hears it: a small intake of breath from the most silent man in England. The ladies in the front pews look at each other. Two of them lose a wager.

He doesn't say much during the service. He doesn't have to. When the vicar asks if he'll have you, he says "I will" so quietly and so firmly that it sounds like a door closing on everything else.

When it's your turn, you think of nine columns under your attic floor, and you say it anyway.

The wedding breakfast is at Severn House, and Lady Theodosia Quarrender takes possession of you before the soup.

She's seventy-four, tiny, hung with diamonds like a chandelier, and was, she tells you with great satisfaction, "thoroughly scandalous in 1762."

"I've watched that boy refuse every girl in London for ten years," she says, gripping your arm with a hand like a bird's claw. "And then he marries the only one who didn't want him. Clever boy. Do you read the Naturalist?"

You choke on your champagne.

"My sister does," you manage.

"Best thing in print. Only honest voice in London. She calls my nephew a glacier, and she's right, and I laugh every Saturday." She peers up at you. "You'll thaw him. I can tell. You have a mouth on you."

Across the room, Mrs. Araminta Vayle is wearing dove-gray, which on her looks like a crime. She glides up to you with a smile that could cut glass.

"Your Grace," she says, curtsying a quarter inch. "What a surprise. We all thought Severn would marry someone who'd be noticed." Her eyes sweep your gown. "But I suppose he wanted peace and quiet. The Naturalist said as much."

So she's read your column about yourself. Of course she has. Everyone has.

You smile. "The Naturalist," you say, "is often wrong about quiet women. We notice everything."

Mrs. Vayle's smile doesn't move, but her eyes do.

Then Ambrose stands to give the toast, and the room goes silent the way it always does for him: half in hope, half in dread.

He raises his glass. He looks at you.

"To my wife," he says. "Who talks back."

Four words. It's the shortest toast anyone in that room has ever heard. Lady Theodosia laughs so hard she has to be fanned.

That night your rooms at Severn House are lit with a dozen candles, and the connecting door between your bedroom and his is shut. You check it. It's locked from your side. The key is on your dressing table, next to the brass key to your study.

Hetty brushes out your hair and leaves you with a look that says ring if you need me, and I'll bring the poker.

At eleven there's a knock. Not at the connecting door. At the corridor door, like a guest.

"Come in," you say.

Ambrose comes in still dressed, cravat loosened, a folded packet of paper in his hand. He looks at you in your wrapper by the fire, and then very deliberately at the ceiling.

"I won't stay," he says. "I wanted to say good night. And I'd like your advice."

"My advice?"

"You said you read people. I believe you." He sits in the chair across the fire from you, leaning forward, elbows on his knees. Up close, with the candlelight on his face and his hair a little ruffled, he looks younger. "Tell me if this is foolish."

He holds out the packet.

It's a letter. Several pages, folded and refolded until the creases are soft. Crossed out in places, written over. The ink changes color halfway down the first page, as if it was started in one season and finished in another.

On the outside, in his strong slanting hand: To the Naturalist. Care of The Looking-Glass.

You can't breathe.

"I've been writing it for a year," he says. "I never sent it. Tomorrow I might. Read it. Tell me if I sound like a fool."

You unfold it with fingers that don't feel like yours.

Madam,

I am the Duke of Severn. You know me. You have described me in print nine times, and every time accurately, which is the worst thing I can say of anyone.

I am writing to ask you to stop.

Not because you are cruel. You are not, quite. You are exact. You see the thing a man hopes no one will notice, and you name it, and then all London sees it too. I have read every word you have published. I have laughed at most of them, which no one in my household has heard me do in some years. You are the only person in this city who makes me laugh. I resent that very much.

But one line in March last year has stayed with me longer than I like. You know the one. I will not quote it. I am asking you, as one who reads you more carefully than anyone, not to write about me again.

I know you are a woman. I know you sit in the same ballrooms I do. You hear what I say, which is little, and you write down what I don't say, which is a great deal more.

I am told I will know your name before the Season ends. I find I would rather you told me yourself.

Severn.

You read it twice. The second time the words swim.

He's watching you. He's waiting. The Frost Duke, who sits by your fire on your wedding night with his elbows on his knees, waiting for his new wife to tell him whether he sounds like a fool to the woman who called him a glacier.

"Well, Ava?" he says quietly. "Should I send it?"