Chapter Four
“… and her needlework, I am told, is exquisite, though that is the very least of her recommendations.” The Dowager Duchess paused to allow the footman to remove her plate, and resumed without troubling to lower her voice.
“Lady Honoria Vane is precisely what this house has wanted these four years. Sensible. Accomplished. Five-and-twenty, and not a particle of the foolishness one finds in girls fresh out of the schoolroom. Her father and I are quite agreed that she and Cedric shall suit admirably.”
Clara, seated at the Duke’s right hand, kept her eyes upon her own plate and her countenance as smooth as she could contrive, and was annoyed to discover how much effort the contriving cost her.
She had no business minding it. She told herself so firmly, even as her fingers closed a degree too hard about the handle of her fork.
Whom the Duke of Farenwoode married was a matter as far above her concern as the moon was above the moor, and the small cold knot that had formed beneath her ribs at the words suit admirably was nothing she would consent to name.
She made her hand relax upon the fork. She was almost certain no one had observed it. She was wrong about that, though she did not yet know it.
“You are very quiet, Miss Ellsworth,” the Duke said.
It was the first time he had addressed her directly that evening, and his voice, heard at such close quarters, did something to the air of the room that she felt along her arms. She looked up.
The candlelight had gilded one side of his severe face and left the other in shadow, and his grey eyes rested on her with an attention that gave nothing away.
“Her Grace was kind enough to advise me against chattering, Your Grace,” Clara said. “I am doing my best to profit by the advice.”
A sound escaped him that, in a less guarded man, might have been the beginning of a laugh.
“And how do you find it?”
She allowed herself the smallest smile. “I fear I have not had sufficient practice, Your Grace.”
“An admirable answer, and a diplomatic one.” He turned his glass slowly by the stem, considering her. “What were you taught, besides the virtues of silence? My mother tells me you kept your late mother’s accounts. That argues an education beyond the usual.”
“It was only what my mother thought proper, Your Grace.” Clara hesitated, for she had learned that the list of her accomplishments tended to make gentlemen uneasy and matrons disapproving, and she had no wish to do either at her employer’s table.
“She taught me French and a little Italian, and mathematics as far as she herself knew it. And some natural philosophy. She had a great love of astronomy, and was good enough to share it with me.”
“And did you enjoy it?”
The question was put so simply that she answered before caution could overtake her.
“Very much, Your Grace. We kept observations together whenever the sky was clear. It was…” Her voice faltered despite herself. “It was one of the greatest pleasures of my life.”
The grief came up beneath the last of it before she could stop it, swift and unannounced as it always was, and she had to lower her eyes again until it passed.
The Dowager’s eyebrows rose towards her perfect silver coiffure.
“Astronomy. Mathematics.” She said the words as one might name two unfortunate ailments.
“How very singular. I confess, Miss Ellsworth, I cannot think such pursuits altogether suitable in a young woman. They are apt to give her a high notion of herself and a low one of ordinary feminine duties, and I should be sorry to see you fall into the error of supposing that a head full of Latin names is any substitute for the accomplishments that actually recommend a woman to the world.”
It was said pleasantly, which made it worse.
Clara felt the colour rise in her cheeks and kept her chin level.
She said nothing, because there was nothing she could say at that table, in that house, to the woman who had taken her in and paid her wages, that would not cost her more than she could afford.
“I cannot agree with you, ma’am.”
The Duke had not raised his voice. He did not appear to have shifted in his chair. But the quiet authority of it stopped the table as surely as a hand laid flat upon it, and Clara turned to him in plain astonishment.
“Intelligence,” he went on, setting down his glass, “is a thing to be valued wherever it is found. I have never understood why a capable mind should be treated as a defect merely because it belongs to a woman. It is not only unjust, Mother. It is wasteful. I should have expected you, of all people, a woman who has managed the affairs of a dukedom with more shrewdness than half the men who boast of understanding such matters, to see that more clearly than anyone.”
The Dowager’s eyes narrowed. For a long moment, Clara thought she would answer, and the room held its breath.
Then she inclined her head with the air of a general declining to spend her forces on an unworthy field, and said only, “You were always fond of an argument, Cedric,” before turning the conversation, with chilly grace, to the question of whether the east meadow ought to be drained.
Clara looked at the Duke. He was not looking at her.
He had taken up his glass again and was regarding the wine in it as though it were the most interesting object in the room.
But he had defended her, openly, at his own table, against his own mother, and she did not know what to do with the warmth that flooded her at it, except to look quickly down at her plate and hope the candlelight hid the foolish brightness she could feel in her face.
The rest of the dinner passed in a strained and careful quiet.
Clara was conscious of him the whole of it, of his hand when he reached for the salt, of the low even cadence of his voice when his mother required an answer of him, and she was conscious, too, of being conscious, and ashamed of it, and unable to stop.
When at last the Dowager observed that Miss Ellsworth looked fatigued and might wish to retire, Clara rose with more relief than she would have owned to.
“Goodnight, Your Graces.” She curtsied, and as she straightened, her eyes met the Duke’s and held, for just an instant longer than they ought, and in that instant, she had the unsettling sense of a question asked and not answered, though neither of them had spoken a word.
Then she went out, and the door closed behind her, and she stood a moment in the cold corridor with her hand pressed flat against her own breastbone, as if she might quiet by main force the thing that was beating there.
***
“You should not encourage her.”
The door had scarcely shut upon Miss Ellsworth before his mother said it, and Cedric, who had been expecting it, felt the familiar weariness settle over him.
“Encourage her in what, precisely?”
“In pretensions, Cedric. In the notion that she is anything in this house but what she is.” The Dowager folded her hands upon the cloth, every inch of her composed and reasonable, which was how she was always at her most immovable.
“She is a lady’s companion. An upper servant, however genteel her misfortunes may have been.
To praise her learning before the table, to take her part against your own mother as though her opinions were of equal weight with mine, it gives her ideas.
And ideas in a girl of her station do nothing but make her unhappy in it. You did her no kindness.”
“I told the truth.” He rose, finding he had no appetite to remain seated under this. “If the truth gives her ideas, the fault is in the world that begrudges them to her, not in my having spoken it.”
“You will think of your position.” The pleasant surface of her voice had thinned, and beneath it he could hear the steel that had governed this family for forty years.
“You have a name to mend and a duty to the title that you have neglected disgracefully these four years. You cannot afford to forget what is owed to your rank. And when Lady Honoria comes…”
“I shall treat Miss Ellsworth, and anyone else, with whatever courtesy I judge them to merit; and I will thank you, Mother, not to instruct me in the management of my own table.” He bowed, with the cold correctness that he knew she hated more than any rudeness. “You will excuse me. Goodnight.”
He left before she could marshal a reply, which was cowardice of a kind, and he knew it, and did not care.
He meant to go to his study. He had every intention of going to his study, where the estate ledgers waited and a man might lose himself in columns that behaved as they were told.
He was halfway down the passage before he understood that his feet had carried him elsewhere: to the library door, which he had opened without deciding to.
He stopped on the threshold.
She was there.
She was curled into the great wing chair nearest the fire, with her slippered feet tucked beneath her in a posture of such unguarded ease that he understood at once she had believed herself alone.
There was a book open upon her knees; one of his own, he saw, a folio of celestial charts he had thought himself the only soul in Yorkshire to value.
The firelight had found the copper buried in her brown hair and the soft, absorbed line of her mouth, and for a moment she was so wholly given over to what she read that he might have been a piece of the furniture.
Cedric stood and looked at her, and forgot what he had come for.
She glanced up, saw him, and her feet came down from beneath her in a flurry.
“Your Grace… I beg your pardon. I had no notion… I shall go.”
“Stay.” It came out rougher than he meant it; he heard the roughness and could not amend it. “You have every right to be here. I cannot recall the last time anyone took down that particular volume who knew what they were holding.”
She subsided slowly back into the chair, watching him with a wariness that he had, he realised, earned.