Chapter Twelve
The carriage was announced a little after four, and the Dowager rose from her menus with a swiftness that transformed her in an instant from a woman managing a household into a great lady receiving an equal.
“They are come. Miss Ellsworth, you will attend me. But you will remain in the background, if you please. You are to be useful, not conspicuous. Observe, assist where it is wanted, and do not put yourself forward.” She paused at the glass to settle a curl that did not require settling.
“Lady Honoria is not accustomed to companions who forget their place.”
“Of course, Your Grace,” Clara said, and tucked her bandaged hand into the folds of her skirt where it would not be remarked, and followed her mistress to the drawing room.
Lady Honoria Vane came in first, and Clara’s heart sank quietly to its accustomed place.
She was beautiful in the effortless, unanswerable way of women who had never once in their lives been obliged to wonder whether they were welcome in a room.
Her hair was the pale gold of winter sunlight, dressed in curls that had cost some maid an hour at least and looked as if they had cost nothing; her travelling-dress of deep blue was very fine; her skin had the untouched fairness of a woman who had never stood bare-headed on a moor in her life.
She moved as though the floor had been laid for her convenience.
This, Clara thought, with a dull inward ache she did not trouble to argue with, is what a duchess looks like. This is the thing his mother means when she says ‘suitable’. This is everything I am not, and can never be made into, not if I lived a hundred years.
Behind his daughter came the Earl of Hartwick, and the ache gave way to a different and colder feeling that Clara could not at once name.
He was perhaps five-and-fifty, his silver hair arranged with great precision, and he came into the room with his pale blue eyes already moving over it, over the pictures, the furnishings, the proportions of the windows, pricing it, Clara thought, the way a man prices a thing he intends to acquire.
When at last his gaze passed across her, it did not pause; she was a piece of the furnishing too, and not a costly one.
“My dear Philippa.” The Earl bowed over the Dowager’s hand and used her given name with the ease of a long acquaintance. “You are good to receive us so warmly. We are quite worn through. The roads beyond York are a national disgrace, and your situation here is remarkably... secluded.”
“Lord Hartwick, the honour is entirely ours.” The Dowager was all graciousness. “And my dear Lady Honoria, how very glad I am to have you under this roof at last. I have heard such accounts of you that I feared the reality must disappoint, and I see already that it shall not.”
“You are too kind, Your Grace.” Lady Honoria’s voice was low and well-modulated and pleasant. “It is a beautiful country. So wild. So unspoilt.” Each phrase came out smooth and complete, like a coin pressed from a familiar die.
The Dowager performed the introductions, and when she came to Clara, “my companion, Miss Ellsworth,” Clara sank into a curtsy as deep as her station required and kept her eyes properly lowered.
Lady Honoria gave her a smile that moved the lips and went no further.
The Earl did not give her anything at all; his glance had already returned to the room and its valuation.
They settled to the business of the drawing room, and the tea things were brought.
“I hope you will forgive us if the house seems a little disordered,” the Dowager said. “One is forever finding some small matter that ought to have been attended to before guests arrive.”
“My dear Philippa, if this is disorder, I dread to think what the rest of us call order.” The Earl smiled. “You have contrived to make the place look exactly as I remembered it.”
“You are very kind. I have grown quite wedded to it over the years. One sees so few people here that one learns to value the few. Tell me, do you still go to Lady Carteret? I had such an affection for her mother, years ago.”
“We dined with her not three weeks since,” the Earl said.
“She asked most particularly after Your Grace. The whole of that set was at her table: the Allinghams, young Marbury, Sir Hugh Davenant holding forth on the corn question as if he had invented it. One hears the same dozen opinions in the same dozen drawing rooms, Duchess, until one could recite them in one’s sleep.
It is the great defect of the season; a man of any originality is fairly starved at it. ”
“And yet you never miss a night of it, Papa,” Lady Honoria said.
“Because business is done there, my dear, which is a matter you need not trouble your head over.” He said it pleasantly enough, but there was an edge laid under the pleasantness, like a wire beneath snow, and Clara, setting down the cream at that moment, saw the young lady’s eyes drop to her own folded hands, and saw the lovely smile fix itself a careful degree more firmly into place, and understood that the remark had been a correction, and that it had been received as one.
“Lady Honoria has a great deal of conversation, when her father permits her any,” the Dowager said, with a light laugh meant to smooth the small awkwardness, and the talk passed on to the safer ground of mutual acquaintance.
Clara, sent to pour, did so with her sound hand, keeping the bandaged one low against the tea-table, and as she carried the cups about the room, she found that she could observe a great deal while being observed by no one, which was, she had learned, the single advantage of being unimportant.
And it was so, watching from beneath her lashes as she set down Lady Honoria’s cup, that Clara saw the thing that troubled her for the rest of the evening.
Lady Honoria thanked her with the same automatic graciousness, and turned back to answer some question of the Dowager’s, and in the half-second between the turning and the answering, when the young lady believed every eye in the room to be elsewhere, the lovely practised smile slipped from her face.
What lay beneath it, for that one unguarded instant, was not the contentment of a beautiful woman secure in her welcome.
It was a different thing: a kind of tiredness, or apprehension, or grief; Clara had no exact word for it, only that she recognised it, with the swift, sure recognition of like for like.
It was the look of a person wearing a face that was not her own, and wearing it because she must. Then the question was answered, and the smile came back as if it had never gone, and the moment closed over like water.
She is no happier than I am, Clara thought, and was conscious of a confused and most unwelcome stir of pity for the woman she had spent the whole afternoon resolving, sensibly, to resent. Whatever this is, she did not choose it either.
***
Dinner was a long and glittering affair, and Cedric endured it as he endured most things now, from behind a face that gave nothing away.
He had taken his place at the head of his own table, feeling like a stranger invited to it.
The Earl of Hartwick sat at his right and his mother at his left, with Lady Honoria placed to be conversed with and Miss Ellsworth set so far down the board that she might almost have been in another room, which was, he understood, exactly his mother’s intention, and which did nothing whatever to prevent him knowing the exact inch of table she occupied.
He had marked, when she came in, that she held one hand a little oddly, and kept it from view; he had thought little of it at the time. He had a great deal else to occupy him.
“You take no part in the Lords, I think, Farenwoode.” The Earl said it pleasantly, between the soup and the fish, but the pale eyes were attentive.
“A pity, if you will forgive my saying so. A duke’s voice carries weight that the rest of us must labour years to borrow.
I had the Hartwick drainage bill through committee in a fortnight last session: a word in the proper ear at the proper hour, you understand, which is worth more than a twelvemonth of honest petitioning.
But then a man in your position will know that better than I. ”
“I take little interest in it, Lord Hartwick,” Cedric said.
“No?” The Earl smiled, unoffended, as a man smiled at a child who did not yet understand the value of money.
“You ought. Influence is a perishable commodity, Duke: it must be spent, and spent shrewdly, or it sours in the keeping. A great name unused is a great waste. I have always held that a man owes it to his blood to make his weight felt while he has the weight to make.” He turned his glass in his fingers.
“Your father understood that. I had the pleasure of his acquaintance, a little, in my younger days. A most able man. A most... influential one.”
It was deftly done; Cedric gave him that.
The mention of his father, the implied comparison, the suggestion of a debt unpaid, all of it laid down lightly, as though in idle conversation.
He recognised the design of it, having spent the morning being driven by his mother’s hand toward the same end, and he answered it with the flat, courteous, impenetrable coldness that had served him for four years against every assault.
“My father is some years dead, Lord Hartwick. I find I manage tolerably without instruction in how to honour him.”
A small silence threatened, and the Dowager moved smoothly to fill it. “Lady Honoria, you must tell us of the season. I am grown so dull and rustic in my retirement that I depend entirely upon my young friends to bring the world to me. How did you find London this year?”
“Delightful, Your Grace.” Lady Honoria set down her fork with perfect precision.
“There was a charming musicale at Lady Sefton’s, and the exhibition at Somerset House was thought very fine, a great many landscapes, this year, and one portrait everyone admired.
And I had the satisfaction of a good deal of work for the Society for the Relief of Distressed Gentlewomen, which I confess interests me more than the dancing. ” She smiled. “One likes to be useful.”
It was a faultless answer. It was, Cedric thought, too faultless, every part of it correct, the musicale, the exhibition, the becoming touch of charity, the modest disclaimer, all of it laid out as neatly as a hand of cards played by a person who had been taught the game very thoroughly and took no pleasure in it whatever.
There was not one word in it he could have faulted, and not one he believed.
He had said a great many such answers himself, in the years when he had still gone into society; he knew the sound of a person reciting a self they had been given rather than one they possessed.
“You are accomplished in a great many directions, I am told,” he said, because something was expected of him.
“I have had every advantage, Your Grace.” Her eyes met his for a moment, and they were lovely, and there was nothing behind them that he could find, nothing eager, nothing afraid, only a sort of practised, weary readiness, like a soldier presenting arms. “My father has been at great pains with my education.”
“I have,” said the Earl, with satisfaction, as if a point had been scored.
The dinner wore on. Cedric did what was required and no more: answered when addressed, declined to be drawn, let the Earl’s probings slide off him one after another.
Twice his glance went, against his discipline, down the long table to where Miss Ellsworth sat eating very little and saying nothing, her face composed into the careful neutrality he had learned to read as its opposite, and once he saw her shift the hand she had been keeping in her lap and saw her wince before she stilled it; and he wondered at it, and could do nothing, and looked away.
At last, the covers were drawn, and the Dowager proposed that the ladies withdraw and that they should have a little music in the drawing room presently, for Lady Honoria played, she understood, exquisitely. The party began to rise.
And the Earl of Hartwick, rising with the rest, leaned a little toward Cedric, and said, in the low confidential tone of a man conferring a privilege, “Before the evening is out, Duke, I should be glad of a quarter of an hour with you alone. A small matter, of mutual interest, I think you will find. Over brandy, perhaps, when the music is done. There is a thing I have come a long way to put before you, and I do not care to put it before an audience.”
The pale eyes held his, cordial and cold at once, and Cedric understood with absolute certainty that whatever the man had come this long secluded distance to say, it was the true purpose of the visit, and that the beautiful, accomplished girl now gliding from the room on his mother’s arm was no more than the instrument of it.
“As you wish, Lord Hartwick,” he said, and rose, and went to endure the music.