Chapter Seventeen
“You will sit at the back, Miss Ellsworth, with Mrs Pickering and the upper servants. It would not do at all for the Hartwicks to see my companion crowding into the family pew as though she had any business there.”
“Of course, Your Grace,” Clara said, and folded her hands in her lap, and watched the grey villages of the moor go by the carriage window, and did not allow her face to show that the words had landed anywhere at all.
The church was old and small and very cold, and the congregation arranged itself within it as exactly as iron filings about a magnet, each according to his station.
The Duke and the Dowager went into the great box pew at the front that had belonged to the family for two hundred years; the Earl of Hartwick handed his daughter in after them, so that when Clara, slipping into a hard bench at the rear among the companions and the lady’s maids, lifted her eyes to the front of the church, what she saw was Lady Honoria seated at the Duke’s side, golden head bent decorously over her prayer book, fitted into the place beside him as neatly as a key into a lock.
That is where she belongs, Clara thought, and made herself look at it steadily, the way one presses on a bruise to learn its size.
That is the seat the world has cut to her measure.
A duchess beside a duke, and the county nodding its approval.
I could sit in that pew a thousand Sundays and never once look anything but borrowed.
She bent her own head over her own book, and said the responses with everyone else, and told herself it was a great piece of folly to mind, and minded all the same.
It was better in the churchyard afterwards.
The service done, the congregation spilt out among the leaning stones to exchange greetings and linger a little before turning for home; and Clara, freed for a quarter of an hour from anyone’s particular notice, made directly for the one face in all that crowd she was glad to see.
Anne Bradley stood by the church door at her father’s elbow, and her whole countenance lit at the sight of Clara, then almost at once clouded again, her eyes dropping to the bandaged hand Clara held a little against her skirt.
“Clara. Your hand, is it no better? You are pale as the wall.”
“It is mending. Truly. Do not look at me so, or I shall begin to feel as ill as you mean me to.” Clara pressed her friend’s arm. “I am very glad to see you, Anne. It has been a trying few days, and you are the most restful thing in this whole county.”
“Now that,” said a warm voice behind them, “I will not dispute, though I had meant to claim the title for my own cook.”
It was Lord Hale. He had come up through the headstones with his hat in his hand and that open, unguarded good humour he wore as easily as other men wore reserve, and he bowed to them both; but Clara, who had grown watchful of such things, marked the way his glance went to Anne and stayed there a half-second past what mere courtesy required, and the way his voice gentled when he spoke her name.
“Miss Bradley. Mr Bradley, sir, good morning. I have a difficulty, and you are all of you the solution to it.” He turned, taking in the wider party as the Duke and the others approached across the grass.
“In a fit of ambition, my cook has prepared a dinner that would feed a regiment, and I am but one man with one appetite. You would all be doing me a genuine kindness to come back to Hale and help me dispose of it. Duchess,” he bowed to Philippa, “I will take no refusal. And the vicar must come, and Miss Bradley, for I am told the country air is wanted after so much sermon.”
“How very good of you, Lord Hale.” Philippa, who could not afford to be uncivil to a baron with so well-favoured an estate, inclined her head with gracious condescension. “We should be delighted.”
“Capital.” Hartwick’s voice arrived smooth over the Dowager’s shoulder, the pale eyes already assessing the advantage in it. “A most agreeable scheme. My daughter will be glad of the air.”
And so it was settled. Clara, who had expected nothing of the day but to carry packages and be invisible, found herself handed up into a carriage bound for somewhere she had never been, with Anne’s warm hand briefly squeezing hers in the crush, and something in her chest she had almost forgotten the shape of.
It took her half the drive to name it. It was the absence of dread.
***
Hale was not an imposing house, and Lord Hale plainly did not wish it to be one.
Where Farenwoode loomed grey and magnificent and cold, Hale sat low and golden in a fold of the hills, its rooms small and warm and a little shabby at the edges, furnished as though somebody had chosen every chair for the sitting in it rather than the looking at; and the table, when they were brought to it, had been laid with the same comfortable disregard for ceremony.
Clara braced herself for the familiar misery of being placed at the far, cold end below everyone, and was not.
Lord Hale, with a careless ease that she suspected was not careless at all, had seen the company seated more by inclination than by rank, so that she found herself set beside Anne, in the warm middle of the table, where for once in a great while nobody appeared to think her presence required apology.
The talk at such a table proved a different creature altogether from the talk at Farenwoode. Lord Hale kept it moving the way a good whip kept a team moving, with a light hand and evident enjoyment, drawing first one guest and then another into it.
“Mr Bradley, you shall settle a wager for us,” he said to the vicar.
“I hold that a sermon ought never to outlast the quarter-hour, on the sound principle that no soul was ever saved in the second quarter that had not already been lost in the first. Farenwoode tells me I am a heathen for saying so. What says an expert?”
“An expert,” said the vicar comfortably, “would tell you that a sermon should last precisely as long as it takes, and not one moment beyond, and that the whole art of the thing lies in knowing which is which.”
“There, you see, Cedric. Diplomacy. That is how a wise man keeps his living. You would have told me flatly I was wrong and gone back to your soup.”
“You are wrong,” said the Duke, “and my soup is getting cold.”
And there was the ghost of something at the corner of his mouth that Clara had never once seen at his own grey table, the shadow of a man who, among the right people and in the right house, might almost be at his ease.
“He has made a jest.” Lord Hale appealed to the whole company in tones of vast astonishment. “Mark the hour. I shall have it entered in the parish records.”
It was under cover of all this good cheer that Anne leaned close to her ear.
“He has done that on purpose, you know,” she murmured, with a small glance down the table at their host. “The seating. He always does. My father says Lord Hale is the only man of title in the whole Riding who appears to have forgotten that he has one.”
“Then your father likes him.”
“My father likes him very much.” Colour came into Anne’s cheeks, and she busied herself with her napkin. “Everyone likes him. It is the most provoking thing about him.”
Clara looked at her friend, the high, quick colour, the carefully lowered eyes, the way she had said everyone as if it were a word she was hiding behind, and felt the whole of it come clear to her at once.
“Anne,” she said quietly, under cover of the table’s general noise, “is it harder today?”
Anne’s fingers stilled upon the napkin.
“To sit here with him, I mean,” Clara said. “And pretend it is nothing.”
For a moment, Anne did not answer. Then she turned her glass a little by the stem and said, very low, “Yes. Much harder.”
Clara’s sound hand found hers beneath the table.
“I thought I had the better of it,” Anne said, her eyes fixed upon the cloth.
“When we spoke before, I thought it would be enough to know myself foolish and behave sensibly. But he has been different, Clara. More often at the vicarage than business can account for. And I catch him sometimes looking at me when he thinks I am attending to something else, with an expression that…” She pressed her lips together.
“That quite undoes me. I have told myself a hundred times that I am reading a romance into a kind man’s good manners.
But I do not think I am. And that frightens me almost as much as it pleases me. ”
“Because he is Lord Hale,” Clara said softly.
“And I am only the vicar’s daughter.” Anne’s mouth trembled. “There is no road from here to anywhere that does not end in my being hurt.”
“Do you love him?” Clara asked, so softly that the words scarcely crossed the space between them.
Anne’s eyes lifted to hers, bright and frightened and certain.
“Yes,” she breathed. Then, with a quick glance towards the others, “I ought not even to say so here. But yes. I do, Clara. I have no notion what is to be done about it.”
Clara closed her sound hand more firmly over her friend’s beneath the table and held it hard.
For a moment, she could not trust herself to answer, for every word Anne had spoken might have been lifted straight out of her own breast. The only difference between them was that Anne had had the courage to give it a name, and Clara had not, and did not mean to.
“Then you must not think yourself foolish,” she said at last, keeping her voice low. “And you must not think yourself alone in it either. I cannot believe a man who forgets he is a baron every time he comes to your father’s door is much occupied with the distinction.”
Anne gave the smallest, most doubtful smile.
“You say that,” she murmured, “as though you know something of the matter yourself.”
Clara’s breath caught and held.
“I know only that people are not always what the world supposes them to be.”
“Clara.”