Chapter 17
Chapter Seventeen
The now technically Dowager Baroness Hartwell had a system, and within the first quarter hour of their meeting the morning she returned, Tamsin understood that a great deal of the older woman’s authority in York rested not on her title alone, but on the sheer thoroughness of what she carried in her head—and now, apparently, meant to transfer into Tamsin’s own notebook, page by careful page.
“Are you certain you wish to do this now, Mother?” Tamsin asked with concern as they entered the morning room. “I do not wish you to feel I am impatient to take on all the things you have been mistress of, given you have the greater experience.”
“I see no reason for delay. The sooner you are prepared for and practiced at all this, the better.” Frances, Lady Hartwell, wore a soft mauve gown, one more suited for a quiet day at home than any sort of visiting or formal conversation.
Her eyes were bright with enthusiasm, anticipating the morning’s activity with relish.
“I have waited and hoped for a daughter-in-law like you for years, Tamsin. You are intelligent, mature, and have such an easy way about you that I think you will take up my position in this house and family quite well.”
Though the praise gave Tamsin a measure of confidence, she still settled in a chair near the writing desk with some hesitation. “I will do my best to fulfill the role of baroness.”
Her mother-in-law nodded. “Then we will start with the ladies you are expected to know and visit as soon as possible. As a new bride to a peer, it is your duty to visit others who match you in rank or come just beneath you. To those above you in rank, you must, as always, wait upon their condescension to either visit you first—or send an invitation.”
That much, Tamsin knew. She gave a nod and opened the blank notebook her mother-in-law had asked her to procure.
“Mrs. Camborne first,” Frances said, seated at the small writing desk with her own notebook open before her, worn soft at the corners from years of use.
“You will find her tiresome, everyone does. But she sits on three charitable committees that matter, and she remembers slights for decades, so you will need to be kind to her whether or not you feel like it.”
Tamsin wrote the name, Mrs. Camborne, then three committees, long memory, beneath it. “I strive to be kind to everyone.”
Her mother-in-law’s lips twitched. “As do I, my dear, but it can still be difficult from time to time.”
“And if I am kind to her, what does that gain us?”
“Very little, immediately. Everything, eventually.” Frances’s mouth curved, the amusement in her tone rather dry. “That is most of what you are learning today, I am afraid. Very little, immediately.”
They moved through names with a steadiness of pace, Frances speaking of the wives of aldermen, the widow of a former Lord Mayor who still hosted the most consequential card parties in the city, a Mrs. Suddaby whose husband’s opinion on the woolen trade apparently carried more weight in private than in any public meeting.
Tamsin found her hand cramping with the effort of keeping up—and found, too, that she did not mind it.
There was a shape to this work she recognized; not so different, in its bones, from tracking which of her siblings required attention before they asked for it, or which household accounts wanted watching before they became a crisis.
She had simply never expected to be taught these skills, formally, by someone who assumed she was capable of learning it well.
In her own family, she had stumbled about until she found what worked.
“You are quick,” her mother-in-law said some while later, glancing at Tamsin’s growing list with cheerful approval.
“I confess I did not expect it. Not because I doubted your intelligence, mind. But I understand that most young women arrive at this rather dazed, unless they are raised in a household such as this one. It is a great deal to absorb all at once.”
“I have had practice managing a great deal all at once.” Tamsin spoke lightly, but something in her tone must have given more away than she’d intended, for Frances looked up properly, studying her for a moment before returning to her own notes.
“Yes. I imagine you have.” She said nothing further and Tamsin was grateful.
She did not think she wanted to explain the arithmetic of her gaggle of siblings and a stepmother who preferred to be informed rather than consulted.
Not today, not while the morning still felt this comfortable and easy between them.
“When I first came to this house,” Frances said, tone soft, setting her pen down, “I made the mistake of calling on the newly married Mrs. Camborne before Mrs. Ashworth, entirely by an accident of scheduling. I did not understand, then, that the order mattered nearly so much as the visits themselves. I received a very frosty reception at the Ashworth house for the better part of a year, and no one troubled to tell me why until my own mother-in-law finally took pity and explained it to me over dinner, rather too late to be of any use.”
Tamsin fought off a shudder. “No one told you beforehand it would be perceived as a slight?”
“No one tells you much of anything, Tamsin. That is rather the point, I believe. Half of what passes for social knowledge in this city is withheld deliberately, the withholding itself becoming a kind of currency. The knowledge itself gives status.” Frances’s eyes glinted with something wry and unbothered, the memory clearly long since blunted by time.
“I have decided you will not suffer the same ignorance. Not if I have anything to say about it.”
Tamsin found herself smiling. Not the careful, assessing smile she’d worn through most of the morning, but something truer to what she felt. “I am fortunate you decided so.”
“I am fortunate my son chose a bride whose intelligence was absolutely apparent upon our first meeting. I am also stubborn. I find people rarely notice it in me until it is working against their favor.” Frances reached for her tea, considering Tamsin over the rim of the cup.
“Roman inherited that from me, incidentally. The stubbornness. But the thoroughness beneath it, that is from his father. The late baron was exactly the same, in his day. Buried entirely in his political committees and his correspondence for months at a stretch, present at dinner and nowhere else besides, and I never once managed to convince him there was a time to set those matters aside to be present in other, important ways.” She shook her head, exasperation in tone and expression both.
Tamsin swallowed, a little unsure how to receive such an intimate confession.
There was no mistaking the warmth in it, the fondness, the ease of someone turning over an old memory that had long since stopped hurting, if it ever had.
“I used to tell myself it was simply the way of men who cared deeply about their obligations. I suppose it was. It still left rather a great deal of solitary hours for me, over the years. I learned to fill them with other things. My sons, my social schedule, and my roses.”
Tamsin kept her expression even, eyes on her notes even though she had stopped writing some sentences back, giving more notice to her mother-in-law’s memories than the names on paper.
Buried in his committees. Present at dinner and nowhere else.
Had Roman known his father well? She had not stopped to truly consider the question. She knew he had inherited his title young, not having yet turned twenty when his father died of heart trouble.
She thought, unbidden, of her own mother—tried, without quite meaning to, to summon some fragment that belonged to her alone rather than to the household’s collective memory.
Tamsin found, as she always did, that there was nothing there to summon.
What she had instead was an image of a woman assembled entirely from other people’s telling: Leopold’s insistence she’d had Tamsin’s exact laugh, her father’s occasional, wistful mention of a color she’d favored, a stepmother who had never known her at all so never spoke of her except in the vaguest terms.
A whole person, built secondhand, out of other people’s memories of her rather than any of Tamsin’s own.
Was that what Roman would be to his children?
She could not dismiss the thought. A quiet unease which did not announce itself so much as settle within her made her wonder. Would their children, if they had any, know their father?
Would they know her?
There was nothing to be gained by voicing it. Her mother-in-law had offered the story with real warmth, not as a caution, and turning it into one by asking impertinent questions would only give a wound where surely none had been intended.
So Tamsin nodded, and returned her attention to the page, and let the thought settle somewhere beneath the morning’s easy warmth rather than displacing it.
“Mrs. Suddaby,” Frances said, moving briskly on, entirely unaware of the small shift that had passed through the room.
“I want you to remember her husband votes with the Corporation on nearly every matter, though she herself has opinions rather more reformist than his, which she will never say in a direct manner but may very well hint at, if you are patient with her.” She tapped the page, considering.
“I do not know precisely what my son is about, these days, with all his committees and his pamphlets and his letters until midnight. He has never confided the specifics to me, and I have learned not to ask directly—he tells one what he wishes to tell, in his own time, and pressing him only makes him more careful. But I have lived in this house a great many years, and I know the shape of a man occupied with something he considers important. If you are to be useful to him in his work, whatever it is, you will want to know these people. All of them. Better than he does, if you can manage it.”
It was, Tamsin understood, both an instruction and something closer to an offering—not concrete knowledge of why the things that matter to her husband occupied him so thoroughly, but the tools to go and find it out for herself.
“I should like to be useful,” Tamsin said, and meant it entirely. She had spent her whole life with that as her goal. Why alter it now?
Frances smiled, satisfied, and turned the page to begin reading through another list. “Ah, here’s an interesting one…”