The Advertisement

The advertisement was unusual enough that Margaret Ellory read it three times before she allowed herself to believe it was real, and then a fourth time before she allowed herself to believe she was considering it. It was set discreetly among the ordinary notices — positions for governesses, for companions to elderly ladies, for housekeepers willing to relocate. But this one was not quite any of those. *A gentleman of means*, it read, *resident at an estate in the western counties, seeks a wife. The position is one of management and standing rather than of sentiment. The successful applicant will be mistress of a substantial house, will receive a generous and independent income, and will not be required to give, nor expected to receive, affection of any kind. Discretion essential. Applicants of good character and quiet temperament only.* Margaret was, at that particular moment in her life, an applicant of good character, quiet temperament, and almost no money whatsoever. Her husband had been dead for two years. He had been kind, and gentle, and entirely hopeless with money, and he had left her a small house she could not afford to keep and a name that opened no useful doors. She had sold the good furniture. She had let the maid go. She had, that very week, sat at her writing desk and done the arithmetic that told her she had perhaps four months before the small house, too, would have to go — and then she would be a widow of forty-one with good character and quiet temperament and no roof, which was a thing the world had no comfortable shelf to put her on. So she answered the advertisement. She wrote a careful, honest letter. She did not pretend to be younger than she was, or richer, or more charming. She wrote that she had run a household, modest but well; that she understood discretion; that she was not afraid of work; and that a marriage without sentiment did not frighten her, because she had had a marriage with sentiment and knew that sentiment, while pleasant, did not by itself keep the rain out. She did not expect a reply. One came within the week, and it invited her to Thornfield. The estate, when the hired carriage finally brought her up the long drive, was larger and colder than she had pictured. It was a handsome house, but it had the particular stillness of a place where no one had laughed for some time, and Margaret recognized that stillness, because her own small house had begun to have it too. Mr. Edmund Thorne received her in a library that smelled of old fires. He was perhaps fifty, grey at the temples, with a face that had been arranged, long ago, into an expression of polite distance and had not been rearranged since. He did not rise far from his chair. He looked at her — the plain travelling dress, the steady hands, the absence of any pretense — and something in his assessment seemed, very slightly, to settle. "Mrs. Ellory. You'll forgive the directness; I find it kinder than the alternative." He gestured her to a seat. "My mother left this house in a trust. The trust passes to me in full only upon my marriage — she did not approve of bachelors, and she did not, I think, approve of me. I have no wish for a wife in the ordinary sense. I had a marriage once. It was not a success, and I have no intention of attempting a second one with my heart involved. What I require is a competent woman of standing to be mistress of Thornfield, to satisfy the trust, and to live here with dignity and independence and her own wing of the house. In exchange you would never want for anything material again." "And feelings," Margaret said, "are not included." "Feelings are not included." He said it firmly, as a man states a clause he has stated to himself many times. "I want that understood before anything else. This is an arrangement, Mrs. Ellory. A sensible one, I hope, for two people whom life has left short of options — but an arrangement. Not a romance. I should not like you to come to Thornfield expecting one and be disappointed." Margaret looked around the cold, handsome library, at the man who had decided so completely what his life would and would not contain, and she thought of her own arithmetic, and her four months, and the rain. "Mr. Thorne," she said, "I have already had the romance. I am not here for that. I am here because I am practical, and because I would rather be useful in a large cold house than helpless in a small one." She folded her hands. "I accept your terms. Feelings are not included. I only hope, for both our sakes, that you have read your own contract as carefully as I intend to — because in my experience, sir, feelings are remarkably poor at staying outside a clause that has told them they may not come in." Edmund Thorne looked at her for a long moment, in the library that smelled of old fires, and did not, she noticed, have an answer ready.