Chapter Sixteen
“You will forgive an old campaigner his plain speaking, Duke, but I do not think I have seen two young people better suited to one another in the whole course of my life.”
The Earl of Hartwick said it down the length of the dinner table, to the company at large, in the expansive manner of a man laying a thing before witnesses so that it might be the harder to take back.
Cedric, at the head of his own board, set down his glass with great deliberation and said nothing at all, which the Earl appeared to take for encouragement, for he went smoothly on.
“My Honoria has every accomplishment a man could wish for in a wife, and Farenwoode wants nothing but a lady to grace it again. Anyone with eyes can see as much. And here we all are, gathered so conveniently under one roof, with a ball in the offing and the whole county ready to wish you joy. I am a great believer, Duchess,” he turned the courtesy upon Philippa, “in seizing the moment when it presents itself. These things ought not to be left to dawdle. A long courtship breeds nothing but second thoughts.”
“I am sure you are very wise, Lord Hartwick,” said Philippa, with a bright, nervous warmth, her eyes going to her son.
“I generally find that I am.” The Earl smiled. “Well, Duke? You are uncommonly silent. A man does not stay silent before such a prospect unless he is too happy to speak, or…” the smile thinned by a hair “… unless he has some objection he is too well-bred to name. Which is it to be?”
It was neatly done, Cedric allowed: the trap laid in company, where a blunt refusal would shame the daughter and insult the father and set the whole table by the ears, and where silence would be read as consent.
He had been managed by experts his whole life; he knew the shape of a corner when he was backed into one.
He also knew that he no longer cared in the least to oblige the man who had built it.
“It is neither, Lord Hartwick.” He spoke quietly, but the table quieted to hear him.
“It is only that I hold marriage to be a serious matter, the most serious a man undertakes, and not one to be arranged between the fish and the pheasant because the company happens to be assembled and the moment happens to be convenient. I married once in haste, to suit everyone’s wishes but my own, and I do not recommend it.
When I marry again, if I marry again, it will be in my own time, for my own reasons, and after a deal more consideration than an evening’s wine permits.
” He inclined his head, courteous and immovable as a closed gate.
“I am sure a man of your judgment would expect nothing less of me.”
A small silence followed, brittle as new ice.
The Earl’s geniality did not falter, he was far too practised for that, but something cold and still came up behind his pale eyes and looked out at Cedric for a moment, taking his measure afresh, and Cedric understood that he had just been moved, in the Earl’s private reckoning, from the column of things easily had to the column of things that would require management.
It was not a comfortable column to occupy.
Men of Hartwick’s stamp did not abandon what they had set their hearts on; they merely changed their method.
For even now, he did not quite let it lie.
“Consideration is a fine thing in a young man,” he said, turning his glass slowly in the candlelight.
“Though I will own it is a luxury the years do not extend for ever. You are two-and-thirty, I believe, and without an heir. A title is not a private comfort, Duke, to be taken up and laid aside as the humour takes one. It is a trust, held in keeping for those who come after. Every season you delay leaves the succession that much more to chance. Your father, I fancy, would have felt the weight of that very keenly.”
The old anger that always accompanied such appeals to his father’s memory stirred in Cedric, and he banked it with the ease of long practice.
“My father felt a great many things keenly, Lord Hartwick. Among them, I am fairly sure, that a man hounded toward a decision rarely makes a sound one. You will forgive me if I ask you to leave him out of the reckoning. He is some years past defending his own opinions, and I find I dislike hearing them pressed into another man’s service. ”
“Cedric.” Philippa’s voice carried a warning and an appeal at once. “Lord Hartwick speaks only as a friend would. There is surely no need to—”
“There is every need, Mother, to settle the disposal of my own life at my own table, and to settle it as I think best.” He said it without heat, but the iron was unmistakable beneath it, and the whole table heard the iron.
Then, deliberately, he turned from the Earl altogether and gave his attention to the one person at the board who had been made wretched by the entire exchange and had earned not a moment of it.
“Lady Honoria. I am told you sing. Perhaps you would do us the kindness after dinner. I confess it would give me a great deal more pleasure than any further talk of trusts and successions.”
She looked up, startled to be addressed directly, and for an instant something crossed her face that was very near to gratitude. “If it would please the company, Your Grace,” she said. “Gladly.”
“To be sure,” said the Earl, yielding the field with the easy grace of a man who had merely resolved to fight another day. “Consideration is the soul of any wise decision. I would not have you hurried for the world, Duke.”
It was Lady Honoria who had suffered most in the exchange, and she had borne nearly the whole of it without a word.
Cedric had marked her when her father first spoke: the way her smile set itself a degree too firmly, the way her gaze dropped to her plate.
And when the Earl, warming to his theme, laid his hand over hers upon the cloth in a show of fatherly fondness, Cedric saw the small involuntary stillness that went through her, the flinch of a creature that had learned better than to pull away.
She bore it all with flawless composure and complete misery; and Cedric, who knew rather more than he wished about wearing a serene face over a wretched interior, felt for her a pity that surprised him with its sharpness.
Whatever this match was, she wanted it no more than he did. They were two prisoners being measured for the same cell.
“Well,” Philippa said, too brightly, into the chill, “and we must none of us forget the ball. I have quite set my heart upon it being the finest this country has seen in twenty years. Lady Honoria, you must tell me, do you favour the country dances, or have you a fondness for the newer figures from town?”
And the talk turned, with everyone’s grateful collusion, to safer ground.
Cedric did not look down the table to where Clara sat.
He had not looked at her once through the whole of the meal: not when she came in with her hurt hand hidden in her sleeve, not when his mother’s voice cut at some small failing, not now.
The not-looking was a labour that occupied a good half of his attention, for he was aware of her as a man is aware of warmth at his back, every moment, without once turning his head.
There was a thing between them now that had not been there a week ago: a garden, a confession, a square of linen that had passed from his hand to hers.
The consciousness of it sat in the air over the candlelit table like a held breath.
He thought she felt it too. He thought, from the way she kept her eyes upon her plate, that she was as careful not to look at him as he was not to look at her.
It was as the ladies were rising that he caught it.
The Earl had got to his feet with the rest, and his pale eyes, in the moment of general movement, went down the length of the table and came to rest upon Clara.
Idly, it might have seemed. Briefly, certainly.
But Cedric, who had spent the evening schooling himself not to do that very thing, knew the look for what it was, because it was the same calculation he had watched the man turn upon the room when first he entered the house: a pricing, a weighing, a cool professional interest in a thing not previously thought worth notice.
The Earl looked at Clara as a man looked at a card he had taken for worthless and had just begun to suspect of being the one his opponent was guarding.
Then the look was gone, and the Earl was bowing the ladies through the door, all silver courtesy, and Cedric was left with a cold weight settling in his chest that had nothing to do with the matter of the marriage at all.
He had been so careful.
And it was not, he saw now, his own discovery he had cause to fear.
***
Clara did not light a candle when she reached her room.
She did not need one; the moon was up, and there was light enough by it to cross the small chamber and sink onto the edge of the bed and draw out, from the pocket where it had lain warm against her all the endless evening, the Duke’s handkerchief.
It was plain: good linen, finely hemmed, a small grey F worked into one corner in thread so dark it scarcely showed. It smelled of him: of sandalwood, and the cold, clean air he carried in from his hill, and ink.
She had told herself a dozen times through dinner that she would give it back. It was the only proper thing to do; one did not keep a gentleman’s handkerchief like a girl with a token. She would find a moment, and return it laundered, and that would be the end of it.
She turned it over in her sound hand and knew that she would do no such thing.
He apologised to me, she thought, and the wonder of it had not worn off in all the hours since.
A duke had stood in his dead wife’s garden and bent his head and said I am sorry to a paid companion, plainly, as though her hurt were a real thing that mattered.
He had offered to defend her to his mother and meant it.
He had looked at her, not through her, not over her, the way the whole world had learned to look at a girl with no money and no people, but at her, as if she were a person worth the trouble of seeing.
No one had looked at her so since her mother died.
And that, of course, was the danger.
For she knew what hope did. She had watched it work its slow ruin in her own mother: the hoping that her father’s next scheme would answer, the hoping that had let a clever woman sell the very stars from over her head rather than admit the truth, the hoping that had ended in a cold grave and a daughter left with nothing.
Hope was not a comfort. Hope was the thing that opened you, that made you set down your guard, that let the world in close enough to do its worst. A woman in her situation could not afford it.
A woman in her situation guarded herself, depended on no one, expected nothing, and was therefore never, ever taken by surprise.
She pressed the handkerchief briefly to her face, breathing him in, one foolish indulgence she would permit herself and no more.
Then she folded it small and tucked it beneath her pillow, where her hand might find it in the dark. She lay down with her injured palm throbbing its slow, insistent beat, and told herself, with great firmness, that she would not hope; that she did not hope; that she had far too much sense to hope.
And she lay awake a long while in the moonlight, listening to her own heart make a liar of her.