Chapter 38
Chapter
Thirty-Eight
What Found Me
Ihad not, in a decade, gone willingly to a dinner party. I had attended a few since I’d inherited the marquisate, but willingly was another matter. I went to them as a man goes to be appraised, as I felt it had been my duty.
This was the first I went to because I wished to be there. That alone should have warned me something had shifted under my feet.
The second warning was that I brought Will.
I had told myself, in the carriage, a number of sensible things about why.
That the boy could not be left to dine alone with the servants on such an evening.
That Lark had asked that he come, and a marquis does not refuse a lady.
That it was, in some vague and unexamined way, good for him.
All of these were true. But not one of them was the real reason.
The reason was that I wanted her to meet him.
I wanted the boy I had let through my guard to stand in the same room as the woman who had got past it without my noticing the breach until it was made.
What I expected to come of the wanting, I could not have said.
I was not a man much practiced in wanting things for himself.
I had spent much of my life learning not to.
Will, for his part, suffered no such complications. He had spent the drive informing me of the locomotive he intended to describe to anyone who would hold still. He came up the steps of Everly House at a pace that obliged me to take the collar of his new coat.
"You will remember," I said, "that you are a guest."
"I know how to be a guest."
"You will remember it in the house, and not only on the steps."
"Rocket's the one with no manners," Will said, with the serene injustice of a boy displacing his sins onto an absent dog. "Not me."
Bexley admitted us before I could frame a reply, and then there was no need of one, because Lark was crossing the hall toward us, and Will fell silent of his own accord—which, I had learned, the boy did for almost no one.
She did not stoop to him, nor pitch her voice up into that register adults reserve for children, which I had found he despised.
She put out her hand as she would to any guest, and said, "You must be Will. I have heard you know more about locomotives than anyone in London. I have a great many questions about the subject.”
Will took the hand. He looked her over with the frank, weighing stare he turned on everyone, the one that had taken the measure of half of those he’d met in London. And found them wanting. Then, with enormous gravity, he said, “I can answer them.”
Something in my chest performed a movement it had no business performing in a front hall.
I had braced, I think, for him to be shy, or sullen, or worse—a rehearsed little gentleman, playing at manners he didn't feel.
He was none of these. He was simply, entirely himself, in a stranger's house, because he had decided in the space of a handshake that this was a person before whom one need not pretend.
It had taken me considerably longer to reach the same conclusion about her. But then Will was quicker than I.
Dinner was a thing I lacked the vocabulary to describe, because I had no prior experience to compare it to. I have sat at a hundred tables. I had never sat at one where I was glad of every face around it.
Linnet was at its heart, of course, and would be for some while yet—the household orbited her with the unspoken tenderness of people who have nearly lost a thing and cannot quite stop touching it to be sure.
Lord Charles sat at her side, where he had contrived to seat himself with a determination I found wholly transparent.
The two of them carried on a conversation in signs that ran beneath the spoken one all evening like a second river.
Now and again, she laughed at something his hands said, soundlessly, her whole face alight, and the young fool looked at her as though he had personally arranged the sunrise.
"He has not glanced at his plate once," Mrs. Selwyn observed to me, low, over the fish. "He will be a stone lighter by the wedding."
"You are very certain there is to be a wedding,” I replied.
"I am very certain of everything, Lord Everthorne. It is one of the great compensations of my age." She regarded the pair with the satisfaction of a general surveying ground well taken. "She will lead him a dance, mind you. He has not the least notion. It will be the making of him."
Peregrine and Quennell had come together and sat together, the editor a transformed man from the fluttering creature I had first met—steadier now, his cause won, his journal sold out to the last copy three times over.
He had become, overnight and at considerable personal risk, the most talked-of editor in London, and bore it with the dazed dignity of a coward who has discovered, late in life, that he was brave after all.
It was Peregrine who raised the matter I had been waiting for someone to raise.
"And the man himself," he said, idly, in the way he said everything that mattered. "The one who put Miss Gray under the wheels. One hears things, Everthorne. One hears he is no longer at liberty to put anyone under anything."
The table quieted. Linnet's hands stilled. Charles signed the sense of it to her.
"Murphy," I said. "His name was Murphy. I gave what we had to the police.
Miss Preston gave the rest. She stood up and swore to what she saw that morning, which took more courage than I think she knew she possessed.
Murphy was taken three days ago. He is in Newgate now, awaiting trial.
The men who paid him are discovering that a hired knife, once caught, becomes remarkably talkative about his employers. "
"Strode," Quennell said softly.
"Strode. Carmody. Grimshaw." I let the three names fall like coins on a counter.
"The commissioners have referred the whole arrangement onward, and Elmwood House is to be inspected from cellar to garret.
Strode's certificates—all of them, fifteen years of them—are being reopened.
" I turned my glass. "He signed a great many women into that house. We unmade only one of them last week."
The lightness went out of the room for a moment, and I was not sorry. It ought to.
“Anne referred her cousin’s case to Thorne’s solicitors,” Lark said.
“Honoria Sefton?” Peregrine asked.
Lark nodded. “They’ve taken it up and are planning the challenge even as we speak. They expect her case will be resolved quickly, same as Linnet’s. Honoria’s husband refuses to take her back. So Anne has offered Westmere House.”
“And what of your brother?” Quennell asked.
“He quit London within the week, went to ground at the Westmere seat in Northumberland. I hear the local society will not receive him. His guardianship of Linnet is at an end. No court will hand a young woman back to him after he was publicly shown to have sold her for the convenience of never seeing her face. She will remain here under my roof and my protection.”
Lark’s brother had wanted the Westmere name kept spotless above all things.
He had succeeded only in making it the single most discussed name in London—attached, in every drawing room, to the words: deaf sister and asylum and for shame.
A man cannot blot out what he has not the wit to leave alone.
He had reached for his sister and pulled the whole edifice down on his own head.
I could not locate the smallest particle of pity for him.
"Honora may be saved, but there are many others still behind those windows,” Lark said.
I met her eyes down the length of the table.
"Harkness is going through records. We will not leave them there if it can be managed.
" It was not a thing I had planned to promise aloud, in company, but I found I did not wish to take it back.
"Lydia Gray died to put a crack in that wall.
It seems a poor way to honor her to mend the crack and walk away. "
There was a silence. Then Quennell lifted his glass, his hand not quite steady, and said, "To Lydia Gray. Who could not be here. Who is the reason all the rest of us are."
We drank to her. Even Will, who had been given watered wine for the occasion, raised his glass with the solemnity of a boy admitted, for one evening, to the councils of men.
It was late when I found Lark apart from the others.
The company had drifted toward the drawing room, where Will was bending Mrs. Selwyn’s ear about locomotives in general and Rocket, in particular.
The woman had the patience of a saint. Peregrine was at the pianoforte, drawing “Moonlight Sonata” from the keys with surprising skill while Quennell looked on.
Across the room, Linnet was teaching Charles signs no young lady ought to know.
Lark stood a little outside the lamplight of the doorway, watching them. I came to stand beside her, and for a while neither of us said anything.
"You brought him," she said at last. Not the boy's name. Him. She understood what she was looking at; she had understood it, I think, in the hall. "I know what that cost you, Thorne. I will not embarrass us both by saying how much."
"Then do not."
"I will say only that I see it." She turned her head, and I became suddenly aware of how near she stood. "You let almost no one in, Thorne. But you walked into my hall tonight with the one person you have, and you set him down in the middle of my family as though—" She stopped.
"As though," I agreed, because I could not finish it either, and was not certain I would have dared.
She did not move away. That was the whole of it, and it was a great deal.
Other women would have moved away, or moved closer, and made the thing into one sort of declaration or another.
Lark only stood, and let it be what it was—unsaid, unmistakable, and ours—and looked at me with those steady blue eyes as though she had all the time in the world.
She did not ask where any of it was going. It did not occur to her to ask, I think, any more than it would occur to her to ask the Thames where it was going. Some things simply were, and moved as they moved. A woman like Lark did not trouble herself chasing a shore.
I understood, standing there, that she wanted nothing further from me than what she already had.
Not a house. Not a name. Not a future arranged and signed and sealed.
She had fought too hard for her own governance to hand any part of it away, even to a man she esteemed—and I did not doubt that she esteemed me.
From the next room came the sound of my nephew's chatter, the soundless laughter of a young woman who had walked out of a madhouse on her own two feet, and the lovely melody of a Beethoven composition, while I stood in a doorway in a house that was not mine, beside a woman who could never be, with a whole company of people who would have remained strangers to my past self, but had now become friends.
It was then I understood that the man who had come back from the Crimea to an empty title and a ruined house, and called that solitude his duty and nothing more, had been entirely wrong.
I had not been left with nothing.
I had simply not been introduced to it yet.