Chapter Two #2
The trap had been laid with some skill. Nathaniel had walked into it before, and the encounter always ended in the same fashion: he delivered a final word, Georgiana answered with a wounded one, and the two of them did not speak for three days. He prepared to be final.
“Colonel Aldous,” Miss Gray said pleasantly, before he could begin. “Is he the tall one, or the one who laughs before he has finished telling his own jokes?”
Georgiana blinked. “The tall one. You know him?”
“I know the type.” Selina set down her spoon and gave the girl her undivided attention, more than anyone at that table had managed in a year.
“A man who is charming to every young woman at a masquerade is not being charming to you. He is merely being charming in your vicinity. It costs him nothing, while you are expected to pay full price for it, and you strike me as someone who dislikes being cheated.”
“I never said I wished to marry the man.” Georgiana had coloured to the tips of her ears. “I said only that he would be there.”
“Then you wish to be in an interesting house, wearing a fine gown and receiving the admiration of people whose approval costs you nothing to collect. There is no harm in that at nineteen. The danger lies in the house itself. Mrs Ottley neither can nor cares to distinguish between a girl who wishes to be admired and one who wishes to be ruined, because another young woman’s ruin will fill her rooms the following Season.
Your intentions may be perfectly innocent, but the company would not be. ”
Georgiana looked from her brother to her new companion and back again, then set down her wine untasted.
“You are supposed to take my side,” she said. “You said that you were not his spy.”
“I am not. I have told him nothing that you did not say aloud at this table.” Selina turned her glass a little by the stem, then left it untouched.
“I am telling you to your face that the masquerade is a poor idea. That is my own opinion. If you choose to go regardless, I shall accompany you, stand between you and Mrs Ottley’s more profitable guests, behave in an exceedingly tiresome fashion, and spoil your evening thoroughly.
You will detest me and remain perfectly safe. That is the arrangement I recommend.”
“You would truly come and spoil it?” Georgiana had forgotten to be angry and had not yet noticed.
“Thoroughly. I have a gift for it. I can render any room dull merely by standing in it with a disapproving posture. Colonel Aldous would find you guarded by a grey woman who answered every gallantry with an enquiry after his mother. He would retreat within a quarter of an hour. They always do.”
“That is a horrid thing to offer a girl,” Georgiana said.
“It is what I have to offer: a tiresome chaperone, and your name still your own at the end of the evening. No one else this Season will offer you anything half so dull.”
A short silence held the table. Then Georgiana laughed, unwillingly, exactly as Nathaniel had laughed unwillingly in the carriage, and the sound sat oddly in a dining room that had not heard much of it in a year. At the sideboard the footman looked hard at the wall and went on looking at it.
It was as his sister reached for her wine, still laughing, that Nathaniel saw the letter.
It had been folded small and tucked under the rim of her plate, half hidden by the linen, and when the footman moved to change the course, Georgiana’s hand went out and drew it under the edge of the cloth into her lap with a smoothness that no innocent errand ever wore.
She did it without breaking the rhythm of her laughter.
She did it the way a practised hand does a thing it has done before.
He said nothing. Speaking would have turned the whole table, and the letter would have vanished, and he would have gained a quarrel and lost the knowledge. He watched the small white corner disappear into the folds of her gown, and let the dinner proceed, and did not taste the rest of it.
***
He found Miss Gray afterwards in the corridor outside the library, where she had gone to fetch a book with an ease that suggested she had already claimed the room in her mind.
The corridor was cold. She had a single candle and had set it on the sill behind her, so that her face was the darkest thing in it.
“You saw it,” she said, before he spoke.
“You saw me see it.” He had stopped a yard short of her and gone no nearer.
“You became very still. You are not still by nature; you are still by discipline, and that discipline slipped for half a moment.” She held the book against her chest, both arms folded over it. “She is receiving letters at the dinner table. You wish to know who sends them.”
“I wish to open her door and take the thing from whatever drawer she has hidden it in.”
“And you must not.”
“She is my sister.” His voice rose, and he mastered it again. “She is my ward. This is my house.”
“And she is nineteen and lonely. If she is corresponding with a man and has learnt to conceal it so well, then he may be patient; and a patient man who encourages secrecy ought to be treated with caution. Tear the letter from her hand tonight, and she will not cease writing to him. She will merely become better at hiding it. You may exchange a letter you have some hope of discovering for a secret you never will.”
“You are telling me to do nothing.”
“I am telling you to wait, and to make yourself someone she may one day choose to tell.” Her chin lowered a fraction. “Shame her and she will retreat into silence, and silence is where she lived before all this began.”
“And meanwhile, the letters continue.” His hand closed around the corner of the shelf beside him.
“Meanwhile, you discover who sends them, which you cannot do if you frighten her into burning every letter unread. If a man is guiding her in this, he may already have taught her to expect precisely the confrontation you intend. What he may not have anticipated is a brother who does not force the door, and a companion whose presence he does not yet know to fear.”
“You would set yourself against him, whoever he may be.”
“I would keep a careful eye upon the matter. The ease with which she slipped that letter into her lap suggests that she has done so before. The precautions may be entirely her own, or someone may have encouraged them; we need not assume the worst, but neither should we ignore the possibility.” Her expression remained composed.
“I have known men to make secrecy seem like cleverness.”
She stopped there, and the flatness of the last sentence had a floor under it a long way down. Nathaniel waited for the rest. It did not arrive.
He stood in the cold corridor and intensely disliked the fact that she was right.
He had built his authority within this house upon being right, yet here was a woman he had employed only the previous day, correcting him in defiance of his every instinct.
Worse still, when he examined that instinct honestly, it sat down beside her judgement and remained there.
“You make it difficult to resent you,” he said. “I wish you to understand that I intend to resent you regardless. Your judgement is sound, but your delivery is insufferable. I have not yet decided which of the two I mind more.”
“The soundness.” She was already turning towards the stairs. “You will have forgiven the delivery by Friday.”
She tucked her book beneath her arm, inclined her head, and left him alone in the corridor with the image of a small white letter disappearing into his sister’s lap.
He went upstairs an hour later. The house had completed its nightly business without him: the shutters closed, the fires banked, the last candles carried away. He ascended the great staircase through the darkness of his own hall as though it belonged to someone else.
On the landing, he stopped outside Georgiana’s door.
He stood with one hand not quite touching it, long enough for the wax of his candle to run crookedly down one side.
No light showed beneath the door, and no sound came from beyond it.
He had given his word downstairs that he would not force his way inside.
He had not promised that he would not stand there.
He slept poorly. He told himself it was the letter.