Chapter Three #2
“Your sister,” Selina began, “has a correspondent for whom I do not care. I am managing the matter. I wished you to know of it so that you would not be taken by surprise, and I wished to tell you plainly that I shall not give you his name.”
Stillness descended over him at once; the same disciplined stillness she had observed before. “You will give me his name.”
“I shall not. If I do, you will confront her. She will defend him, and every doubt I planted this morning will be torn up by the roots the moment you make him a martyr. She is already half persuaded that your disapproval is the strongest evidence of his merit. Do not provide her with further proof.”
“Has she been meeting this man in secret?” The Duke’s hand flattened upon the desk between them.
“She has given me her word that she will not meet him again without telling me first. I believe her because I did not shame her into making that promise; I secured it through a bargain. A promise extracted through shame would have been quicker to obtain and unlikely to last a week.”
“You place a great deal of faith in a girl who has lied to me all season,” he said.
“She lied because you left her no honest means of making herself heard.” Selina remained on the far side of the desk, her hands quiet at her sides.
“She gave me his name in the garden this morning when she had every reason to withhold it. She did so because I asked without pressing her and allowed her the silence in which to answer. You have never allowed her that silence.”
He crossed to the window and stood with his back to her, his shoulders set in the rigid line of a man mastering an instinct at considerable cost. When he turned, the anger had been folded away; not extinguished, but contained.
“Three days,” he said. “You have been in my house for three days, and twice you have told me that the thing I most wish to do is precisely what I must not do. Twice, you have been right. I do not enjoy being managed in my own study by a woman whom I employ to manage my sister.”
“Then dismiss me, Your Grace. Confront her yourself and observe how the Season ends.” Selina made no move towards the door. “You may even give me a character, or I can draft it for you. I write an excellent hand.”
He was silent for a moment. “Is that a threat?”
“It is an offer to resign. You are not accustomed to trusting another person’s judgement, but you must learn to trust mine in this.
Otherwise, you will drive your sister further into the confidence of the very man you wish to remove from it.
I did not create those alternatives. I merely refuse to pretend that a third exists. ”
A muscle shifted in his jaw. Then, stiffly, in the voice of a man to whom the words came with difficulty, he said, “I apologise.”
He stopped and began again.
“You are protecting her better than my temper would. I dislike your method.” Another pause followed, this one longer. “I trust the result.”
“That is nearer to an apology than most men manage in an entire day.” Selina allowed her hands to relax. “I accept it.”
He fell silent once more. When he spoke again, his voice had changed; it had laid down its armour somewhere along the way.
“You have taken a book from the library every night since your arrival. Bassett tells me that you return each one before breakfast, in perfect order, with the markers removed and its spine aligned precisely with the others.”
Selina said nothing. Any answer she might have made would have cost more than she was willing to spend.
“Which did you take last night?”
“The Cowper, Your Grace. The volume with the water stain upon the frontispiece. It appears not to have been opened since the stain was made.”
“I did not know that I owned a Cowper.”
“You own a great many things of which you are unaware.” She smoothed the darned wrist of her glove with two fingers.
“I have been arranging your library in my head each night, which is a liberty. I return the books early so that no one may accuse the murderer’s daughter of pocketing the volumes along with her salary. ”
She delivered the last lightly because the alternative was to deliver it with all its weight.
“The library is at your disposal,” Nathaniel said. “Not merely to borrow from. To use as you please.”
He addressed the words to the window rather than to her.
“I shall have a chair placed beside the south window. The light lasts longest there. It is otherwise a poor room: cold, full of consequence, and wasted upon me. Consider it an asset put to better use.”
He did not say the rest, nor did he turn. He had wrapped the entire kindness in the language of a ledger so that she would not be obliged to feel grateful for it. Selina stood in the middle of his study with her hands at her sides and found, for a moment, that none of her usual replies would come.
“Thank you, Your Grace,” she said, and left it there because he had made it possible for her to do so.
***
The invitation arrived that afternoon upon thick cream paper, perfumed with hothouse flowers and addressed to Lady Georgiana Sinclair in a bold, fashionable hand.
Selina found it upon the salver in the hall and read the name without compunction, having been forced to abandon such delicacies over matters of greater consequence.
Mrs Ottley requested the pleasure of Lady Georgiana’s company at a masquerade.
Selina turned the card between her fingers.
Mrs Ottley presided over the sort of household that sent scented invitations to nineteen-year-old girls without extending the courtesy to those responsible for accompanying them.
Hers was a house of new money and considerable ambition, its mistress purchasing admission to greater circles by providing what more respectable hostesses would not: rooms open to anyone whose presence might make them interesting.
A Mr Felix Rowland might be welcomed there without inconvenient questions about the company he kept or the young women he encouraged towards the private supper rooms.
Selina stood in the cold hall, the invitation in her hand and the name Rowland turning once more within her chest.
The pieces had begun to gather into an ugly picture, though too many of them were still missing.
A hostess of new money who traded propriety for interesting company.
A man named Rowland, whose name belonged to her father’s former circle and whose face she might have seen across the charitable hall.
A girl of nineteen meeting him in secret and calling the secrecy romance.
Perhaps the invitation was no more than an invitation.
Perhaps Mrs Ottley’s failure to include Georgiana’s brother was merely discourteous.
Yet Selina could not dismiss the possibility that someone had drawn a line from the Fenwicks’ rout in March to this salver in May, and that the line passed through Georgiana towards the protection, influence and fortune of the Duke of Wexford.
Selina did not return the invitation to the salver.
She slipped it into her own cuff, where Georgiana had concealed the note that morning, and walked down the hall to the study.
There she stopped with one hand raised, the card stiff against her wrist, considering how much she ought to tell Nathaniel and how much she had promised to keep.
The hall clock measured most of a minute before she knocked.