Chapter Fourteen
“… and so I told the gentleman plainly that the measure would not answer, and within the week, he had come round entirely to my way of thinking. It generally happens so, in my experience. A man has only to know his own mind, and to make it perfectly clear that he will not be moved, and the world arranges itself accordingly.”
The Earl of Hartwick helped himself to more of the kidneys as he spoke, in the manner of a man who had never once doubted that a breakfast table wished to hear him, and Clara, from her place at the far end of it, kept her eyes upon her plate and her bandaged hand hidden in her lap and said nothing at all, which was, she had found, the surest way to remain invisible.
Her hand throbbed beneath its wrapping, a deep ache that had kept her half the night and made dressing that morning a small private ordeal; she had arranged her sleeve to cover the worst of the bandage, and powdered the shadows under her eyes, and come down to be useful and unseen.
The first of these she could manage. The second was proving the harder, for there was a great deal of strain in the room that morning, and strain, she had learned, made a person notice things.
She noticed, for instance, what happened to Lady Honoria when her father spoke.
The young lady sat beside the Earl in her usual flawless composure, answering when she was addressed, smiling when a smile was wanted; but her hands, folded in her lap where she imagined no one could see them, were not still.
They turned and turned upon themselves, the one gripping the other, and when the Earl’s voice took on an edge, as it did when he was contradicted, or thought he might be, a small flinch went through her, quickly mastered, like a creature that had learned where the blows fell and braced for them out of habit.
Clara had mistaken her self-possession for indifference.
She saw now that she was not indifferent at all. She was afraid.
“Lady Honoria tells me she is fond of riding,” the Dowager offered, in the determined manner of a hostess filling a silence. “You must try our Yorkshire country, my dear. It is rough going, but there is nothing in England to equal it for a gallop.”
“I… Yes, I am very fond of—”
“My daughter rides creditably enough,” the Earl said, “though I have always held it a pursuit that does a young woman little credit if she is seen to enjoy it overmuch. A lady is admired for her seat, you understand, not her speed.” He smiled as he said it, pleasantly, and Lady Honoria’s half-finished sentence folded itself away as though it had never been begun, and her eyes went down to her plate.
“She has a great deal too much sense to go racketing about the countryside. Have you not, my dear?”
“Yes, Papa,” said Lady Honoria.
Clara, watching, felt something turn over in her that was very near to recognition. She knew that silence intimately, the swallowing of the thing one had been about to say, because to say it would cost more than she could afford. She had been swallowing such things herself for months.
The door opened, and the Duke came in.
His eyes moved over the table with their usual unreadable economy, and then they found Clara, and dropped to the hand she could not wholly hide, and something happened in his face that she felt across the whole length of the room.
The cool civility he wore did not break, exactly; it only thinned, for the space of a single breath, so that for that one moment she saw plainly the man beneath it, and the man beneath it was not civil in the least. Then it closed over again, and he took his seat at the head of the table without a word, and Clara looked down at her plate with the heat climbing in her cheeks and her heart doing something foolish and unwelcome behind her ribs.
“What a very fine morning it is.” The Dowager set down the teapot with bright determination.
“Quite the loveliest we have had. Cedric, you must show Lady Honoria the gardens directly after breakfast. The roses are nearly past, but the walk down to the ornamental lake is charming at this season, and it would be a great shame to keep her indoors on such a day.” It was not a suggestion; it was a thing already decided, dressed up in the clothes of one.
“I am sure she would like it of all things.”
“I should be glad to, Your Grace,” said Lady Honoria, in the voice of a woman agreeing to have a tooth drawn.
“Of course.” The Duke inclined his head. “If Lady Honoria wishes it.”
There was nothing in the words to take exception to, and nothing in them of warmth either, but the Earl looked from the Duke to his daughter with the quiet satisfaction of a man watching his investments mature, and Clara, gathering the strength to lift her teacup with her sound hand, found that she could not watch them rise together and go out through the long windows into the sunlight.
She kept her eyes upon the cloth instead, and told herself that the small cold ache beneath her breastbone was nothing she had any right to feel, and was not in the least convinced by it.
***
“Every one of them, mind, in a fair and even hand. I will not send out a single invitation that looks as though it were scrawled by a clerk.”
Philippa had a stack of blank cards waiting upon the writing desk when Clara presented herself in the sitting room, a tall white stack that seemed to grow no smaller however long Clara looked at it, and beside it a list of names three pages long.
“I am giving a ball, Miss Ellsworth, the week after next, and it is to be the event of the season in this part of the country, and everything, everything, must be exactly as it ought. You will begin at once. I have a great many other matters to attend to.”
Clara sat, and drew a card toward her, and took up the quill, and dipped it, and set its point to the paper.
The first letter sent the pain shooting clean across her palm and up into her wrist, so sharp and so sudden that she nearly cried out.
She did not. She set her teeth, and steadied the quill in fingers that did not want to grip it, and formed the next letter, and the next, slowly, with a care that was three parts agony, the stitched edges of the wound pulling with every stroke.
She filled one card. She filled a second.
By the third, her whole hand had begun to cramp about the pen, the muscles seizing into a knot she could not ease, and she was obliged to stop and lay the quill down and flex her fingers beneath the edge of the desk where it would not be seen.
It was seen.
“I cannot conceive what the matter is with you this morning.” Philippa did not look up from her own correspondence.
“You write as though the pen weighed a stone. I have seen snails cross a garden path with more dispatch. If you applied yourself, Miss Ellsworth, instead of sitting there working your fingers like a woman at her knitting, the thing would be done by noon.” A pause, and then the sentence that found its mark as surely as if she had aimed it.
“You would do well to remember that your place in this house depends entirely upon your being of use in it. A companion who cannot perform the small tasks asked of her is not a companion. She is merely another mouth to feed.”
The words went into Clara exactly where she was softest, for they named the very thing she had feared her whole life, that she was wanted only for what her hands could do, and that on the day her hands failed her, she would be wanted not at all.
For a moment, she could not trust herself to speak.
Then she set the fear aside, because she had no choice, and tried the only thing left to her.
“Forgive me, Your Grace.” Clara kept her voice level with an effort that cost her more than the writing had. “My hand was hurt yesterday, rather badly. If I might be allowed a day for it to mend, I should be able to give you a far fairer copy.”
“Your hand,” Philippa repeated the words as if they were ridiculous, and at last looked up.
“I have kept this house in order for forty years, Miss Ellsworth, through childbed, and fever, and the burying of people I loved a great deal better than I shall ever love a hired companion, and I never once allowed a small hurt to excuse me from what was required of me. You will forgive me if I cannot regard a cut hand as sufficient reason to leave a season’s correspondence unwritten.
” She returned to her own letter. “Pray do not give me excuses. I find I dislike them even more than I dislike blots.”
There was no answer to be made to that which would not cost Clara her place, and so she made none.
She picked up the quill again, dipped it, and set it to the card; but her hand was shaking in good earnest now, and the nib caught, and spat, and a blot of ink spread dark and accusing across the half-written name.
Philippa looked at it, and looked at Clara, and her voice when it came was quiet, and cold.
“Get out of my sight. Go and do whatever it is you do, and come back to me when you can hold a pen without ruining good paper. I have not the patience for you today.”
“Yes, Your Grace.” Clara rose. She curtsied, as deep as it ought to be and not one degree less, and she walked out of the sitting room with her spine straight and her head level, down the corridor, down the stairs, and out through the side door into the gardens, and she did not let one tear fall until the door had shut behind her and there was no one left in the world to see it.
Then she walked. She walked without direction or purpose, away from the formal beds where the Duke might at that moment be pacing with Lady Honoria, away from the house and its windows, until the gravel gave way to a mossed and broken path she had never trodden before, and the clipped hedges fell behind her, and she came all at once into a place that had plainly not been tended in years.
It had been a rose garden once. The roses were still there, but they had gone wild and rampant, climbing in great untrained arcs over trellises that had half collapsed beneath their weight, their last blooms blown and brown at the edges, beautiful and abandoned together.
Weeds stood knee-high in the beds. And in the midst of it, half swallowed by a curtain of unpruned briar, stood a weathered stone bench, as though someone had once meant to sit there and look at the flowers and had simply, one day, stopped coming.
Clara sank onto it, and the weight of everything she had been carrying came down upon her all at once, and she put her face into her sound hand and wept.
She wept for her hand, and for the Dowager’s contempt, and for the long day of pretending still ahead of her.
But underneath those, rising up through them, she wept for the things she carried always and let herself feel almost never: for her mother, six months gone now; for the house that had been sold from under her with all its small dear familiar rooms; for the observatory carried off piece by piece in sacking, the brass that her mother’s hands had touched a thousand times borne away to pay a dead man’s debts.
She wept until her breath came in ragged pulls and her eyes were raw with it.
Mother, she thought, the way she had thought it a hundred helpless times since the spring. I miss you so. You would know what to do. You always knew. Tell me what to do.
But the dead keep their counsel, and no answer came, and Clara sat alone among the ruined roses with her grief spent at last and her face wet and her guard, for once, down.
And it was then, in the small ringing silence after the worst of the weeping had passed, that she heard it, the soft, deliberate crunch of a boot upon the broken gravel, close behind her, where she had believed herself utterly alone.