Chapter Ten #2
“I am old enough to be kind without any expense to myself. It is the one economy age improves.” She might have left it there, and the table might have followed her lead, but Mrs. Pelham had heard a door swing open and could not resist a draught.
She leaned to her neighbour at a pitch built to be overheard and disowned in the same breath.
“It is very odd, is it not? A lady of birth, taking wages in the house of an unattached gentleman. One does wonder a little at the arrangement, at who proposed it and to what end, and why a widow of decent family would ever consent to it, unless the wages were not quite the whole of the inducement. I say it only because someone really must, and I have always held plain speaking to be a kindness, whatever the plain-spoken are told to the contrary.”
Renae held still, because the single defense a servant is permitted is stillness, and the long years of her matrimony had perfected it in her. She had begun to believe it would carry her through one more evening when the host set down his glass at the head of the table.
“Mrs. Trelawney is not an oddity for your table, madam,” Declan said evenly, and the level of his voice was worse by far than any shout.
No one answered him. There was no answer to be made that would not enlarge the thing, and he had depended on that, as he counted on everything, and Beatrice covered the silence with a remark about the frost and a question to the rector that Mr. Dabney seized like a drowning man seizes an oar.
The dinner finished itself in the careful murmur of people who have witnessed something they fully intend to describe inaccurately by morning.
Beatrice caught her in the passage as the last carriage was called for. “Well. He has done it now, and done it thoroughly, in the only manner that man has ever done anything.”
“I am aware, Lady Beatrice.”
There was no displeasure in her voice, which was worse than if there had been. “Do not scold him too well, child. The man who can be scolded out of defending you is no kind of man at all, and I have buried two who could, and have missed neither of them.”
“I do not want defending. I want a position, and a character, and a quiet old age in which no one living has ever heard my name.”
“Yes. I know exactly what you want. I am simply not yet persuaded you will be permitted to go on wanting it, because the wanting of a thing and the keeping of it are two different counties, child, and you have only ever held the deed to the first.”
She got them into their carriages. She found Lady Carbery’s lost shawl and woke Mrs. Pelham’s coachman and steered the whole bright wreckage of the evening towards the scullery, and only then did she go to find him, because some things will not keep until morning, and a temper is the first of them to spoil.
He was in the emptied dining room, turning a mismatched fork over in the candlelight as though it had betrayed him personally.
“You stayed to be found,” she said. “You always go up, after. Tonight you stayed.”
“I wanted the scolding over with tonight, rather than carried up to my breakfast. You are gentler at this hour, and I am a coward about mornings.” The fork stayed in his hand. “Begin. I have been bracing for it since the soup.”
“You must not ever do that again.” She kept her voice low, and the lowness cost her more than shouting would have. “Tell me that you understand what you did at that table.”
“I corrected a rude woman. I have done it before, and I expect to do it again before I depart this world. It is among my few honest accomplishments, and I am loath to surrender it at an age when most of the others are already behind me.”
Her voice did not rise, which was the only weapon she had left and the only one she trusted.
“You defended a housekeeper, my lord. Warmly. In front of nine people who came into this house for one piece of evidence and one only, and you rose and handed it to them across the fish, on a clean plate, garnished, with the family crest turned to face them.”
“You would have had me sit and let her name you an arrangement.”
“I would have had you sit and let me be a housekeeper, the one thing in this house that keeps me safe and keeps you solvent. Do you not see the difference in what it costs us?” She had not meant to come so close to the table, and she did not retreat from it.
“You lose a season of invitations. You are an heir. The county will forgive you anything by spring, because they must, because you will one day hold their mortgages. I lose the only character I have left. A housekeeper suspected of being kept finds every house closed to her and every town as well, and you cannot mend that with a level voice across a dinner. The thing that ruins me is the very warmth you used to defend me.”
“That is a fearful lot of figuring to do in the time it takes to insult a woman.”
She met his gaze, holding it without a single mark of wavering.
“I have been doing that arithmetic since I was nineteen, my lord. I do it faster than you can be gallant. It is the only sum I have never once got wrong, and tonight you reached across the table and smudged my working in front of the examiners.”
“I am not in the habit of weighing what a kindness costs before I extend it.”
She set a glass down harder than she had meant to.
“No. You are an heir. You have never had to. A kindness is a thing you can afford, like the candle-ends you let me count. I am the woman who counts the candle-ends, and I have weighed every kindness anyone ever showed me, because I have had to know which of them arrived with a bill folded inside.”
“And which sort was tonight.”
“I do not know yet, and the not knowing is precisely the part that frightens me. I have always known before, with everyone, and known it early.”
“Then do not be insulted in public, and I shall have nothing to defend.” He set the fork down. “I find I cannot manage the first half of that bargain, so you will have to forgive me the second.”
“You are impossible.”
He almost smiled, and stopped himself. “I am told it is hereditary. My brother was impossible and winning both. I had to economise, and I kept only the one quality.”
“You chose poorly.”
“I am beginning to suspect I did.”
He said it quietly, and without the dryness, and it landed in the cleared room with no fork left to turn over and no guest left to perform for, and for a moment neither of them did anything with it at all.
Then she gathered the last of the glasses, because a woman in her position is never more than one breath from a task, and a task at such a moment is a kind of rescue, and she carried them out before the silence could become something she would have to answer for by daylight.
Sleep would not come. She sat at the small window of the small cold room they had given her, the one with its view of nothing but the kitchen yard and the lane beyond it, and turned the evening over as Lady Carbery had turned her glass, to see what ran out.
It was past one when the movement in the yard caught her.
A figure crossed it without a lantern, hugging the dark along the wall, and let himself through the gate to the lane, and was gone perhaps twenty minutes, and came back by the same careful road he had left.
The set of those shoulders was one she had watched carry her own heavy presses up two flights without a word of complaint, and she had thought, more than once, that he was the single good thing below stairs she had not been obliged to fight for.
It was none other than Finch about some business of his own, in the middle of the night, by the one lane no honest errand troubled after dark.
A footman might keep a sweetheart in the village, she told herself.
She told herself a good many reasonable things, in the reasonable voice she kept for frightened housemaids, and she believed perhaps half of them.
The column she had opened on him had not balanced since the silver, and here was a second figure standing on the wrong side of it, in the wrong hour, and still her hand would not write the name at the head of the page.
She sat with the half she did not believe until the candle guttered low and the yard was only a yard again, and the lane was only a lane, and she was only a woman at a window, choosing, one more night, not to know.