CHAPTER THIRTEEN #2
“You knew enough to put men in the trees and keep a horse to hand. You knew enough to be there.” She laid both hands flat on the cloth.
“And you let her walk out into it. You stood in the dark and watched your wife go to that man and waited for the last possible moment to ride in. Why? Why not stop her at the door, or send Selby after her, or go to her yesterday and say plainly, I know what is being planned against you, for goodness sake do not go?”
He was a long time answering.
“Because if I had stopped her at the door she would have believed for the rest of her life that she would have gone. That the lieutenant was the one road out of this cold house and I had barred it against her. She had to learn what he was with her own eyes, in her own time, or she would have spent her entire life wondering whether I robbed her of the only man who ever cherished her.” He said it quietly, and believed it.
“Now she knows. It cost her a dreadful night. It has bought her a truth that nothing gentler would have bought.”
“And you call that kindness.”
“I call it the only thing that would have answered.”
“It is the thing you always call it.” Augusta’s voice was very tired, and very old, and entirely without mercy.
“You decided, alone, what your wife needed to suffer in order to be taught, and then you arranged the suffering, and you will go to your grave certain it was affection. Hear me, because I will not say it twice. One day that girl is going to see the whole of what you arranged on her behalf, the watching and the waiting and the trees, and she is not going to thank you for the lesson. She is going to ask you what right you had to set it. And you will have no answer, Theodore, because there is none, and on that day all your careful kindness will look to her exactly like every other man who ever decided her life for her without troubling to ask.”
“You are wrong.” It came out without conviction, the first words he had spoken all day that he did not entirely believe even as he said them.
“I did not arrange it to teach her anything. I arranged it because I could not bear to be the man who took from her the one thing she still believed she had left, it was nothing but a fabrication which was slowly devouring her.”
“That is the same decision, Theodore. You merely prefer the second telling of it.” Augusta rose, and gathered her shawl, and there was nothing in her face but grief.
“I am going to sit with your wife,” she said. “Since you will not.”
She went out, and left him with his cold soup and the whole of what she had said, and he sat under it for some minutes before he could make himself rise.
***
He rode until the gelding was blown and his own hands were numb, the long way, over the south ridge where he had given her three true words about himself a lifetime ago.
It did not help. He had known it would not, and had done it regardless, which he recognised, with grim humor, as exactly what his wife had done the afternoon she met the lieutenant in the town.
He worked until midnight on accounts that did not need him. He sent word by her maid that he hoped Her Grace had rested, and that nothing whatever would be required of her until she was ready, and he did not knock at her door, though he stood near it once and made himself walk on.
Late in the day he had met Selby on the stairs and stopped her, which he had not meant to do.
“How is she?”
“Quiet, Your Grace. She took a little broth at noon, when Lady Augusta sat with her. She has not wept that I have seen, and I would rest easier if she had.” Selby’s face did not change. “She asked me one thing only, this morning.”
“What did she ask.”
“Whether you were very angry with her.”
The question went into him sideways, like a blade slid between two ribs to find the gap on purpose. “And what did you tell her.”
“That it was not my place to say what His Grace felt, since His Grace has never once told me, nor anyone, in all my years in this house.” A pause, and something almost gentle crossed the severe face.
“If you will forgive the liberty, Your Grace, it might be the one thing in the world worth the telling, just at present. To her, I mean. Not to me.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Selby. That will be all.”
He did not go up, though he stood at the foot of the stairs a long while after she had gone, and the not-going was the single hardest thing he had done all day.
After midnight, with the fire down to embers, he let himself think about what he had held off since dawn.
He should have taken the man’s life in the folly. It would have been the simplest sum in the world. He thought it without heat, the way he thought of drainage and notes of hand, and turned it over, and put it down.
He would not grant Vance the mercy of a quick dispatch.
A sudden end was a privilege, and he had no pity for a man who had attempted to destroy her reputation for mere wages.
He would ruin the lieutenant slowly instead, and the earl who hired him slower still, by inches, over months, in ways no court would trace to a duke who had been quietly at home in the country the whole while.
The thought gave him no satisfaction. He sat with it until the fire was out, and it did not warm him, and it did not leave him, and somewhere above him, three floors up, his wife was sitting at a dark window believing herself despised by the only man in England who would have burned the world down to keep her from harm.