CHAPTER NINETEEN
“You are certain, child. Be certain before we go down, because there is no leaving in the middle of something like this. Half the people who will look at you tonight have read that filthy paper, and the other half have had it described to them by the first half with improvements.”
“I am certain.” Ellen turned from the glass, where Bess had just set the last pin.
“A woman who hides confirms the story. A woman who comes to the opera in the front of the ducal box, in her best gown, and looks bored, unmakes it. They cannot whisper that I crept out at midnight to a folly if I am sitting in plain sight where they expected to find an empty chair.”
“That is precisely the reasoning I should have used, and I am gratified to find it has occurred to you, because it means I need not pretend I talked you into it.” Augusta settled her own shawl with the air of a general approving the ground.
“There is one thing more, and you will not like it. You will be calm tonight. Not defiant. Defiance tells them there is something to defy. You will be a woman who has heard a piece of nonsense about herself and found it too dull to resent. That is the hardest face of all to wear, and it is the only one that wins.”
“I have worn it before. For two years, to creditors.” Ellen took up her gloves. “I am out of practice. I am not out of the knack.”
“And the rest of it. His part. The House.”
“Moves on its own slow schedule, which is the one mercy of the Lords, that nothing in it can be hurried, least of all by the man it is aimed at.” Augusta drew on her own gloves finger by finger.
“Theodore brings the navigation petition before the House a fortnight hence, with your Mr. Burton’s account read into the record in Burton’s own plain words, and Carrow tells him the votes are already counting his way, which is the entire reason Carrow’s wife is so very eager to be seen embracing you in public tonight.
The drawing rooms and the House are the two halves of one nutcracker, child.
The earl’s good name is the nut. Tonight is the night he first feels the two halves begin to close on it, and he will feel it the harder for finding you sitting in plain view looking as though you had never once heard his name. ”
Theodore was at the foot of the stairs, and he watched her come down the whole length of them, and for once he said the right thing, which was almost nothing at all.
“You look as though you own the place,” he said. “Keep looking it. I will be beside you the whole evening, and I will say nothing clever, because nothing clever is wanted. A duke who jests is a duke who is worried. We are not worried.”
“Are we not?”
“We are terrified,” he said, very low, for her ear only. “We will not show it to a soul. After you.”
The King’s Theater was full, which she had expected and dreaded in equal measure.
They came into the box at the front of the grand tier with the house lights still up, which was deliberate, Augusta having timed their arrival to the worst possible moment for privacy and the best for being seen, and Ellen took the front chair, the one nobody could pretend not to see, and arranged her skirts, and lifted her glass to the stage as though the stage were the only thing in the building that interested her.
The theater noticed. She felt it the way she had felt the Cresswell ball, the turning of heads, the leaning of one bonnet toward another, the small industry of comment running along the tiers like a fuse.
She did not look at any of it. She looked at the curtain and let them look at her, a duchess entirely at her ease, and underneath the gown her heart was going like a hammer and not one beat of it reached her face.
Then a curious thing began to happen, and it took her a few minutes to understand it.
The looks were not all the kind she had braced for.
A dowager two boxes along, a great gaunt monument of a woman Ellen had never met, caught her eye and gave her the smallest, most deliberate nod, the nod one gives a person one has decided to be seen approving of.
A few minutes later a couple she did not know bowed to the box as they passed below.
And then Lady Carrow came along the tier, the wife of the man Theodore was working with in the House, and stopped at the box door, and was admitted, and settled herself in the empty chair beside Augusta with the air of a friend who had the whole night and meant to spend all of it just there.
“My dear Duchess.” She said it loudly, a good deal more loudly than the distance between them required, and took both of Ellen’s hands in a grip that was pure performance and perfectly deliberate.
“I have been trying to reach this box a quarter of an hour and been quite defeated by the crush. How well you look. How perfectly well. I said to Carrow only this morning, I will not have it, I said, the things people will repeat without the smallest notion whether there is a word of truth in them, and out of a printed sheet of all places, a thing got up by some grubbing creature for ha’pennies.
One does not credit a ha’penny. I told him I should call on you tonight in front of the entire grand tier if I were obliged to climb over three boxes to manage it, and here I am, and here is the entire grand tier, and I do hope they are all attending closely. ”
“You are very kind, Lady Carrow,” Ellen said, and meant a quite different thing by it than the words, and saw that Lady Carrow knew exactly what she meant.
“I am not in the least kind. I am extremely particular about the persons I am seen with, which is a different thing entirely and a great deal more useful to you this evening.” She patted Ellen’s hand once more, for the benefit of the watchers, and rose.
“You must both dine with us on Thursday. I shall not be refused.” And she swept back out along the tier with her chin up, having spent five whole minutes saying nothing whatever at the top of her voice, every syllable of it a flag planted in plain sight of two hundred people on the side of the Duchess of Rosanne.
When she had gone, Ellen understood what she had been watching.
“Augusta,” she said quietly, behind her fan. “These people are being kind to me on purpose.”
“These people are doing as they have been told, which from that particular set of people looks remarkably like kindness and answers just as well.” Augusta did not trouble to lower her own voice much.
“I have spent a fortnight at a great many card tables, child. I have mentioned, to the right women in the right order, that the poor new Duchess has been most shamefully maligned by some mercenary printer’s scribbler, and that everyone knows whose spite is behind it, and that a woman of real quality will of course be seen to stand by her.
They do not know they are being marshalled.
They believe they thought of it themselves. That is the whole art of it.”
“And the other half. The ones who are not being kind.”
“Watch where they are not being kind, and to whom.”
So Ellen watched, and saw it, and the seeing of it was the first wholly satisfying thing the evening had given her.
The cool looks, the turned shoulders, the small theater of disapproval that she had feared would be aimed at her own box, were being aimed instead, two tiers up and across, at a box she had not yet let herself look at directly.
A box with a silver-haired man in it. People were not cutting the Duchess of Rosanne tonight.
They were beginning, in the small preliminary way these things began, to cut the Earl of Greaves, and they were doing it where he could not fail to feel it, and Ellen understood that Augusta’s fortnight and Theodore’s quiet work in the House had between them turned the tide a degree, and that a degree, in this water, was a great deal.
She let herself look at the earl’s box then, once, for exactly as long as courtesy allowed and not a moment longer, and found him already looking at her.
It was the first beat of it, the thing that would finish in the corridor at the interval.
Across the breadth of the lit theater he looked at her, and she looked back, and she did not shy away as he was searching her face for, and did not give him the defiance that would have told him he had drawn blood.
She gave him the bored, faintly puzzled half-smile of a woman who cannot quite place a face, and then she returned her attention to the stage, and left him holding a look that had found nothing to take hold of.
It was while the first act was ending that she saw her brother.
She had been letting her glass drift along the cheaper boxes and the upper tiers, the way one does, and it stopped without her deciding it on a figure standing at the rail of the gallery, far up, in the part of the house where people went who could afford the opera once a season and chose to spend the afford on the music rather than the being seen.
Henry was thinner than she remembered, in a coat she did not know, which meant a coat from before the worst of it, kept and brushed.
He was not looking at the stage. He was observing her box, she understood he had been doing so for some time.
When at last she raised her glass and their eyes met across the crowded theater, he knew it immediately, by that strange, unspoken instinct which connects two souls.
He did not wave. He did not make any sign that a person below might mark and gossip over.
He inclined his head to her, once, gravely, the bow a man gives a lady he respects and has no claim upon, and then he turned and looked at the stage and did not look at her box again, and left her in possession of the evening without asking the smallest thing of it.