Chapter Two
There was ink on the third finger of her right hand, worked into the skin at the side of the nail, the sort that soap had given up on some while ago. Nathaniel had been looking at it for three streets.
He had told himself, three times since the carriage pulled away from Harcourt House, that the arrangement was practical.
A companion for Georgiana. A spine his sister could not snap.
A debt of common decency paid to a woman the world had used badly.
A quiet house again by June. He assembled the reasons the way he assembled everything, in order, and set them where he could consult them, and not one of them accounted for the ink.
“You are staring at my hands, Your Grace.” She had not turned her head from the window to say it.
“There is ink on your third finger, and it has been there long enough to resist soap. You write.”
“I write.” She folded her hands into her lap the moment she noticed him looking. “Letters. Accounts. Lists. Apologies I never send.”
“Why do you not send them?”
“Because people would rather condemn me than understand me, and an apology asks them to relinquish the one in favour of the other. They resent being asked. I have ceased to ask.”
“That is a remarkably complete philosophy for a woman of five-and-twenty.”
“Grief is an excellent tutor. Expensive, but thorough.”
He looked out of the window rather than answer. The streets of Mayfair passed in their ordered greyness. His reflection regarded him from the glass: dark and composed, wearing the face he presented to committees and to the occasional woman who imagined she might thaw it.
“You will find my sister difficult,” he said. “I told you as much. But difficult is the whole of it. She is not vicious. She is nineteen and unhappy, and cannot be persuaded that anyone has ever been unhappy before her.”
“Then she is nineteen.” Selina smoothed her gloves over her knuckles, one finger after another. “You need not brief me upon your sister. I have been nineteen and unhappy. I know the country intimately.”
“You keep saying so.”
“You keep needing to hear it.”
He allowed a silence to follow; the sort he employed in committee rooms to make a man reconsider what he had just said.
It had no effect upon her. She remained with her hands folded and her attention fixed upon the passing street, declining the silence as one might decline a dish offered for the second time.
“You are not curious,” he said at last. “Most people in your position would be. A duke’s house, a duke’s sister, a salary that alters their entire future… They would ask questions throughout the drive. You ask nothing.”
“Because you are answering them already, and the answers a man offers unprompted are generally the better ones.” She did not turn from the window.
“You have told me that your sister is not vicious, which means someone has recently suggested that she is. You have explained at considerable length why you require a companion for her, which means you are not entirely certain that hiring me was wise.”
Nathaniel turned and looked at her fully for the first time since the carriage door had closed.
She met his gaze without flinching. There was nothing insolent in her expression, only a steady and unwelcome accuracy; the look of someone who had read a document he had believed was his alone to possess.
“You are going to be trouble,” he said.
“You hired me to make trouble for your sister.” She turned back to the window. “You specified no limit, and I agreed to none.”
The carriage turned in at the gates of Wexford House, and the conversation ended as conversations with her seemed to end, with him half a step behind and disinclined to admit it.
The house received them in its usual manner, which was to say coldly and correctly, footmen at the door and the great staircase rising into shadow. Nathaniel handed Miss Gray down himself, which he had not planned to do.
She stood for a moment upon the gravel, her single small box beside her, and looked up the full height of the house, from the front door to the roof. Then she drew a breath and seized the box before any of the footmen could reach it.
Nathaniel was still composing a suitable remark upon this when they entered the hall and the drawing-room doors flew open. His sister came through them at speed.
“Another one,” Georgiana said. “You have brought me another keeper. I counted the wheels upon the gravel and knew it was you, and I said to Hannah, ‘That will be Nathaniel with a fresh gaoler.’ And here you are, and here she is, and she is dressed in grey, which I suppose is intended to assure me that she possesses no imagination.”
“Georgiana.”
“Do not ‘Georgiana’ me in that voice.” She stood upon the bottom stair to gain a little height, her hands clasped behind her back like a child before a tutor. “I am nineteen, not nine, and I will not be handed a companion like a parcel with the direction written upon it.”
“You will be civil to Miss Gray,” Nathaniel said. “She has done nothing to earn your temper except arrive.”
“I am always civil. I am so civil that I could scream, and screaming would at least be… well, it would be a change.” Georgiana turned the full force of her youth upon Miss Gray.
“Well? Are you going to tell me that I shall grow to like the arrangement? The last one told me that. She remained six weeks and left with my clock.”
Nathaniel drew breath to intervene. This was the point at which the previous four had wilted, and he had grown weary of apologising to departing gentlewomen in his own hall.
Miss Gray spoke first.
“I have no intention of telling you that you will like it,” she said.
She had not moved from where the footman had left her, nor did she step nearer now.
“You will very probably dislike it for some time, and you are entitled to do so. Being managed is disagreeable, and being managed by a stranger whom your brother selected without consulting you is worse. If it offers any comfort, I was not consulted either. He decided that I would suit before I had finished insulting a baronet’s wife, and I agreed to let the matter be decided for me because I require the wages.
In that sense, we are both parcels. I merely intend to be a parcel who reads the same books you do and does not report their contents to your brother. ”
Georgiana’s mouth opened and closed. She glanced at her brother to determine whether the speech had been arranged between them, only to find him standing in his own hall, his gloves still in his hand and no more notion of what was coming than she had possessed. Her fury found nowhere to go.
“You will not report to him?” Georgiana had stepped down from the stair without appearing to notice it.
“I will keep you from harm, and I will keep your confidence in every matter that does not place you in harm’s way. You may test me upon that point whenever you please. You will find that it holds.”
“That is not what companions say.” Georgiana watched her sideways now, as a horse might watch an unfamiliar gate.
“I am aware. I have met several.” Selina set her reticule upon the hall table at last, as though the matter had been settled and they might all cease standing. “They said a great many gentle things and meant most of them, yet they were dismissed regardless. I intend to be useful instead.”
Georgiana stared at her for another moment. Then her shoulders lowered half an inch; the first sign of a truce Nathaniel had spent a year failing to broker.
“You may stay for dinner,” Georgiana pronounced. She gave the bell-pull an unnecessarily violent tug and swept back through the doors she had flung open.
Nathaniel found Miss Gray watching him with an expression that was almost amused and entirely without triumph.
“You accomplished that in less than two minutes,” he said.
“I accomplished it because I am not afraid of her, and everyone she has encountered this past twelvemonth has been afraid of either her temper or your displeasure.” She retrieved her reticule.
“A frightened woman will tell her whatever is required to preserve the peace. She has been lied to by people who love her, and she has perceived it. That is why she is reckless, but no worse.”
He had no answer to that either. It was becoming a habit.
She was conducted upstairs, the door of her room closed behind her, and the house resumed the silence it had maintained for a year. Nathaniel remained in the hall rather longer than his business there required.
***
The following evening, the household sat down to dinner as a household rather than a collision, and Nathaniel briefly permitted himself to believe that he had solved a problem.
He ought to have known better. Georgiana had spent the day rehearsing.
“I have decided,” his sister announced over the soup, “that I shall attend Mrs Ottley’s masquerade after all.
Everyone is going, or very nearly everyone, and Colonel Aldous will be there with half his regiment.
Mrs Ottley admits absolutely anyone, which is precisely why it will be worth attending, because dull houses admit only dull people.
It is a law. I have observed it in operation. ”
“You will not attend Mrs Ottley’s,” Nathaniel said.
“Because you say so?”
“Because Mrs Ottley collects scandal as other women collect fans, and she selects her guests to supply it.” He set down his spoon. “Her invitations are issued for her benefit, not yours.”
“You see danger in a set of quadrilles.” Georgiana put down her spoon sharply enough for it to ring against the bowl. “You see danger in everything. If I so much as speak to an officer, you behave as though I had fled to Gretna Green in my shift.”
“Georgiana.”
“There it is again. That voice.” Georgiana appealed to Miss Gray across the table. “My brother claims to have one tone for managing horses and another for managing me, but I assure you they are precisely alike. You are here to advise me, so advise me.”