Chapter Eighteen The Best of Them #2
“Then he possesses somewhere to stand.”
Ambrose laughed.
Mary Beth had learned that this was one of the small pleasures no scandal could have predicted: making him laugh when he was trying to be sensible.
The marriage had cost her some people, and she made no effort to pretend otherwise.
Two families who had once visited Blackthorn no longer did.
A woman Mary Beth had known since girlhood crossed the street rather than greet her after the marriage notice appeared.
The musicale invitations stopped completely.
One charitable committee accepted Mary Beth’s money but declined her presence at meetings for nearly three months before discovering that principles were expensive and inviting her back.
Mary Beth attended the next meeting and behaved beautifully.
Ambrose told her this was more frightening than if she had caused a scene.
The bank restored Blackthorn’s seasonal line after examining the figures and the correspondence surrounding Sablehurst’s inquiries.
The York merchant took longer, but competition proved morally clarifying; when another supplier offered Blackthorn reasonable terms, the first firm suddenly rediscovered its confidence in Mary Beth’s solvency.
The tenant whose daughter had been warned by her employer came to Mary Beth in February.
The girl had kept her position. The threatened dismissal never happened.
Mary Beth did not ask whether the mistress had changed her mind from fairness, embarrassment, or simple lack of replacement servants.
She was grateful and left the matter alone.
Benedict’s campaign had not vanished from memory, but its force diminished once people understood that there were documents behind Mary Beth’s accusations and witnesses who could confirm the financial pressure. He did not apologize. Mary Beth did not expect him to.
He spent more time in London.
This also seemed satisfactory.
By noon, Blackthorn’s front drive began filling with carriages for the summer luncheon Mary Beth had insisted on holding despite Ambrose’s suggestion that inviting the county to the house again so soon might be interpreted as provocation.
“It is luncheon,” she had told him. “If Yorkshire feels provoked by cold salmon, Yorkshire deserves what happens to it.”
He had surrendered.
Now the terrace doors stood open to the lawn. Tables had been set beneath striped awnings. The repaired north field could be seen beyond the trees if one walked far enough along the path. Mary Beth had deliberately arranged nothing there. She had no desire to turn a drainage project into a shrine.
Guests came anyway.
The elderly widow arrived first, announced that she had supported the marriage before it became fashionable, and demanded the same champagne Mary Beth had failed to provide at the engagement.
Mary Beth informed her that four months did not make anything fashionable.
The widow said Yorkshire was slow and should be allowed time.
The hospital committee sent two representatives.
Neither mentioned the months in which Mary Beth’s name had been considered unsuitable for a meeting room, but one asked whether Blackthorn’s carriage might again be available twice a month for women traveling in from the western villages.
Mary Beth agreed without rewarding the request with gratitude.
The work had mattered before the scandal and mattered after it.
The bank manager came late and talked to Ambrose about drainage rather than credit.
Mary Beth found this almost suspiciously pleasant.
The York merchant’s representative did not attend, though a hamper arrived from the firm with a card wishing Mr. and Mrs. Tavener good health.
Ambrose ate one of the pears and said reconciliation tasted expensive.
Some were friends. Some were people who had always liked Blackthorn’s cook.
Some had been at the confrontation with Benedict and now treated the entire affair as if they had supported Mary Beth from the beginning.
A few arrived with the cautious curiosity of people testing whether association with Mrs. Tavener remained dangerous.
Mary Beth received all of them with the same courtesy.
Ambrose appeared beside her when he could, vanished when an engineering client arrived early, returned with ink on his thumb, and was intercepted by a gentleman who wanted advice about a bridge before he reached the food.
No footman directed him toward a separate table.
Mary Beth noticed.
Ambrose noticed her noticing.
Across the terrace, he lifted one eyebrow.
She smiled and turned to greet another guest.
There were moments when the change was almost laughably small.
A place set beside hers. His name spoken with “Mr.” before it rather than delivered like an instruction to a servant.
A landowner asking Ambrose’s opinion and waiting for the answer.
A woman who had once called him “the engineer” asking whether he and Mary Beth would attend a harvest dinner later in the year.
Birth remained what it was. When someone asked about his father, Ambrose said quarryman. When someone asked where he had studied, he said mostly at night and mostly from borrowed books. He had stopped treating those answers as things that required apology or embellishment.
Mary Beth loved him for many reasons, but she particularly loved that one.
She also loved that he no longer mistook pride for self-erasure.
Late in the afternoon, when the last guest had gone upstairs to retrieve a wrap and the servants were clearing abandoned glasses from the lawn, Mary Beth found Ambrose beside the old stone bridge.
He had escaped the party without telling her.
She considered being offended.
Then she saw the coat folded beneath him on the grass so his trousers would not stain and decided he had already suffered enough indignity.
“You disappeared,” she said.
“I walked two hundred yards.”