CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“You’ve not touched the toast, Your Grace, nor the soup, and the soup was the white one you favor. Cook made it special.”
“Thank you, Bess. Leave it. I am not hungry.”
“You weren’t hungry yesterday either, my lady, if you’ll forgive me.
” But Bess left it, because there was nothing in the duchess’s voice to argue with, no temper, no grief, nothing at all, only a flat quiet that frightened the girl worse than weeping would have, and she went out and closed the door softly and told the others below that Her Grace was no better.
There were messages, too, every day, carried up by the maid in a careful voice.
His Grace hoped Her Grace had rested. His Grace begged she would not trouble herself about the household, which was in good order.
His Grace asked whether there was anything she wished sent up, a book, a higher fire, the physician if she would see him.
Ellen received each of them lying still, and sent back each time that she wanted for nothing and was very well, and the maid carried the falsehood down and brought up the next day’s message in its place.
The small daily traffic of it, his asking and her refusing across three floors of a silent house, was, that week, the whole of the matrimony, conducted by a frightened girl with a tray who did not understand a word of what she carried.
Ellen did not weep, in those days, and she did not rage. She simply stopped.
She stopped going down to breakfast, and trays came up and went down again barely touched.
She stopped walking to the stables, and Heather stood in her box and was exercised by a groom and turned her head toward the yard gate each morning at the hour her mistress used to come, and gave it up, and Hibbert said nothing to anyone but had a hard look about the eyes.
She stopped walking the kitchen garden. The weeds came back among the cleared beds, slowly, the way they do. The stillroom inventory she had been compiling sat half-finished on the desk in her sitting room with the ink dried on the quill.
The Burtons’ roof was thatched that week, clean and whole before the hard frost, exactly as she had ordered it through Crewe the afternoon of the folly.
She did not know it had been done. No one thought to tell a woman who had stopped asking about anything, and so the one good and lasting thing she had set in motion went up over a poor family’s heads without her ever learning that it had.
The kitchen sent up the things she liked without being asked, the pear preserve and the white soup and the thin dry toast, and most of it came down again, and the cook took it as a personal grief and made more.
Once, Bess brought a message up from the stables along with the tray.
“Hibbert asks, Your Grace, was the mare to be kept to the paddock or took over the south ride as usual. He says she’s gone off her feed, and stands at the yard gate of a morning, and he didn’t like to settle it without your word.
” A small pause. “He says, begging pardon for the saying of it, that they go like that, the clever ones, when they’re used to a person and the person stops coming.
He says a turn out over the ridge might mend her quicker than any paddock would. ”
“Tell Hibbert to do as he thinks best,” Ellen said, to the window, and Bess went away, and it did not once occur to her, that whole day that Hibbert had not truly been asking about the mare at all.
She sat at her window.
The window gave on the park, and she sat in the chair beside it with her hands in her lap and watched the light cross the grass and the rooks go up off the home wood at dusk and come down again, and she thought, in slow circles that always came round to the same three places.
Her brother, who had sold her across a desk to clear his gaming debts.
The lieutenant, who had written her a letter in a warm false hand and led her into the dark to be ruined for a fee.
And her husband, who had been there, who had ridden out of the trees and seen the whole of it, the held hands and the weeping and the embrace, and who had brought her home and had not spoken to her since.
The circle always closed on him. That was the part she could not get past. A man who loathed her could have made use of the folly.
A man who wished to be rid of her had been handed the perfect means.
He had used none of it. He had wrapped her in his own coat and walked her home and asked nothing and reproached nothing and simply withdrawn, and she did not know what to do with a mercy she could not understand and felt she had not earned, and so she did the only thing that was left, which was nothing.
Augusta came every afternoon.
She brought her embroidery frame and sat in the second chair by the window and did not require Ellen to talk, or to eat, or to be anything other than what she was, and she filled the long silences with small idle harmless things, the way a person leaves a low fire burning in a cold room.
“The rooks have been at the new wheat again,” she said, on the second afternoon, to nobody.
“Coyne is in a passion about it. He has put up a scarecrow in your father’s old coat, Theodore’s father I mean, a coat the moths had already half eaten, and the rooks sit upon its shoulders to survey the field.
I have rarely seen a man so insulted by a bird. ”
Ellen said nothing. Augusta drew her thread through and went on.
“My sister kept rooks once, as a girl, in a great wicker cage, and fed them on bread and her own bad temper, and they learned to say two words, neither of which I shall repeat in a respectable bedroom.” She held the frame to the light.
“She passed away at nine-and-twenty and I have missed her every day for forty years, which I mention only to say that I am tolerably practiced at sitting in a room with a person who does not wish to speak. You need not perform for me, child. You need not do anything at all. I am only here so that the room is not empty.”
It was the kindest thing anyone had said to her in a week, and Ellen could not answer it, and Augusta did not ask her to, and the afternoon went down into dusk with the two of them and the small steady going of the needle.
On the third afternoon Augusta spoke of her own girlhood, of a Season forty years gone, and a man she had very nearly taken as her husband and was glad now that she had not.
“He was uncommonly handsome, and said the prettiest things, and meant about a third of them, which I have since learned is a high average for a handsome man.” She held the frame to the light.
“My father forbade the match, and I sat at a window for the better part of a year over it, and was perfectly certain my life had ended.”
Ellen said, before she had decided to, the first words she had spoken in three days that were not a refusal of food. “Did you hold him close to your heart?”
Augusta did not look up from her work, lest looking up should startle the words back in.
“I thought I did, at twenty, which is the age at which one is certain of a great many things that are not so. He wedded into a fortune in the end, and beat it through in six years, by all accounts, and possesses a full girth and resides in Bath together with his bitter disappointment.” A pause ensued, and the needle went steadily on.
“I have never once been sorry I lost him. But I was sorry for a year, child, and I sat at a window for a part of it, so understand that I am not speaking to you from any great height. I am speaking from the very same chair, a long way back.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“No reason in the world. I am an old woman and I ramble. Pay me no mind.”
But Ellen had turned her head toward the room, away from the glass, the first time in three days she had done it, and Augusta had seen her do it, and neither of them said a word about it, and the afternoon went down a shade less heavy than the ones before.
So the fourth day passed with the hedge feud and the apothecary and a christening in the parish, Augusta’s voice going on over it all like water over a stone, asking nothing back, and Ellen grateful for the sound of it in some buried place she could not have named.
“The Pargeter girl is to be wedded at Lady Day,” Augusta said on the fifth afternoon, grey and still, threading a fresh length of silk.
“To the curate, who has a weak chest and excellent prospects, which her mother assures me is the ideal combination, since the prospects arrive sooner if the chest does its part.” She let that sit.
“You are not laughing. A month ago you would have at least troubled to disapprove of me for saying it.”
“I have not much laughter in me this week.”
“No.” The needle went on, even and unhurried. “I have noticed. I am only marking the day you find a little of it again, so that I may take the credit.” She did not look up. “I am patient, child. I have outlasted better sulks than yours, and a Bonaparte besides.”
On the fifth day Augusta’s patience broke.
It did not break loudly. She was too old and too governed for that.
She drew her thread to its end, and knotted it, and set the embroidery frame down upon her knee with a deliberateness that was its own kind of announcement, and she folded her hands on top of it and looked at Ellen full in the face, which she had not done in five days of looking sidelong.
“I am going to say a thing now,” she said, “that I have held my tongue on for five afternoons, and you are not going to like it, and I am going to say it regardless, because I am too old to watch a thing go to waste in front of me and hold my peace out of manners.”
“Then do not say it,” Ellen said, to the window.