Chapter 14 #2
But it held. The footmen bumped into each other, and nothing happened. The children bickered in a corner over who had the larger piece of cake, but no tears came. Her stepmother flew about like a bird trapped inside, but no one else appeared the least bit ruffled.
Matilda Elgin leaned close, a bright smile on her face.
“I cannot say when I have seen three such interesting matriarchs all in one place. My mother, your stepmother, and your mother-in-law. They seem to mostly avoid each other, keeping to their own sides of the room. Do you think they are territorial creatures when they have not their own friends near them?”
Tamsin nearly choked on her punch. A strange concoction, she was relieved to have a reason to put it down. “But my stepmother and Mrs. Holly are friends at present, are they not? Or did they have another falling out?”
There had been many dramatic ends to their friendship over the years, but always an equally dramatic moment of forgiveness and renewed professed sisterhood. It was difficult at times to keep track of where they were in the cycle…
“Oh, heavens, I think they are about to. My mother is quite envious that you are to be a baroness and I am merely a gentleman’s widow.” Her smile held no pain nor regret, but Tamsin reached out and squeezed her friend’s hand anyway.
Daughters of difficult parents understood each other better than most.
Despite the little troubles of the event, the world did not end, and Tamsin found this more disorienting than she cared to admit.
She occupied herself instead with slipping in and out of everyone else's world, since her own had apparently been taken out of her hands for the day.
Roman's friends were louder than she'd expected—Mr. Kettlewell especially, who regarded the length of the wedding ceremony as a personal grievance against the Church of England, and who was roundly agreed with by at least three other gentlemen. The subject changed to something about a barbican she did not follow and privately resolved to ask about later, given the way her husband’s friends glanced in his direction and lowered their voices.
There was a whole language here she had yet to learn—corporation votes and reform clubs and men who nodded at each other across a room in some code she hadn't been taught.
She listened without appearing to listen, a skill she'd had cause to practice for years, and found—to her mild surprise—she wanted to understand it.
Frances, Lady Hartwell, moved through the room the way Tamsin imagined a ship might move through calm water—graceful and beautiful, disturbing nothing.
She caught the older woman's eye once, across the width of the table, and could read absolutely nothing in the look that was returned.
Not disapproval. Not warmth, precisely. Pleasant and more patient than either.
Her new mother-in-law had already made up her own mind and was simply waiting for events to catch up to her opinion.
Tamsin found she minded this less than her stepmother’s frequent comments on her own feelings, which were most often categorized as complaints which the bride attempted to ignore.
There was something peaceful about her mother-in-law, and Tamsin wanted that for herself. A silly thing, perhaps; but between the woman who had finished raising her and the baroness, the latter felt a great deal steadier.
Leopold sidled up to her as she surveyed the room. “Well now, sister, you have managed a thing I have not, though not from lack of trying. Marriage, and true escape.” He looked at her from the corner of his eye. “Taking in the lay of the land?”
“Something like that,” she admitted, smiling up at him. He had not heard from Augusta Despencer directly, or through her family. The woman was well and truly out of his reach in Scotland with her grandmother. “I hope it will be your turn soon, Leo.”
Tamsin did not know his chosen lady, as he had met her while visiting a friend in the country and had only known each other a fortnight. Though she was hardly one to protest, given the haste of her own courtship, engagement, and wedding.
“Perhaps. Mourn not for my sake. Be happy for your own.” Leo gave her hand a squeeze then drifted away, expression still far too melancholy.
Her new brother-in-law Lyness and his betrothed, Lady Emily, caught her attention next.
They stood near the window for the better part of twenty minutes, heads bent toward each other.
Tamsin could not have guessed what they spoke of, only that Lady Emily laughed twice and Lyness, watching her laugh, wore an unguarded look of a man who still found it remarkable that he was allowed to make her do so.
They were not yet married—December, Lady Emily had said firmly that morning, reminding people she waited for her large family to attend—but Tamsin thought privately that whatever paperwork remained between them was a formality.
They had already chosen each other. It showed in the comfortable way they stood together, the way neither performed anything for the room, the way he looked after her when she moved to speak to another.
What it would be to have that deepness of intimacy and understanding?
Would she and Roman ever gain it?
Her new husband found her near the window not long after, and told her—badly, and rather stiffly, in a way that made the words worth more rather than less—that she'd managed the room well.
She had not known what to do with that, had said something equally clumsy back, and watched him retreat afterward looking faintly like a man who'd surprised himself.
Botheration. She had meant only to tease him. Perhaps her nerves had taken hold of her tongue and kept it from the right tone or words.
Still, she made note of it, as she did everything else she was learning about her husband. Praise did not come naturally to him; when it came anyway, it cost him something to give it.
The conversation of the breakfast had begun to thin toward its natural end.
It was Daphne who found her in the morning room, Tamsin having stepped away from the crowd needing a moment to catch her breath.
She would be departing, and it seemed her sister had come to the same conclusion.
Seraphina and Pearl trailed behind her, and something in the three of them together, hovering in the doorway rather than coming fully in, told Tamsin before any of them spoke that this was not a simple errand.
“You are leaving soon.” Daphne’s bluntness helped in a way.
“Yes,” Tamsin said, as gently as she could manage. “I am.”
Pearl's mouth did something complicated, like she could not decide which words to shape first. “I know that. We knew that. It is only—” She stopped, and looked to Seraphina, hoping the eldest of the starlings might finish the thought better.
Seraphina didn't try for complexity. “Who will help us with our bonnets?” She looked immediately embarrassed to have asked something so small when she so plainly meant something larger.
Tamsin understood the question. It was not about the bonnets, or the embroidery, or conversation, or a thousand other little things she had always helped her sisters to do.
“Your mother will manage,” she said, and heard how thin it sounded, even as she said it.
“Mother does not notice when Henry's grown out of his boots until he refuses to wear them,” Daphne said, with the flat honesty of a seventeen-year-old who had clearly been rehearsing this complaint but had not expected to need it quite this soon. “You always notice first. You notice everything.”
There was nothing Tamsin could say to that which wasn't either a lie or an admission she wasn't ready to make in her wedding clothes, with her new husband's political friends still audible through the wall.
She looked at the three of them—Seraphina with her careful composure beginning to crack, Pearl caught somewhere between grief and guilt for feeling it, Daphne too young to have learned yet how to hide what she felt—and understood, with a small, quiet lurch, she had spent so long being the one who held everyone steady that she had never once considered what it would look like from the other side, watching her go.
She had not prepared them for this day, because she had stopped thinking it would come.
“You three will all get on well enough without me.” That was true, and also not at all what any of them wanted to hear. “You did before I was old enough to be of much help, and you will after I am living away from here. A whole two and a half miles,” she teased.
It didn't comfort them. She hadn't expected it to. She only reached out and drew all three of them in at once, inelegantly, wedding gloves and all, and let them stand in her arms until they withdrew, when the noise of the breakfast called them all back to a room she no longer entirely belonged to.
Tamsin would not be far. Indeed, she could see them every day if she wished. But it would be different from this moment onward. All of them felt it. And, with a touch of guilt, she released the smallest sigh of relief.