CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“You are staring at your wine, Your Grace, as though it has done you some injury.”
“I am trying to express a sentiment in words, and find I possess no skill in the uttering of sentiments, only in their suppression.”
It was the fourth night running he had come to dinner and stayed past the meal, and the fourth night Augusta had developed, with great tact and no subtlety whatever, a sudden need to retire early, and they had been left at the long table with the candles burning down between them and the footmen sent away.
“Then say it badly,” Ellen said. “I have heard a great deal of bad saying in my life. I shall not mind one more piece of it.”
“Very well.” He turned the glass by its stem and did not drink.
“I find I do not know how you take your tea. We have been wedded four months, and I have watched you pour it a hundred times, and I could not tell you tonight whether you take sugar, because I have never once let myself sit close enough to learn. I find that I should like to know. That is the thing. It is a very small thing, said badly, and it is the truest thing I have said at this table in four months.”
“One sugar,” she said. Her voice was not quite steady. “In the morning. None in the afternoon, because the afternoon pot is stewed and sugar only makes it worse.”
“One in the morning. None in the afternoon.” He said it as though committing it to the same ledger where he kept the rents and the river land. “Thank you.”
“Is that the whole of what you wished to know? My tea?”
“No. It is the smallest of some four hundred things I wish to know, and the only one I could make myself ask tonight, because it was safe. A man may ask about tea and survive the answer.” He very nearly smiled.
“Tomorrow I may attempt something as reckless as your favorite color. Do not look for me to reach anything of real consequence before the spring.”
“And if I should wish to know something of you, in return.”
He went still. “Then ask it now, tonight, while I am being brave about tea and may by chance find myself brave about something larger.”
She considered him across the guttering candles, this difficult guarded man who had ridden into the dark for her sake and could not ask his own wife how she took her tea without rehearsing it first. “Why did you enter into matrimony with me?” she said.
“The truth of it. Not the debt, I have had the debt a hundred times. You might have had your pick of the season, fortunes and faces both. Why a viscount’s ruined sister with nothing to her name but a brother’s losses at the table. ”
The candles burned down a little. He was a long time answering, and when he answered it was not quite to the question.
“That,” he said, “is a very great deal larger than your favorite color, and I am not yet brave enough for it at this table. Ask me again when I have the wall further down. I will answer it then, I give you my word, and the answer will surprise you, and not in the direction you are bracing for.”
It should have been absurd. A duke who could recite the acreage of three counties confessing he did not know how his wife took her tea, and meaning it as a courtship, because it was a courtship, the strangest and most backward she had ever heard of, a man laying down his coldness one small fact at a time because he had no other language for it.
It was absurd, and she did not laugh, because under the absurdity was a man who had decided, very late, to learn her, and was doing it the only way he knew, which was thoroughly.
***
Thus, the days passed.
He rode out with her in the mornings now, the two of them and Hibbert at a discreet distance, over the south ridge where the frost lay late in the hollows, and he talked, haltingly at first and then less haltingly, of the land and the tenants and, once, of his mother, who had named the cottage and ridden this same ridge and been the last person in his life he had allowed himself to cherish first locking a door against the cost of it.
Ellen listened, and asked her questions, and watched a man who had spent thirty years behind a wall take it down a stone at a morning, and was careful not to praise him for it, because praise would have made him notice he was doing it, and noticing would have frightened him back behind the wall.
One morning he drew rein at the very top of the ridge, where the whole valley lay spread below them silver with frost, and he stopped, which he never did, and looked at it a while.
“My mother used to halt here. Just here. She said it was the one place on the whole estate where a person could see the whole of it at once and forget, for a moment, that any of it was theirs to answer for.” He kept his eyes on the valley.
“I have not stopped here in eleven years. I have crossed this ridge a thousand times and never once let the horse stand, because stopping was the thing she did, and I had no wish to be reminded of her doing it.”
“And today?”
“Today I found I wanted you to see it. Which is a different matter altogether, and I have been turning it over the whole way up, trying to make out what it signifies that I wanted such a thing.” He looked at her then.
“I have concluded that it signifies I have begun to think of you when I come upon something worth the seeing. I did not used to think of anyone at all. It is new, and it is your doing, and I have not yet decided whether to thank you for it or to be thoroughly alarmed by it.”
“You might do both,” Ellen said. “I find I generally do.”
And he laughed, short and startled, the first laugh she had ever heard out of him in four months of matrimony, and the sound of it carried out over the frosted valley and put up a pair of rooks from the hedge below, and she thought she would have ridden through a great deal worse than one cold winter to have been the cause of that sound.
***
She did not go to the connecting door.
It stood where it had stood since the wedding, in the panelled wall between his rooms and hers, shut and silent, and on her side of it her own bolt sat drawn across, and she had never once tried the handle in four months, because in four months there had been no reason on earth to think the door would open from the far side, and a woman does not rattle a door she knows is locked against her.
The wedding night had been done through that door, dutifully, in the dark, a thing accomplished and not spoken of, and the door had shut after and stayed shut, and she had taken it, all this time, for the plainest statement he had ever made to her, which was that the formality of the thing was complete and nothing further was wanted.
She did not know yet how to read it differently. She was learning. But she had not learned that.
It was Augusta who gave her the last of it.
They were in the small parlor, the two of them, on a wet afternoon when riding was out of the question, and Augusta had her embroidery and Ellen had the stillroom book she was finally finishing, and the rain went down the windows, and Augusta inquired, with an affectation of carelessness that betrayed a premeditated purpose, “Has he yet made any mention to you of his grandfather?”
“He has told me almost nothing about anyone. I did not know he had a grandfather to tell.”
“Everyone has a grandfather, child, it is the one thing that may be said of the whole human race without fear of contradiction.” Augusta drew her thread.
“But ours is worth the telling, and he will never tell it, so I shall, because you are his wife and you have been given a great many of this family’s silences and not one of its reasons, and that seems to me a poor bargain. ”
Ellen set the book down in her lap and waited.
“The old duke, Theodore’s grandfather, had formed an attachment of the heart, rather than a union of convenience, and wedded the woman he held his deepest affections, which was thought a great folly in his day and in his rank, and he was right and they were wrong, because he and his duchess were happy in a way I have seen perhaps twice in a long life.
” Augusta’s needle went steadily on. “She was a small dark laughing creature, no fortune to speak of, and he doted upon her with an openness that defied all decorum. He made no secret of it, none whatsoever, and though the ton was vastly scandalised by such unseemly affection, it moved him not a whit. I was but a young girl. I thought it was how all matrimonies would be. It put a notion in my head that took me years to be cured of.”
“What happened to her?”
“She passed away bearing their third child, who departed this world with her, on a wet afternoon rather like this one.” Augusta did not look up.
“And the old duke, who had hidden nothing, who had cherished her in the full sight of the world, was left standing in the wreck of it with everyone watching, every soul in three counties who had smiled behind their hands at his great unfashionable affection now watching to see what the affection had cost him. And it had cost him everything. He closed the great house. He let the gardens go. He sat in one room for the better part of twenty years and saw almost no one, and drank, and grew strange, and the boy who would be Theodore’s father grew up in that cold ruin with a father who could not look at him because he had his mother’s eyes, and that boy, Theodore’s father, learned the lesson the house was teaching, which was that to show your affections openly is to be flayed in public when the affection ends.
And he taught it to Theodore. Not in words.
Houses do not teach in words. He taught it by never once, in Theodore’s whole childhood, saying a warm thing where it could be seen. ”