Chapter Ten
Cedric closed the door of his mother’s sitting room behind him with more force than the act required, and the small hard sound of it was the first shot fired in a battle they had both known was coming.
The Dowager sat at her writing desk by the window, her pen laid neatly across the inkstand, her hands folded, her composure as smooth and as cold as the surface of a frozen pond. She did not rise.
“Sit down, Cedric.”
“I would as soon stand.”
“As you please.” She regarded him for a moment. “We must speak of your future. I have delayed it long enough.”
“There is nothing to discuss.”
“There is a very great deal to discuss.” Her voice remained level.
“I have not pressed you these four years. I have allowed you your privacy and your grief, and I have asked very little of you beyond what the estate itself required. But four years is a long time, Cedric. The world does not stand still because we wish it to.”
He said nothing.
“You are the Duke of Farenwoode. There will one day have to be an heir. There is a great house that ought not to be left empty for ever. And there is yourself.” She paused.
“I cannot persuade myself that this,” her eyes flickered briefly towards the window, towards the hill beyond it, “is the life you mean to lead for the next thirty years.”
“I had not realised my habits required your approval.”
“They require no one’s approval. They merely have consequences.”
A small pause. “Lady Honoria Vane. I could not have chosen better had I made her to order.”
“I am aware of your choice, Mother. You have commended her to me at every meal for a fortnight.”
“And with reason. She is sensible, well-born, well-connected, and old enough to know her own mind. Her father’s friendship would be of real advantage to us, and she would make an excellent Duchess of Farenwoode.”
“I do not require an excellent Duchess of Farenwoode. I require to be left in peace.”
“No,” said the Dowager quietly. “You require to begin living again.”
His expression hardened.
“I made an entirely sensible match once already,” he said. “It answered every requirement you have just listed. It was approved by everyone concerned. And it made two people profoundly unhappy. I have no wish to repeat the experiment.”
For the first time, something moved beneath her composure.
“Eleanor’s death was a tragedy,” she said.
“But you cannot allow one unhappy marriage to become the measure of the whole of your life. Lady Honoria is not Eleanor. She comes to the world with her eyes open. She knows the place she would hold and the duties it would ask of her. She is not a fanciful girl.”
He looked at her steadily.
“And what of the duties it would ask of me?”
The Dowager was silent for a beat too long.
“At our time of life,” she said at last, “one learns that affection and esteem are often better foundations than the sort of feeling young people imagine they cannot live without.”
Cedric gave a short, mirthless laugh.
“So that is to be my recommendation? That I marry a woman who will expect very little of me, because we have all agreed by now that very little is all I have to give.”
“I did not say that.”
“You did not need to.”
He had not raised his voice. If anything, he had grown quieter, and that quietness was what finally unsettled her.
“I will not be managed into this, Mother. Not by reason, nor duty, nor the memory of what happened before. I married once because it was expected of me. I will not marry again because it is convenient.”
For a moment, the Dowager only looked at him. Then the patience she had held so carefully began, by degrees, to fail.
“You are being selfish,” she said, and her voice was not quite steady. “Selfish, and stubborn, and very determined to call it principle.”
He said nothing.
“Do you suppose I take any pleasure in this?” she went on.
“In pressing you, meal upon meal, as if I had nothing better to do than arrange your life for my own amusement? I am one-and-sixty, Cedric. I have buried a husband, and a grandchild, and I have spent four years watching you go up that hill night after night as though there were nothing in this house worth staying for.”
Something caught in her throat, and for a moment she seemed almost surprised by it.
“I am afraid,” she said, lower now. “There. You may have the truth of it, since truth seems to be the fashion in this house. I am afraid I shall die without once seeing you content in your own home. I am afraid this is all there will ever be. You, alone on that hill, and this house growing colder year by year.”
“Mother—”
“And your father…” Her voice broke across the words, but she drove on. “Your father did not leave you all this so that you might spend the rest of your life refusing it.”
The change in him was immediate.
“You will not.” The cold went out of him all at once, and the fury that had been years in the gathering came up in its place like a wave finding the sea wall.
“You will not speak to me of my father. You will not use his memory to bend me to your will. You have done it since I was a boy, and I will not bear it from you again.”
She went very still.
“I have spent four years punishing myself more thoroughly than you, in your worst imaginings, could devise,” he said. “I will not crown it by handing the rest of my life to a stranger to satisfy your ambition and call the thing duty.”
He bowed, rigid with anger.
“This conversation is concluded.”
He turned on his heel before she could answer, because if he stayed another moment, he did not trust what he might say, and he crossed the room in three strides and wrenched open the door, and his shoulder, in the blind hurry of his going, caught the tall porcelain vase that stood upon the side table by the door.
It went over before he could put out a hand, and struck the marble floor of the corridor, and burst.
The sound of it was enormous in the quiet house, a bright shattering crash that seemed to hang in the air long after the pieces had stopped skittering across the stone.
He did not stop. He did not turn to look at the ruin of it, or at his mother’s face, or at the small startled cry she gave behind him.
He was dimly aware, as he strode away down the corridor, of a figure in a doorway, of Clara, white-faced, one hand at her throat, but he could not stop for her either, dared not trust himself to speak to anyone while the thing in his chest was still so near to breaking its banks, and so he went past her without a word, out through the back of the house and into the raw bright morning, toward the only place left to him where a man might breathe.
***
Clara stood frozen in the corridor while the last shard of porcelain spun to a stop against the wainscoting, and the silence that came down afterwards was, if anything, worse than the crash had been.
She had heard everything. She had finished the last of the letters and was carrying the morning’s lists towards the Dowager’s sitting room, as she had been bidden, when the voices behind the door rose past the point that good manners pretended not to hear.
And she had stopped where she stood, unable to move on and unwilling to be caught listening, and so she had heard it all: the proposed marriage, Lady Honoria, the woman chosen because she would not ask the Duke to love her, and then that terrible final exchange about his father, and the fury in his voice that she had never heard him loose on anyone.
She had seen him come through the door like a storm given a man’s shape, seen him stride past her with his eyes fixed on nothing and his face like something carved.
He had not seen her at all, she thought.
Or if he had, he had been too far past speech to show it.
The Dowager appeared in the doorway.
Her face was flushed, and her hands shook a little, and for one moment, one only, Clara saw beneath the anger to the hurt and the fear that lay under it, the look of a woman who had just lost a battle she fought out of love and could not admit even to herself that love was at the bottom of it.
Then the Dowager’s gaze fell upon the shattered vase, and then it rose and fell upon Clara, and whatever softer thing had been in her face was put away, and what replaced it was cold.
“Clean this up,” she said.
Clara opened her mouth.
It was not her work; it was a housemaid’s work, and they both knew it. To be ordered to her knees upon the marble was deliberate: a setting-down after the indignity of having been within earshot of the family’s private griefs.
The protest rose to her lips. I am your companion, Your Grace, not your—
And died there.
I cannot, she thought. I cannot say one word of it. I have nowhere to go, no one to take me in, and not a penny that is not given me by this house. If I give her the smallest cause, she will turn me out without a character, and then what becomes of me?
So she swallowed the words, every one of them, as she had swallowed so many since her mother died. She inclined her head, said, “Yes, Your Grace,” and knelt upon the cold marble to gather the broken pieces of the vase into her cupped hand.
The Dowager watched her do it. Clara could feel the cool weight of that gaze upon the back of her bent neck.
She kept her eyes upon her work and her face turned down so that nothing in it could be read, and picked up the larger fragments one by one: the smooth curved pieces that had been a graceful thing a minute since, and were now only so much rubbish to be carried away.
Her hands were not steady. She had thought them so, but they were not.
The morning had shaken her more than she had let herself know; and as she reached for a long curved sliver, its inner edge turned up and gleaming, her fingers closed upon it wrongly.
It slipped, and the edge drew clean across her palm.
The pain came an instant after the sight of it.
She heard herself make a small sound. The shard dropped from her fingers and rang upon the marble, and she turned her hand over to see the cut laid open across her palm, from the base of her thumb nearly to her smallest finger.
Deep. Already welling dark. Then a bright bead broke and fell, striking the white marble between her knees, and another after it.
“Good grief, girl, you are bleeding on the floor.” The Dowager’s voice came sharp, with something between alarm and disgust. “Do not sit there dripping. Go and find Mrs Hutchins, and have it seen to before you ruin the marble entirely. Go.”
Clara rose unsteadily to her feet, pressing her good hand hard against the wound to stem it. She made what was nearly a curtsy and went, leaving the broken vase where it lay.
As she made her way down the long corridor towards the servants’ stair, cradling her bleeding hand against her breast and feeling the warmth of it soak slowly through her fingers, she found that the thing that hurt was not the cut at all.
The cut would heal.
What stung, and went on stinging long after the marble was behind her, was the plain, bitter knowledge that in this great house she had blundered into, her own warm blood upon the floor had been reckoned a smaller calamity than the broken pieces of a porcelain vase.