CHAPTER TWO #4
“Ellen, if you knew the whole of it, if you understood how near we are to ruin, you would see that I had no other course.”
“I understand ruin better than you think,” she said, her voice still quiet.
“I have watered soup, dismissed servants kindly, mended curtains where guests would not look, and smiled at tradesmen who knew precisely how little we had left. Do not speak to me as if ruin is a room you discovered this morning.”
Henry winced at her words. “The debts are beyond anything you know.”
“Then you should have told me.”
“I could not.”
“You could offer me to a stranger, but you could not speak to me?”
He looked away.
She waited for an answer, and when none came, the last of her softness seemed to move out of reach. “Did you tell him about Lieutenant Vance?”
Henry’s face changed.
There it was.
Ellen felt the breath leave her. “You knew.”
“There is nothing to tell.”
“You knew,” she repeated, stepping back from the chair. “You knew there was someone, and still you went.”
“There is no understanding between you.”
“He asked me to wait.”
“That is not an understanding.”
“He told me he could not bear the thought of anyone else.”
“Then he ought to have done more than speak prettily in a morning room.”
The words struck her with such force that for a moment she could only look at him. Henry seemed to regret them as soon as they had left him, yet regret did not take them back, and truth had a cruel habit of wearing the same coat as insult.
Ellen lifted her chin. “Do not mock the true value of his heart because yours has been so long in finding its way.”
Henry’s eyes shone again. “I am your brother.”
“Yes,” she said. “That is what makes this worse.”
He stepped toward her then, his voice breaking out of its strained restraint.
“What would you have had me do? Wait until they came to the door again? Wait until there was nothing left to sell, nowhere left for you to sleep, no name left for either of us to carry? The duke can settle it. He can settle all of it.”
“And in exchange he takes me.”
Henry’s throat moved. “He takes you as his wife.”
“Do not dress it up for me. I am too tired to admire the ribbon.”
He was entirely without a satisfactory reply.
Ellen did not wait for one. She walked past him, out of the morning room and into the hall, where the familiar dimness of the house seemed suddenly foreign to her.
Behind her, Henry said her name once, not loudly, and the sorrow in it almost stopped her.
Almost. Her hand remained steady on the stair rail as she climbed, though nothing else in her had kept its balance.
She went into her own room, turned the key in the lock, and sat down on the edge of the bed.
Her first thought was not the duke.
Her first thought was Vance.
Half an hour ago, he had held her hand upon his knee and asked her to wait.
He had told her he could not bear it. He would hear of this.
He must hear of it. The town carried such news faster than any post, and when he heard, he would come.
A man did not say I could not bear it, and then sit upon his hands while another man bought the woman he had said it to.
“He will come,” she whispered, pressing her gloved hand to the place where his fingers had rested. “He said he could not bear it.”
The words sounded small in the room, so she said them again.
“He will come.”
There was still everything to hope. There had to be.
Hope had stopped being a delicate thing, all ribbons and smiles and handsome officers in red coats.
It was a hard thing now, a necessary one, and she gripped it because the alternative was lying down under the future Henry had brought into the house and letting it close over her face.
She lay back on the counterpane and looked up at the canopy, where a seam had begun to loosen near one corner. She had meant to mend it. The memory of that ordinary intention nearly undid her more than Henry’s words had done.
Underneath the hoping, another voice began to speak.
It was quieter than panic and more patient than grief, and it could not be put down with reasons.
It made her think of Charlotte in the carriage with her hands folded in her lap.
It made her think of the half-second too long at her wrist, the whole silent summer, the September note with no apology in it, and the way Vance had asked her, with such tenderness, whether there was anyone he need fear, as though her heart were a position he meant to hold without ever quite committing the troops.
“I am not Charlotte,” Ellen said into the dimming room.
The quiet voice answered without sound.
I am Charlotte.
She turned her face into the pillow, breathing through the linen and lavender until the sharpness behind her eyes became something she could command.
I was Charlotte the whole time he was kissing my hand, the quiet voice said. I did not know it, and he did.
“No,” she whispered, fiercely enough that the word warmed the pillow beneath her mouth. “He remembered the watercolours. He came back. He asked me to wait.”