Chapter Eighteen
“You will carry the parcels, Miss Ellsworth, and pray try not to drop them in the road. I cannot conceive why you wear such a put-upon look; a little air and exercise never yet harmed a young woman, whatever her station.”
Clara took the first of the parcels without a word, and settled it against her sound arm, and followed the Dowager and Lady Honoria into the haberdasher’s, and reminded herself, as she had reminded herself a great many times that week, that a place she despised was still a place, and that she had nowhere else on earth to go.
The Earl had elected to remain behind at the house; he had business with the Duke, he said, that would not keep, and Clara had caught, as the ladies left, the trapped look on the Duke’s face at being so disposed of, a man left to the wolf for an afternoon and knowing it.
She had not been able to do anything for him.
She could do nothing for anyone, herself least of all, and the proof of it occupied the whole of the next two hours.
“That blue. No, the deeper one, behind it. Hold it to the light, Miss Ellsworth, I cannot judge a colour with you mumbling it in the shadow.”
Clara held it to the light.
“No. Take it down again. And the rose-coloured sarcenet, and the figured muslin, and the one beside it. Do keep them from creasing, they are not yours to ruin.”
Clara gathered them up.
“Now the ribbons. The whole card. We shall want a great deal of ribbon.”
The shopman spread his cards upon the counter with trembling reverence. “Of course, Your Grace, directly. We have had in only this week a French shipment, the very first quality, if Her Grace will but cast an eye over them—”
“I have a great many things to cast my eye over, and very little of the morning left to do it in. The whole card, I said, and a dozen yards of the silver net besides, for the ballroom.” A flick of her fingers in Clara’s direction, without so much as a glance.
“My companion will carry them. She is good for that much, at the least.”
The shopman ran to and fro with his measures and his boxes, and the Dowager presided over the counter like a general over a campaign.
Clara fetched and held and carried, her bandaged hand throbbing steadily beneath its glove, the stack of parcels in her good arm climbing higher with every purchase until she could scarcely see over the top of it.
“You might at least appear grateful for the outing,” the Dowager observed, to no one in particular, examining a length of blond lace.
“There are companions in this county who would think themselves fortunate beyond measure to be brought into town of a fine morning. Gratitude, I find, is the first thing to go when a person grows too comfortable in another’s house. ”
It was as Clara turned to add a bandbox to her swaying tower that her injured hand betrayed her.
The fingers, stiff and slow, would not close as they ought; the box tilted, and slid, and she snatched at it with the bad hand and felt the stitches pull and the pain flash white up her wrist, and the whole untidy heap went down, parcels and bandboxes and a cascade of unrolling ribbon, across the shop floor.
The Dowager’s voice cut through the little shop like a blade through silk.
“For goodness sake. Can you do nothing, nothing at all, without making a spectacle? Look at it. Half a morning’s purchases in the dust.” She did not raise her voice; she did not need to; the cold contempt of it was worse than any shouting.
“If you cannot be trusted to carry a parcel the length of a shop, Miss Ellsworth, you had far better wait outside in the street with the grooms, where your clumsiness can disgrace no one but yourself.”
The shopman busied himself very hard with something behind the counter.
A lady examining gloves at the far end turned delicately away.
And Clara knelt down on the dusty boards, her face burning, and began to gather up the scattered ribbon with hands that shook, and told herself that she would not cry, that she had survived a great deal worse than the sneer of a discontented old woman, that she would not give the satisfaction—
A pair of gloved hands came down beside hers and began, quietly, to help.
Clara looked up. It was Lady Honoria, kneeling on the dirty floor of the haberdasher’s in her beautiful travelling-dress, gathering up the fallen ribbons as composedly as though it were the most natural thing in the world for an earl’s daughter to do.
She did not speak. But when she had retrieved the last spool and set it back into Clara’s arms, she looked at her for a moment, a single direct look, quickly given and quickly withdrawn before the Dowager should see it, and in it was something Clara had not expected and did not know what to do with: understanding.
A quiet, wordless fellow-feeling that said, as plainly as speech could have done, I see.
I see what is being done to you, and I am ashamed of my part in standing by.
“There,” said Lady Honoria, rising, in her ordinary cool voice, as though nothing had passed at all. “No harm done, I think. Shall we go on, Your Grace? I had my eye on that figured muslin.”
She is not her father’s creature, Clara thought, getting to her feet with her arms full. Whatever else she is, however gilded and guarded, she is not entirely that.
It was a small thing. But it was the first kindness she had been shown in that company for what felt like a very long while, and she carried it home more carefully than any of the parcels.
***
It was a great deal worse, Cedric had discovered, to be hunted at one’s leisure than to be hunted in company.
He had spent the afternoon penned in his own library with the Earl of Hartwick, who had wanted, he said, only a quiet hour of the Duke’s society, and who had used it to circle the matter of the marriage from every side at once: the advantages, the connexions, the ball at which an announcement would sit so very gracefully, the regrettable swiftness with which a man’s window of opportunity in such things could close.
Cedric had parried it all with monosyllables and grown colder by the hour, and by the time the ladies’ carriage was heard upon the gravel, he had reached that pitch of suppressed fury that felt, from the inside, almost exactly like calm.
Tea was brought to the drawing room, and the party assembled, and Cedric stood by the window with a cup he did not want and watched the Earl’s satisfaction and his mother’s bright social chatter and thought that he had seldom in his life so wished to be out of a room.
He was watching, therefore, when Clara came to the tea-table to pour.
He saw what the others did not trouble to see: that she was grey with tiredness, that she held her bandaged hand stiffly against her body, that the morning had cost her something.
He saw her take up the heavy pot in her good hand and manage it; saw her reach for a cup; saw the injured fingers, asked to steady the saucer, simply fail to close.
The cup went from her grasp. It struck the edge of the table and dropped to the floor and broke upon the marble with a small bright shattering sound that fell into the genteel murmur of the room like a stone into a pond, and spread the same widening silence after it.
“Oh, really.” His mother was the first to speak, and her voice was honed to a fine, cold edge.
“Clumsy, careless girl. Have you the smallest notion what that service is worth? It was my grandmother’s.
You are an embarrassment, Miss Ellsworth, useless and clumsy and an embarrassment before guests, and I have borne it as long as flesh and blood can be expected to—”
“One can never get reliable people now.” The Earl said it lazily, to the room, swirling his tea, his pale eyes resting on Clara where she had sunk to her knees among the broken china.
“It is the same everywhere. No training, no care, no pride in the work. Poverty makes people careless, Duchess. They grow accustomed to scrambling, and the habit follows them. You may put a person in a decent gown, but you cannot make her forget that she depends upon the wages in your hand.”
And something in Cedric, some last overstrained thread that had held for four careful years, quietly and completely gave way.
“Enough.”
He did not shout it. He had never in his life needed to shout. But the single word came down across the room with such cold finality that every other sound in it stopped at once, and three faces turned to him, and Clara, on her knees on the floor, went still.
“You will none of you say another word to her.”
He set down his cup. He crossed the room unhurriedly and stood between Clara and the rest of them; and when he spoke again it was with the quiet, level, lethal courtesy that had frozen better men than the Earl of Hartwick.
“Miss Ellsworth cut her hand to the bone in this house, some days since, gathering up the pieces of something broken through no fault whatever of her own. She has carried on with every task set her since, without one word of complaint, while that hand bled and stiffened and gave her pain enough to grey her face, as anyone in this room might have observed, had anyone in this room troubled to look. And now she has dropped a cup because her hand will not close, and you,” his gaze rested first upon his mother, and then, deliberately, upon the Earl, “are pleased to call it clumsiness, and to lecture a hurt and defenceless young woman upon her place.”
“Cedric—” his mother began, white now.
“As to place, Lord Hartwick.” He did not raise his voice a single degree.
“I was always given to understand that it shows itself most plainly in the manner of a man’s conduct towards those who are in no position to answer him back.
By that measure, and I can think of no better one, I find this room wanting.
Myself not least, for having stood by in my own house and let it go on this long. ”
For a long moment, no one answered him. Then the Earl of Hartwick set down his cup, with great deliberation, and smiled.
“You feel strongly, Your Grace,” he said softly.
“I confess I had not looked for quite so much warmth on the subject of a hired companion. It does you credit, of course. A gentleman should be kind to those who depend upon him; it is one of the gentler obligations of his station.” The pale eyes rested on Cedric’s face and did not waver.
“Though if I may venture a word of counsel, from one who has weathered a deal more of society than yourself, a man in your position does well to take care how warmly he champions the help. The world is a censorious place, Farenwoode. It does so love to wonder why.”
“Then let it wonder, Lord Hartwick.”
Cedric did not move, and his voice did not change, which was the most dangerous thing about it.
“I have given the world four years’ worth of things to wonder at, and I find I survive its curiosity tolerably well.
But I would think very carefully indeed, were I in your chair, before I undertook to feed that curiosity myself.
A guest who makes free with his host’s good name seldom remains a guest for long. ”
It was as near a threat as he had ever spoken to any man beneath his own roof, and the Earl heard it for exactly what it was. He inclined his head, the perfect picture of a man yielding a point with grace, but the cold light in his pale eyes did not go out.
It sharpened.
The silence that followed was absolute.
Clara was the first to move. She rose from the floor with her injured hand cradled against her, and did not look at him, did not look at anyone. She only dropped a curtsy to the room in general, a small, perfect ruin of a curtsy, and walked out with her head up and her eyes too bright.
She was gone before the first tear fell.
Cedric let her go, because to follow her would have been to undo with one act the only protection his words could buy her. He stood instead in the wreckage of the afternoon and made himself look at what he had done.
His mother had gone from white to a mottled flush, her hand pressed to her breast, too angry and too astonished to speak. That he had expected.
What he had not allowed himself to foresee was Hartwick.
The Earl was not angry. He was not even discomposed. He sat motionless with his cooling tea and watched Cedric over the rim of it with the same unhurried interest his words had carried a moment since.
And Cedric understood, with the lurching sensation of a man who had stepped off a stair he did not know was there, that in defending her, he had done the very thing he had sworn above all else not to do.
He had shown a dangerous man exactly where he might be wounded, and through whom.