Chapter Nine
The letters lay across the morning-room floor in two unequal heaps.
Selina knelt among them with her sleeves turned back and the inkstand placed safely beyond the reach of an unwary foot.
The copies Georgiana had kept of her own letters formed the taller pile; the few of Rowland’s which she had not burnt made up the other.
Selina had set the girl to sorting them because it gave her hands something to do besides wring one another.
“You are not to linger over them, and you are certainly not to weep upon them. The ink will run, and then we shall be unable to distinguish the foolishness already sorted from the foolishness remaining.” She held out her hand for the next letter.
“Dry your face. We shall conduct ourselves as two clerks, not as a tragedy.”
“They are so stupid.” Georgiana held one at arm’s length, as though it might turn upon her.
“Listen to this: No one in this house has ever asked me a single question about myself and waited for the answer. I wrote that to him. As though it were some great and secret truth. He agreed with me so beautifully that I felt clever merely for having thought of it.”
“It was true,” Selina said. “That is why he could use it.”
She placed the letter upon the sorted pile and reached for another without looking up. The silence remained where she had left it, in the middle of the carpet and within Georgiana’s reach.
The girl took it.
“It was not precisely true. Or it was true only upon the days when no one came, and I daresay other girls endure worse days than mine without writing to strange men about them. I did know better. I want you to understand that I knew perfectly well. I simply did not think it signified, because he never completed a sentence. He left the ends lying about for a person to pick up herself, and by the time I understood what I was picking up, I had already written three letters.” She pushed the hair from her face with the back of her wrist. “I have explained that very badly.”
“You have explained it perfectly well.”
“You are letting me talk.”
“I am.”
“I would rather you scolded me. Nathaniel scolds me, and then it is over, and I know where I stand.”
“Hand me the next letter,” Selina said.
Georgiana looked for a moment as though she meant to say more.
She turned the letter over, read several lines in her own hand and placed it face down upon the carpet as though that settled the matter.
Then she picked it up again and passed it to Selina.
Without looking at her, she folded her hands in her lap and unfolded them once more.
“You are going to tell me that it was Nathaniel’s fault. That he starved me of attention. Or perhaps you will say it was mine. I am tired of believing the blame must belong entirely to one of us. I only want the matter to be over. I want to wake tomorrow and find that it is July already.”
“I am not going to tell you whose fault it was.” Selina set aside the letter she held. “I am going to tell you something more difficult: you liked it.”
Georgiana’s hands stilled above the pile.
“You liked being chosen. A man noticed you when no one else in this house appeared to be looking, and it was the best feeling you had experienced in a year. Rowland found that need already waiting for him and made himself at home in it. You would have written a great deal more than this to preserve the feeling.”
“Is that so terrible?”
“No. It is common. That is why he chose someone who had begun to doubt whether she was valued.”
Georgiana’s mouth opened and closed. She looked at the letter in her hand, then at the fire.
When she began speaking again, the words emerged in a rush and in no proper order.
She had not meant any of it; she had meant all of it.
Once, he had told her that she possessed a fine ear for music, and she had gone to her room and wept for an hour without knowing why.
She had recognised the danger by the second letter and written the third that same evening.
She ran out of breath before she ran out of words. Selina had not interrupted once and continued sorting.
“You are not saying anything,” Georgiana said.
“No.”
The girl returned to the pile.
They worked amid the soft sounds of paper and fire. Somewhere below, a door opened and closed. By degrees, the room became easier than it had been at the beginning of the hour. After a while, the shrillness left Georgiana’s voice, and a steadier tone emerged beneath it.
“Did anyone ever choose you?” she asked. “When you were my age. Before your father, I mean. Was there a man who saw you as I believed Mr Rowland saw me?”
Selina squared a pile which required no attention.
“There was a young man when I was seventeen. Perfectly ordinary, with a perfectly ordinary future before him. He liked me, and I liked being liked, and for a little while I thought a great deal of it. Then my father was arrested, and the young man discovered a pressing engagement in another county. I never saw him again.” She reached for the next letter.
“That is the whole of it. There is no lesson at the end. I have looked.”
“I am sorry. That was an unkind question, though I did not mean it to be.”
“It was not unkind. The next letter, if you please.”
Georgiana passed it across, then placed the one after it upon the sorted pile herself, with a steadier hand than she had possessed at the beginning.
“He does love me. Nathaniel, I mean. I know that he does, in his way, but his way is so cold that I have never been able to warm my hands at it. He gives orders instead of asking questions. He forbids instead of listening. I used to think that he simply did not care. But since you came, I have watched him, and I no longer believe that. I think he does not know how to show that he cares without turning it into a rule.”
“That is very nearly the truest thing you have said about your brother.” Selina sat back upon her heels.
“He is not cold. He is frightened, and he has been frightened for longer than you have been old enough to recognise it. A duke may not be seen to be afraid, so his fear emerges as authority. When he forbids you a masquerade, he believes that he is protecting you, though the protection may feel very like a cage. I do not yet know what first taught him to fear losing control. But I know the shape of a man who has carried that fear for years.”
Georgiana studied her for a long moment, and some part of her old resentment loosened its grip.
“You are defending him.”
“I am. I did not expect to when I first entered this house.” Selina gathered the sorted letters and knocked their edges square against the floor.
“I expected to spend my entire employment standing between the two of you and translating. You may hold it against me whenever I am wrong. But I am not wrong about his fear.”
***
She learnt the origin of that fear the same evening, in the library, which had become by unspoken agreement the room where she and Nathaniel said the things for which the rest of the house was too bright.
Selina sat in the chair he had placed beside the south window, the last of the light failing over a book she had ceased to read, when Nathaniel entered carrying a decanter and two glasses.
With him came the particular quiet of a man who had brought a burden to set down and did not know how to begin.
“Georgiana tells me that you defended me this afternoon,” he said. “To her face, she added, and upon the morning-room floor, surrounded by the evidence of her misjudgement. She reported the occurrence as one might report a wonder.”
“I told her the truth as I have begun to understand it. Some of it happened to favour you. Do not grow accustomed to the circumstance. I told her a great deal which did not.”
“May I ask what you saw that fell in my favour?”
Selina set aside the book. “That you are not cold, only frightened. That the fear is old. I could not tell her its origin, which I disliked, because I am not accustomed to defending what I cannot see.” She watched him pour the wine.
He poured but did not sit. Instead, he crossed to the darkened window and stood with his glass in his hand, his back half turned towards her.
“My father died ten years ago,” he said. “I was four-and-twenty. That is where it begins, I suppose.”
“Is it?”
He stood with the decanter still in his hand and appeared to have forgotten it. After a moment he put it down on the table beside her, considered its position and moved it an inch.
“No.” He paused. “No, it is not.”
Selina waited. Nathaniel turned his glass slowly by the stem, and the wine caught what little light remained before releasing it again.
“My mother was beautiful,” he said. “That is the heart of the trouble, and I have never found a way to say it without making her beauty sound like an accusation. She was beautiful and deeply unhappy, and she sought consolation in the few forms society permitted an unhappy married woman. Admirers. Attention. A growing carelessness about the distinction between them.” He stopped. “This is not proceeding as I intended.”
“Nothing worth saying ever does. Begin further back if you must. I am not going anywhere.”
“There was a summer twelve years ago. I was two-and-twenty, and my father was already ill. What began as flirtation became an attachment the town could see. There was very nearly a scandal which would have touched my father’s name and Georgiana’s future.
She was seven years old and might have grown up beneath the shadow of it.
” He drank. “I spent that summer containing the damage. Standing between my father and the knowledge of it. Between my mother and its consequences. Between this family and the precipice towards which it seemed determined to lean. Then she died, the scandal never broke, and that was considered the end of the matter.”
The room had grown very quiet. Outside, the last light had left the garden.
“How did she die?”
“Grief, they said.”