Chapter 26 #2
“And do you like it?”
“It is very useful, Your Grace, for one’s Latin.”
“That is not what I asked.”
“Pardon, Your Grace?” Edmund asked, his cheeks turning pink.
“I asked about what you liked,” William said once more, trying to engage the boy.
Edmund’s hands tightened around his napkin. It was so small a motion that William might have missed it had he not been watching for it.
“I do not know, Your Grace. I had not considered whether I liked it.”
“Ah.”
“Should I have, Your Grace?”
There was nothing pert about the question. It was a genuine inquiry. The boy wished to know what the correct answer was, so that he might give it the next time he was asked.
“No,” William said gently. “It was an unfair question. Forgive me.”
“Not at all, Your Grace. It is… nice speaking with you.”
Felicity is younger than this boy by only four years.
He could not imagine his daughter sitting through a dinner in this fashion. She would have made a remark by the second course.
“Papa, Papa, have you noticed the ceiling? There are pomegranates. I do not believe I have ever been in a room with pomegranates on the ceiling.”
She would have asked her neighbor whether he had read the book presently of interest to her. If ignored for long enough, she would have begun quietly, in her own corner, a conversation with the footman about the provenance of the silver.
“Is it Merrivale, do you suppose, or did it come in with Lady Merrivale when she married? One can sometimes tell from the hallmarks if one is allowed to look, which of course is not always the case.”
Edmund, William mused, would not do any of those things. At some point, he had been trained out of doing such things.
“Edmund, do stop fiddling with your napkin,” Lady Merrivale said sharply, again without looking, again without breaking her conversation.
“Yes, Mother.”
The napkin was laid flat on the boy’s lap. His hands were folded on it. He ate another neat, small piece of lamb.
William did not doubt the boy would go back to Eton in a fortnight and would write a perfectly correct letter home every Sunday, addressed to Dear Mother and Father, and would include only the things one included in such letters.
“Your Grace?” Sir Henry called from down the table. “You are very quiet this evening. Have you a view on Lancashire, or are we boring you?”
“Forgive me. My mind wandered.”
“Not at all, not at all. A dull subject for a dinner table, I know.”
“No,” William said. “Not dull. I was only thinking of something else.”
“Anything of interest?”
He looked at Edmund once more. The boy had resumed his careful, even cutting, and did not look up.
“No,” William replied. “Nothing of any consequence. Please, go on.”
“I was saying, the Liverpool question. I believe we shall need to resolve it before the spring.”
“Yes. Yes, I quite agree.”
“You have given it some thought, I hope.”
“I have. I have brought some notes. Perhaps after dinner—”
“Excellent.”
Sir Henry returned to his conversation with Hollis.
William returned to his plate, but his appetite had vanished.
The ladies withdrew after dessert. Edmund bowed to his mother as she passed his chair. She laid her hand on his shoulder for a moment, the first gesture of maternal affection William had noticed the entire evening, and went out.
The port was brought, a fine vintage from Portugal.
Sir Henry sent the footman away. The four men—William, Merrivale, Carstairs, and Hollis—gathered at one end of the table.
After a small hesitation, Edmund was told to remain.
His father commented that he was of an age where he might begin to attend to such matters.
“Unless,” Sir Henry added, “you would prefer to retire, Edmund.”
“I should prefer to remain, Sir. Thank you.”
“Very good.”
Port was poured once more, and cigars were passed around.
The Liverpool question was taken up in earnest. William heard himself offering the views he had ridden twenty-six miles to offer.
The views were sound. They were received well, as he knew they would be. Sir Henry nodded. Carstairs made a note on a small card he had brought for this purpose. Hollis asked two intelligent questions, which William answered.
He was attending perfectly adequately. He heard himself making the arguments in the order he had intended to make them, and he heard Sir Henry receiving them in the order he had intended them to be received.
The business of the evening, the actual business for which he had ridden out here, was being discharged.
And the whole time, another part of himself was watching the boy.
Edmund sat at his father’s right hand. He had not been given a glass of port. He was not expected to contribute. He was only expected to listen, to sit upright, attentive, silent, and to absorb, in the manner of a vessel being filled, the shape of the world his father moved in.
His face was grave and intelligent in the candlelight. He was, William concluded, a good boy. A thoroughly good boy.
Since his birth, Edmund had been given every advantage money could buy and no warmth whatsoever.
Yet, he had taken what he had been given and grown into a grave, intelligent, silent fifteen-year-old who would grow into a grave, intelligent, silent man, and who would in thirty years sit at the head of a table of his own, with a wife at the other end of it discussing a house party in Derbyshire, and a son of his own at his right hand being trained into silence.
William looked down into his wineglass.
I was nearly this man. Or rather, I was. Until, he thought with a cold clarity that had been a long while arriving, Anne came into my life.
He did not know how many hours had passed, only that the decanter had gone around twice more and that Carstairs was telling an anecdote about a bishop.
Sir Henry leaned in toward him discreetly. “Your Grace. Forgive me, I have been meaning to ask. Is there truth in what one hears about remarriage?”
William had been asked the same question a dozen times this season. And each time, he had answered it with the same polite deflection.
He heard himself begin the deflection now, and then he heard himself stop. He looked at Sir Henry, then looked at Edmund, the good, grave, silent boy eating a sugared almond with his hands folded between bites.
“Yes,” he replied.
“Ah. Splendid, splendid. May one enquire about—”
“Her Grace”
“Yes, Her Grace. The Viscount Kirklow’s niece.”
“Yes.”
“Her father was a decent man. I was sorry when we lost him. And you have… Is there a family understanding? May I offer my felicitations?”
“You may. There is rather more than an understanding. We got married in May.”
“Oh, my dear fellow. I had no idea just how recent. My heartiest—”
“Thank you.”
“My very heartiest! Lady Merrivale will be mortified that she has failed to reach out properly to Her Grace.”
“It was quiet. We did not announce it widely, although we have been to several events.”
“I see. I see. Well, I congratulate you. I congratulate you with all my heart. And may I ask—forgive me once more…”
“Ask.”
“Any prospect of…”
A child.
Sir Henry did not finish the sentence. He did not need to. William had heard it in slightly varied forms, from every man of his acquaintance over fifty, for the past five months.
The duchy. The line. The name. The thing one gets married for.
He looked down at his port. He thought of Anne’s face on the ride home from Lord Eldridge’s ball, her cheek resting against his shoulder, the dark streets of Mayfair blurring past. He thought of her that afternoon in her bedroom, weeping in his arms.
“I cannot. I cannot. I am so afraid…”
He thought of the letter in the pocket of his coat upstairs, which he had not yet opened. He thought of Edmund sitting three seats away, silent, good, eating another almond.
“My wife,” he heard himself say, and he was aware even as he said it that he had not called her that in front of any man in quite this way before, “and I have two girls between us, Sir Henry. Her sister and my daughter. They are…” He paused.
“They are the greatest happiness of our lives. Beyond that, God may dispose as He chooses. I find I have no further requirements of Him.”
Sir Henry blinked. He was not a stupid man; it did not take him long.
“Ah,” he murmured. “I… Ah. Quite. Quite so. Quite so, Your Grace.”
“Yes.”
“A very—well, a very modern view, if I may say so.”
“I do not know that it is modern, Sir Henry. I think it is merely the correct one. A family is what you make of it.”
After a small, thoughtful pause, Sir Henry lifted his glass. “To Her Grace, then. And to your two daughters.”
My two daughters…
“Thank you.”
They drank deeply before William set down his glass. He suddenly had very little appetite for the remainder of the evening. The Liverpool question was, in any case, settled.
He would make his excuses at the next convenient moment. He would go up to the room they had given him, draw a chair to the fire, take out the letter at last, and open it.
He would read whatever Anne had written to him, and in the morning, at first light, before the house woke up, he would call for his horse and ride home.