CHAPTER FOURTEEN #2
“I have said nothing for five days. I have sat in that chair and talked of rooks and let you grieve in whatever shape grief chose to take, because that is what one does, for a while.” Augusta’s hands stayed folded on the frame.
“But there is a grief that heals and a grief that digs in and builds itself a house and means to stay, and I have watched yours these two days deciding which it intends to be, and I find I cannot sit quiet and watch it decide wrong.”
“You do not know what it is deciding. You do not know what I have done.”
“Then tell me, and I shall hold my tongue gladly. Tell me the black thing you did that has earned you five days of starving in the dark and frightening your servants half out of their wits.” Augusta waited, and the needle was still in her hand, and Ellen said nothing at all.
“No. You will not, because there is nothing in it worth the telling.”
“You have sat in this chair for five days punishing yourself for a thing you did not design.” Augusta’s voice was level and clear.
“You were lured into the dark by a letter written in a hand you trusted, by a man who was paid in good coin to write it, by another man who has despised your husband for nine years and used you as the cheapest weapon to hand. That is what was done to you. It was a pitfall, my dear, laid by those all too well-practiced in deceit, and you walked into it because you are twenty and lonely and were starving for one kind word, and there is no shame in a hungry creature taking the bait in a snare. The shame, if there is any going, belongs to the men who set it.”
“You cannot know what I am.”
“I know that the only person in this house suffering for that night is you. The lieutenant sleeps sound, I have no doubt. The earl dines well. Your husband goes about cold and grim and untouched, as he always has. And you sit at a window and starve and call it penance.” She drew breath.
“I find this, if I may be frank, a waste of a woman who was doing rather well before she let a red coat and a moonlit folly undo her. You raised a withered garden. You faced down Selby and won her. You mended a roof over a family the house had forgotten for a decade. And you have thrown the whole of that into a corner to sit here and prove to everyone, yourself most of all, that a fortnight of kindness can be undone by one bad night.”
“Get out.”
It came out of Ellen low and shaking, and she turned from the window, and the look on her face was not grief.
Augusta had been waiting five days for grief and would have known what to do with it.
This was the other thing. This was fury, clean and hot and entirely awake, and it was not turned inward where it had been pointed all week.
It had found a door at last and come out.
“Get out of my room.” She was on her feet without knowing she had risen.
“You sit there every afternoon with your embroidery and your patience and your kindness measured out by the spoonful, and you think because you are kind you have the right to tell me what my own ruin is worth and how long I am permitted to feel it. You are exactly like the rest of them. My brother decided my life for me. My husband decided it. The lieutenant decided it. And now you, in this chair, deciding when I have grieved enough, deciding what was a trap and what was my own foolishness, deciding, deciding, deciding, every last one of you deciding around me as though I were a chair in the room. I am so tired of being decided. My husband sends a maid up to my door three times a day to ask whether I want a book or a higher fire, and never once comes himself, because even his kindness must be handed down through a servant so that he need never stand in a room with me and risk my having a feeling where he can see it. And you sit there with your needle and your forty years of being right. And I am to be grateful to the pair of you for managing me so very gently. Get out. I am finished being managed by people who cherish me.”
The room rang with it.
Augusta did not argue. She did not apologise, and she did not explain, and she did not soften any part of what she had said, and that, in the end, was the most respectful thing she could have done, because it took Ellen seriously enough to leave her in possession of her own anger.
She rose, and set the embroidery frame down on the seat of the chair, and looked at Ellen one moment longer with something in her face that might have been satisfaction and might have been grief and was very likely both.
“There she is,” Augusta said quietly, to herself more than to Ellen, and went out, and closed the door behind her.
Ellen stood in the middle of the room.
She was alone. Properly alone, for the first time in five days, with no one holding the low fire in the cold room, no one filling the silence with rooks, and the quiet that came down was a different quiet from the one she had been living inside.
It was louder. It had her own raised voice still in it.
She had driven off the one person who had sat with her, and the park outside the window had gone fully dark, and she stood there with her heart going hard and understood, with the terrible clarity that only arrives when every comfort has been stripped away, that she had spent five days accomplishing one single thing, which was to prove to the whole of the household and to herself that she could be broken by a man who had been paid to break her.
She did not like the look of that. Standing in the dark with the anger still hot in her, she found she did not like it at all.
Augusta had left the embroidery frame on the seat of the chair.
Ellen looked at it a long while in the dimness, the half-worked flowers, the needle pushed through the linen and waiting, a thing set down mid-stitch by a woman who had said her piece and walked out.
She understood, looking at it, that Augusta had not forgotten it. Augusta forgot nothing.
The old woman had left it there on purpose, the way one leaves a glove or a book in a room one fully intends to enter again, and the leaving of it said, more plainly than any speech, that the door had been shut but not locked, and that she would be back tomorrow whether she was welcome or not.
The thought ought to have softened the anger.
It did not, quite, not yet. But Ellen marked it, the way she had once marked the state of a bed of soil or the honest price of seed, and the marking was the old Ellen, the one who took the true measure of a thing, lifting her head for the first time in five days.
She did not go down to dinner. She was not ready for that, and she knew it, and the knowledge was itself a small return of something.
But she lay down on her side that night, on her side and not on her back staring up at the canopy as she had lain for five nights, and the difference was small and it was real.
And lying on her side she thought, not in the slow closing circles of the week but in something straighter, of the kitchen garden going back to weed, and the roof she had ordered and never gone to see, and the stillroom inventory with the ink dried on the quill and the chestnut mare turning her head to the yard gate every morning at the hour her mistress no longer came.
And she understood, lying there in the dark, the thing she had been too far under to take in that morning.
Hibbert had not sent up a question about a horse.
He had sent her the only message a groom could decently send his mistress by way of a housemaid and a breakfast tray, that a creature she had taught to trust her was standing at a gate, waiting, off its feed, and would mend the very day she came back to it.
He had been asking her to come back. He had dressed it as a question about a paddock because a man of his station could say no more than that, and she had told him to do as he thought best and turned her face to the glass.
She thought of the whole of it, the garden and the roof and the inventory and the mare, all the things that had been hers by her own hand, the only things in this entire bought and bargained matrimony that had ever been hers by her own hand and nobody else’s, lying neglected and going back to ruin because she had surrendered her week to the three men who had hurt her and let them keep it, as though they had not taken quite enough already without being handed this as well.
And she thought, with no warmth in it yet, only the bare flat sense of a woman doing a sum, that if she was going to be a woman at all, she might as well be one who got up in the morning.
She did not get up that night. The thought was not strong enough yet to lift her, and she did not pretend that it was.
But the thought was there. And it had not been there yesterday.