Chapter Eight #2
She held the bowl while he took the last of it, and his eyes went past her shoulder to the doorway, where Declan had come to stand without her having heard him arrive.
The old man looked at his son a long moment.
Then he looked at Renae, and then back to his son, and a knowledge settled into the ruin of his face that was not a smile and was a long way from a question.
He had read all of it at a glance, as he had read everything else.
He turned his eyes back to her, deliberately, and let her watch him decline to say it aloud, and let his son watch the declining.
In a man with so little breath left to spend, the declining carried like speech.
Renae took up the empty bowl and made her curtsey and got herself out of the room before the silence could ask her anything she had no answer ready for.
He was in the corridor when she came out, leaning against the panelling as though he had been there an hour and would deny it under oath.
“He ate it,” she said warmly.
“I heard. I believe the entire landing heard. The soup was threatened with the linen cupboard, and the soup, being a sensible soup, surrendered.”
“It was a fair threat.” She had not smiled. “I meant every word of it.”
“I have no doubt of it whatever. You threatened me with a column of figures once, in this very house, and I have not passed an easy night since.” He turned the next of it over before he let it out. “You had my note.”
“I framed it. In my mind. It hangs beside the other, where you ordered the household to collapse upon a fixed schedule.”
“I did not order it to collapse. I ordered it left collapsed. There is a distinction in that, and a man in my position is obliged to cling to his distinctions, having so few other things left to cling to.” His eyes stayed off her face, and she understood that now in a way she had not a week before, that it was a courtesy and not a coldness, and that he was leaving her a wall to be private against. “You will tell me, if ten on the hour should prove insufficient.”
“I require nothing, my lord. Requiring nothing is the single study at which I have ever made myself the foremost living authority in England.”
“Yes. I had gathered as much.” He said it without the dryness, only the once, and then he put the dryness back on as one shrugs into a coat in a cold passage.
“Go and eat something yourself. That is not an instruction, and it is not management, whatever your face is preparing to accuse me of being. It is an observation that you have carried soup to a duke this morning and have carried none to the housekeeper, and the housekeeper is the one member of this staff I have lately discovered I cannot replace.”
“That is a great deal of weight to hang upon a woman before her breakfast, my lord.”
“It is. I find I have a talent for it I had not suspected in myself.” A silence he did not trouble himself to fill. “I shall not say it again, if it discomfits you. I am setting it down the once, for the record, in case the house should ever require reminding which of us keeps it upright.”
“The house knows. It is only too proud to say so.”
“Then we are two proud houses, Mrs. Trelawney, and one of us has lately learned to speak.”
She studied him a moment. “You are in an odd humour this morning, my lord.”
“I am in an honest one. The two are easily confused in a house that has had so little practice with the second of them.”
“Then practise,” she said, before she had quite decided to.
“I intend to. I am told the housekeeper is very strict upon the point.”
He left her with that, and the leaving spared her the labour of an answer. It was the nearest he had come, in the cold sober light of an ordinary Tuesday, to the dark edge of the pond.
***
The London letter came two days after, and Beatrice read it through twice and laid it face up on the breakfast table. She laid things there only when she had decided they would be discussed whether or not anyone present wished it.
“The Ossorys have remembered, quite suddenly, that they are full for the season.” Beatrice tapped the page with one finger.
“The Pleydells find their numbers will not, after all, stretch to take in Declan. Three more houses will make the same discovery by Friday, and you may set your clock by the order they arrive in.”
“Over Alaric.”
“That is the reason written upon the paper. Alaric’s scandal is two full years cold, and it has never once kept a hostess from seating Declan at her best table, because a duke’s heir is a duke’s heir and an old scandal is no more than a flavour to a dull dinner.
” Beatrice’s voice stayed very level, the pitch Renae had learned to read as true anger.
“What has altered is not Alaric. What has altered is that Mrs. Allardyce called here on Tuesday, and stayed her full hour, and was heard to remark to her own coachman as she climbed into the carriage how very comfortable dear Lord Declan looked these days with his housekeeper. Mrs. Allardyce’s carriage is the swiftest post in three counties and the least honest of the lot. ”
Renae set down the cup she had been holding without once drinking from it.
“So it is me,” she said.
“It is the look of the thing, which to the people who compose these letters is the entire thing and the only portion they trouble to read at all. They do not care one straw what you are to one another in fact. They care what it can be made to seem in the retelling, and you have handed them something that seems, by the one unforgivable crime of making a dying house comfortable and a cold man laugh inside it.”
Renae heard her own voice come out flat and practical. “Then I shall be less comfortable to be near. It is a thing that can be managed. I have managed a great deal harder than my own face.”
“You will do no such foolish thing, and if you attempt it he will notice inside a day, because he notices everything that concerns you, and there lies the whole of our present difficulty.” Beatrice folded the letter along its crease and pressed it flat with her palm.
“Hear me, for I am old and I am right, which is a rare and valuable pairing in any one woman. Should you grow cold to save him, he will follow the cold to its source like a hound after blood, and arrive at the truth far faster than the gossips will, and you will have ruined the whole thing in the saving of it.”
“Then what would you have me do?”
“For the present, nothing whatever, which is the hardest labour there is and the one you are least practised in.” She laid her hand flat upon the folded letter.
“And what will you say to him? When you give it to him.”
“The truth, which is the only thing he has ever respected and the last thing anyone in his life has troubled to hand him. That the invitations are withdrawn, that the reason on the paper is a falsehood, and that the falsehood will cost him nothing he ever valued in the first place.” Beatrice’s mouth thinned to a line.
“I shall not tell him the part that touches you. He will arrive at that part himself, and a man who arrives at a thing on his own feet owns it, whereas a man who has it pressed into his hand spends the rest of his life suspecting he was robbed of it.”
“You are managing him.”
“I am managing the manner of his finding out, which is an entirely different trade. There is all the difference in the world, child, between steering a man towards a door and shoving him bodily through it, and I have buried two husbands learning precisely where the one ends and the other begins.”
Renae turned the spoon over in her saucer. “And if I do nothing, and it grows worse regardless?”
“Then we shall do the next sensible thing, and the one after that, until the season wearies of us, as seasons always do.” Beatrice’s voice gentled by a degree.
“Scandal is a fire that wants constant feeding. Starve it of fresh comfortable looks across a sickroom and it will eat itself hollow inside a month.”
Beatrice rose, with the slow deliberation of a woman whose joints held strong opinions on the matter.
“I do not tell you all this to wound you. I tell you because you are the one person under this roof clear-headed enough to do something sensible with the knowing of it. My nephew will do something magnificently foolish with it inside the hour he reads it, which is exactly why I mean to be the one who hands it to him, and exactly why you will allow me.”
Renae looked at the small heap of withdrawn invitations and understood, with the particular cold of a thing she had refused for a fortnight to see, that the warmth she had been so quietly proud of building was the very rope they would use to hang him.
They were the two pieces of evidence that counted, and she had gathered them both herself, and carried them across with her own two hands, and set them down in front of the very people who would use them against him.