Chapter Eleven
In the end, he did not go to the observatory.
He had meant to. His feet had carried him toward it as they always did when the ground opened beneath him, out of the sitting room and down the corridor with the blood still loud in his ears.
But the way to the back of the house ran through the long gallery, and the long gallery had Eleanor in it; and as he came beneath her portrait, some hook in him caught and held, and for the first time in four years, he stopped before it instead of hurrying past with his eyes upon the floor.
She looked down at him out of the canvas exactly as she had looked in life, young, and lovely, and puzzled, as though the painter had caught her in the middle of a question no one had ever troubled to answer.
They had hung her beside his own likeness, the pair of them painted in the first year of the marriage, and he stood now between the two of them and felt the whole bitter symmetry of the morning close over him.
He had just done it again. He had let his temper off its chain, had frightened a woman and shattered a thing of beauty and walked out of a room without a word, had been, in short, the very cold and ungoverned creature the world believed had driven this gentle painted girl into her grave.
Four years of penance, and at the first hard push, he was the same man he had always been.
Nothing in his life was governed. That was the truth her painted eyes seemed to put to him, mild and unanswerable.
Not his mother, who would not be refused.
Not the future closing on him like weather.
Not the dukedom, nor the duty, nor the woman being readied this very afternoon to be set before him like the next course at a dinner he had no stomach for.
And not, this was the worst of it, the newest and the worst, not his own heart, which he had believed safely dead these four years and which had chosen the most impossible moment imaginable to prove itself stubbornly, inconveniently alive.
And then, standing before the wife he had failed, he found that he was not thinking of her at all. He was thinking of Clara Ellsworth.
He had gone past her in the corridor without stopping. He saw it again now, in the merciless clarity of memory, Clara in the doorway with her hand at her throat and all the colour gone out of her.
She had heard the crash. She had very likely heard a great deal more than the crash; the voices had been raised, and the door was not so thick as all that. And he had walked past her without a word, his face like a slammed door, and left her standing there frightened.
The thought of it was unbearable to him in a way he could not have accounted for.
He could weather his mother’s anger; he had weathered worse.
But that Clara should have been made afraid, Clara, who came up his hill in the dark with her chin level and her grief held under such fierce command, who had sat by his cold hearth and given him back his own soul in plainer words than he had ever dared use on it himself, that she should have stood in that corridor with her face gone white because of him, because of the ungoverned temper he had loosed upon his mother’s porcelain, was a thing he could not forgive himself for having done.
He would find her. He would explain, no, he could not explain, there was nothing he could say that did not make the thing worse, but he would at the least let her see that the storm had not been aimed at her, that she had nothing to fear from him, that whatever else he was, he was not a man who would ever…
He got that far, and then the plain practical truth of his situation closed over the impulse like water over a stone.
He could not seek her out. Not today, of all days, with the house in an uproar and the Earl of Hartwick’s carriage due before the light failed; not in the state he was in; not without drawing the notice that would do her the most harm.
To go to her now would be to endanger her far more surely than any shattered vase.
The kindest thing he could do for Clara Ellsworth, the only thing, was to stay exactly where he was and leave her alone.
So he stayed where he was. He sank onto the hard window seat at the end of the gallery, between the tall cold panes and the two painted faces, and he sat with his elbows on his knees while the autumn light moved slowly along the floor, and he turned the whole impossible tangle over and over in his mind, looking for the way out of it, and found, as he had known he would, that there was none.
He never once imagined that while he sat there beneath his dead wife’s portrait, grieving the fright he had given a living woman, she was three miles distant, having a wound in her palm cleaned and bound.
***
Mrs Hutchins took one look at the handkerchief Clara had wound about her hand, soaked through and through, and dripping, and set down her keys with a grimace.
“That wants more than I can give it, Miss Ellsworth. That wants stitching, or you’ll carry the scar of it crooked the rest of your days, and worse if it festers.
” She was not unkind; there was a rough sense in her that Clara had come to value.
“The apothecary’s in the village, but he’s a butcher with a needle, between ourselves.
You’d do better at the vicarage. Miss Bradley’s nursed half the parish through one thing and another.
She has the trick of it, gentle hands and a steady eye.
Go to her. I’ll account for you to Her Grace if you’re asked after. ”
So Clara walked the road to the vicarage, cradling her wrapped hand against her breast and feeling the slow, warm seep of it with every step.
Anne opened the door herself, and the smile of welcome faded the instant she saw the bundled hand and the set of Clara’s mouth.
“Mercy, come in, come in at once.”
She drew Clara through to the small sitting room and pressed her into a chair by the window.
Then she sent the maid for clean water and linen, and unwound the stained handkerchief with a care that did not quite spare Clara the wince of it.
When the cut lay bare across the pale of her palm, Anne’s face grew grave.
“Oh, my dear. That is a nasty one.” She took up a clean cloth and folded it into a firm pad. “Hold this there for a moment. So. We shall see whether it means to be troublesome before we do anything heroic.”
“It was a piece of porcelain,” Clara said.
“I had guessed it was not a rose thorn.” Anne’s eyes flicked up to her face, kind but searching. “And I cannot think a lady’s companion’s duties commonly run to broken porcelain.”
Clara looked towards the window.
Anne did not press at once. She bathed the cut, bound it neatly, and only when the linen was secured did she sit back and say, more quietly, “Now. Tell me as much or as little as you please.”
So Clara told her; not all of it, not every word behind the sitting-room door, for some of it was not hers to repeat.
But she told enough: the raised voices, the proposed marriage, Lady Honoria, the terrible final exchange about the Duke’s father, the crash, and the Dowager’s cold order to clear away the broken vase.
She told her, too, of kneeling on the marble and of the shard slipping in her hand.
Anne listened without judgment, only tightening her mouth once or twice and smoothing the last edge of the bandage with great care.
“There,” she said at last. “It should do, if you keep it clean and do not try to write for half the household before supper.” But she did not smile as she said it.
She kept Clara’s hand in hers a moment longer.
“Clara, I am going to say something as your friend, and I ask you to hear it as such. You must be very, very careful.”
“I am always careful. I have learned to be.”
“Yes,” Anne said. “But perhaps not in the particular way Farenwoode requires.”
Clara looked at her then.
Anne lowered her voice. “I have lived in this parish all my life. I do not pretend to know the private affairs of the Hall, but one hears things. Companions do not always stay long with Her Grace. Sometimes they leave for very ordinary reasons; sometimes no one is quite sure why they have gone. Her Grace is not a cruel woman, I think, but she is a proud one, and she likes everything in its proper place.”
Clara’s fingers tightened under the bandage.
“I have given Her Grace no cause for complaint. I keep her accounts, and I read to her in the evenings, and I make myself useful. That is the whole of it.”
Anne looked at her with quiet concern.
“Is it?” she asked gently. “Clara, I am not asking you to tell me anything. I would not. But I saw your face the first day we met. And this week, even in the village, people have noticed that His Grace is seen more about the house and grounds than he has been in years. That may mean nothing. I hope it means nothing dangerous. But if Her Grace thinks you have become in any way important to him, whether you intended it or not, then usefulness may not be enough to protect you.”
Clara said nothing.
Anne released her hand and folded the remaining linen with unnecessary care.
“I do not say this to frighten you. Only to remind you that the world is not kind to women who depend upon houses that are not theirs. And Farenwoode, for all its grandeur, may be less safe than it looks.”
The words sank into Clara like cold water and settled there.
For she knew, she alone knew, how near the danger was.
It was not only a matter of being too clever, or too noticed, or too useful beyond her place.
It was a hill in the dark, and a telescope, and a man’s voice telling her things he had never told another living soul.
It was a promise, freely given against all her better judgment, to climb that hill to him again, as though the difference between them were something a clear sky and an hour’s conversation could make less real.
If the Dowager knew the half of it, Clara would be on the next mail coach with her single case and no character, and nowhere in the world to go.
“You are not alone,” Anne said, mistaking her silence.
She rose, drew Clara up too, and put her arms about her with great gentleness, so as not to jar the bandaged hand.
“Whatever happens. You are not alone. You must remember that. You have a friend here, and this door is always open to you, day or night.”
“You are very good,” Clara said, and meant it.
She held her friend a moment, then went out again into the grey afternoon. She walked back towards Farenwoode slowly, cradling the throbbing hand against her, and the warmth of Anne’s kindness could not reach the cold place the warning had made.
For Anne was right, and still it did not answer.
Clara had a friend now; she was grateful past saying for that.
But friendship could not stand between her and what she had been doing, nor bear the cost of it for her if it was discovered.
In that, she was alone: alone in the knowledge of how far she had already gone, and of the single hard choice it left her.
She must stop.
She saw that now with a clarity as cold and final as the warning that had given it to her.
Whatever had begun on that hill, whatever the observatory had come to mean to her in a handful of nights, she must put it away and never go back.
She must give him not the smallest sign, and the Dowager not the smallest cause.
She must be again exactly what she had been hired to be, and nothing more; want nothing more, and feel nothing more.
The dome was already rising pale ahead of her against the lowering sky, the way it always did, as though it had no notion at all that she had just decided never to climb to it again.