Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty
“Enough.” That quiet word came from Lady Seymore, and both Cressida and Theodore turned to look at her.
Lady Seymore was no longer seated at the table.
She had risen at some point in the last several minutes—Cressida had not noticed precisely when—and was now standing near the window with her hands folded at her waist, the plum silk of her gown catching the candlelight at its folds, her silver-streaked hair neatly arranged above a face that wore an expression Cressida had not previously seen on it: shame.
“I said, enough,” she repeated softly. She looked first at Theodore, who had gone very still in that controlled, dangerous way of his, and then at Cressida. “I need to tell you something.”
Theodore’s eyes narrowed. “Whatever you wish to say, it can wait until—”
“It cannot.” Her voice did not rise, but there was no arguing with it. She had the tone of a woman who had arrived at a decision and would not be dissuaded. “It cannot, given that you are currently accusing your wife of a thing she did not do.” She exhaled through her nose. “Because I did it.”
The candlelight moved across the room in a slow, indifferent pulse.
“I beg your pardon?” Theodore blurted, breaking the silence that had already begun a languid stretch between them.
“The scandal sheets.” Lady Seymore did not flinch from his stare. “The information was mine to give. I gave it.”
Cressida heard the words, and for a long moment, they arrived stripped of meaning, as though in a language she had studied only at a remove and could not yet translate with any confidence.
She looked at Lady Seymore and remembered, quite involuntarily, the column that had described her stay at Ashmere Castle with such specific, corrosive accuracy.
The exact details, the particular phrasing that could only have come from someone with knowledge of the castle, of the circumstances, of her, and of the column’s editor to see the thing published without delay.
The entire edifice of it rearranged itself in the span of a breath.
“You…” Cressida trailed off, the word barely audible.
“Yes.” Lady Seymore held her eyes, even as the shame burned inside her own. “Me.”
Theodore’s chair scraped back from the table.
He stood, and the sudden change in his height had a particular effect.
The way a building looked different in a storm than in fair weather—much more consequential.
His face was composed. That was almost worse than if it had not been, because Cressida had learned over these weeks that his composure was not evidence of calm. It was a lid on something worse.
“Tell me,” he said, “that I misheard you.”
“After the storm—you will recall there was a rather severe storm, the morning of Lord and Lady Whitebrook’s wedding—I received word.
” Lady Seymore held his gaze without flinching.
“Not from the castle, but from my house. My housekeeper’s sister is married to a coachman in the village nearest Ashmere.
The sort of connection one never considers until one finds a use for it.
” A brief pause. “I knew within two days that you had brought an unchaperoned young woman here. I did not yet know who she was.”
Theodore had gone completely still.
“I made enquiries,” she continued, in the same level tone. “Carefully. Once I knew the young woman in question was the daughter of the Earl of Bardwell, I sought out Lady Norwell—we have been friends these thirty years, she and I. What she told me confirmed what I had already half-decided.”
She glanced at Cressida, apology and resolution in equal measure.
“Lady Norwell was very worried about her granddaughter. The engagement to Emerton and what her parents intended for her. She had been worried for some time, with no means of addressing it. And I had in my possession information that could change things.” She looked back at Theodore. “So I used it.”
“You used it.” He repeated the words with a quietness that was more unsettling than any raised voice. “You took information from my household—from my estate—and you used it. Against me.”
“For you,” she corrected. “There is a difference.”
His expression did not change. “I do not recognize the distinction.”
Lady Seymore’s chin lifted. “Then allow me to explain it.” Her voice, still level, carried the particular quality of a woman who had reached the end of her arguments and chosen to spend the last one well.
“I thought about what I know of you. I have thought about what I know of you for a very long time. You have managed this estate and your affairs and the weight of this family’s history entirely alone since you were seventeen years old.
It has made you an excellent duke.” She held his gaze steadily.
“And a deeply unhappy man. I have watched it, year after year, and said nothing because you made it perfectly clear that my opinions were not required.”
There was no sentimentality in her voice. She delivered the account with precision, as though sentiment would only undermine the case she was making.
“And then Cressida came along. I thought, at last here was a woman worth the disruption.”
“You decided,” Theodore repeated.
The words were controlled, but Cressida could see his hands, the way his fingers had straightened at his sides very slowly as though he were releasing something by degrees.
“I did.” Lady Seymore did not retreat from it. “I thought I was helping you both.”
Cressida had not moved from her chair. She was watching Lady Seymore with the focused, effortful attention of someone trying to hold several understandings in place at once before any of them could collapse into something less ordered.
Here was a woman she had liked—had been genuinely glad to find, in those early bewildering weeks at Ashmere, as a source of warmth and clear-sightedness and frank amusement.
Here was a woman who had drawn her out at dinner, who had told her things about Theodore that had proved more accurate than any other intelligence she possessed, who had laughed with genuine delight and looked at her with the particular regard of someone who saw a person and approved of what they saw.
And this same woman had looked at the circumstances of her life—her parents’ plans, her engagement to Emerton, the vulnerability of her position—and had made a decision.
Not with her, but for her. With kindness, but without consultation. As though the question of what Cressida Whitaker’s future should contain was a matter that could reasonably be settled by someone else, provided that person had good intentions and sufficient connections.
Cressida had spent two years at her aunt’s house being managed by people who believed they knew what was best for her.
She had scrubbed floors and mended gowns and slept in an attic and been grateful, she was told, for the opportunity to do so.
She was familiar with the texture of being decided upon by those who meant well.
It was peculiar how generosity and presumption could arrive in identical dress.
“You wanted to save us,” she said slowly.
“Yes.” Lady Seymore’s voice was softer now. “I know how that sounds. I know it was not—”
“Not your decision.” Cressida said it without heat, because heat would have been the easy response, and this did not feel like a moment for easy responses.
“It was not your decision, My Lady. I understand that you meant well. I believe that entirely and without reservation. But you treated my life as a difficulty to be resolved on my behalf, without once asking whether I wished it resolved, or how, or at what cost to me.” She met Lady Seymore’s eyes.
“I was not a piece to be moved into position.”
Lady Seymore received that with the quiet of a woman who had no defense to raise and knew it. “I know,” she said steadily. “I am sorry, Cressida.”
Theodore had not said anything, so Cressida looked at him.
He was standing with his back half to the table, one hand resting on the dark mahogany, and he was looking at Lady Seymore with an expression Cressida had not seen from him before. This was something older and harder.
“You interfered,” he said. “In my home, in my marriage decisions, without saying a single word to me.”
“I did.” Lady Seymore’s voice did not waver. “I believed it was the only way to bring you together. That without a formal obligation, without a circumstance requiring your hand, you would have found reason after reason to keep your distance from any happiness you might have had.”
“You—” He stopped and gathered himself. “Do not explain your reasoning to me again. I have heard it.”
“Theodore, I only—” Lady Seymore tried, but he held up his hand, cutting her words short.
“I don’t need saving.” He said it far more quietly than anything else he had said that evening, and it was precisely because of that restraint that it arrived with the force it did.
There was nothing theatrical in it, nothing that invited argument or appeal.
“I did not need it then. I do not need it now. Not from you… or anyone else.”
Lady Seymore looked at him for a long moment. “I did it for both of you,” she said. “I believed it was the only way to secure your future together.”
“Leave.”
At that, Lady Seymore did not argue. She was a woman of too much dignity and, Cressida suspected, too much genuine regret for argument. She straightened, smoothed the front of her gown, and crossed the room with the composure that, under other circumstances, Cressida would have found admirable.
As she passed, she paused beside Cressida’s chair, and the look she gave her was brief but full, and the apology in it was loud. Then she was gone, and the front door closed behind her.
The room resettled around her absence.
Cressida looked at Theodore, but he was already moving away from her.
He turned away from the table with the deliberation of a man who had decided that the only useful thing he could do was be somewhere else, before anything further could be asked of him or said in his presence or laid at his feet.
The dining hall, with its cooling silver and its confessional aftermath, apparently held nothing he wished to remain in.
She was on her feet before she had consciously decided to stand. Her chair scraped back from the table with an undignified sound, but there was no time for embarrassment.
He was already crossing the threshold into the corridor without looking back.
So she followed him.