Chapter 6
“How does a woman receive no letters from a man who wrote until ink became more precious than sleep?”
Cole had not meant to say it aloud, and Finch, who had laid the old letter-books open across the estate office table and waited as a servant waits on a master long given to questions he does not always want answered, said nothing, which was the correct response and the one Cole found least bearable.
“I am asking the table,” Cole said. “Not you. Forgive me.”
“The table will not mind, Your Grace.”
They had been at it since before the household was properly awake.
The letter-books went back through the war years, the steward’s careful record of every item that came and went from Greenstone, in and out, franked and paid and forwarded, a vast dull monument to the truth that a great house generates more paper than affection.
Cole had not slept at all. He had lain in the unfamiliar ducal bed in the unfamiliar ducal dark and turned Melody’s three words over until they wore smooth, the not uncertain of them, the part that did not yet make sense.
He had not heard her say it, and would not until the afternoon, and still the words came on the way bad weather comes on in a knee once broken, and he had risen before the maids and sent for Finch and the books.
Hewitt the steward came in at seven, a spare grey man who had served the estate through three dukes and regarded the fourth as a problem he had not yet finished assessing.
“You wish to know about the wartime post, Your Grace.”
“I wish to know whether letters of mine, sent from the Peninsula, could have failed to reach a house four miles from this one. And whether letters sent to me could have failed to leave it.”
Hewitt did not hurry, for he never hurried at anything. He drew a chair and sat and folded his hands and gave the question the consideration he gave a drainage dispute, which was to say all of it.
“The post from Spain was a scandal, Your Grace, as everyone with a son abroad will tell you. Letters came in clots or not at all. A man might have six in a week and then nothing for three months, and the nothing meant nothing, only that a ship had been delayed or a mail had been taken or a clerk in Lisbon had stacked a sack in the wrong corner. That much is ordinary. Every family in the county lived on that uncertainty for years.”
“That is the part I know.”
“Yes. Here is the part you may not.” Hewitt turned a letter-book towards him and laid one finger on a column of dates.
“When His Grace your brother passed on, the estate went into what the lawyers like to call transition. For the better part of a year, while you were abroad and unreachable by anything quicker than a frigate, the business of Greenstone was conducted partly here and partly through Greenstone House in town, because that is where the lawyers were, and where Her Grace your mother removed to for the mourning. Correspondence for the family was redirected to town and sorted there. Anything addressed to you, or anything of yours wanting forwarding, would have passed through that house and that staff during those months. Not through mine.”
The office was very quiet. Somewhere beyond the window a stable lad was whistling and a horse was being walked on the cobbles, the ordinary morning going on outside the small still room where Cole sat understanding something.
“Through Greenstone House,” he said. “Through my mother’s staff. During the mourning.”
“During the transition, Your Grace. I make no charge against anyone. I am telling you where the paper went, because you asked, and because I have found it is generally better to know where the paper went.” Hewitt closed the book.
“There is another thing, smaller. The Carrows passed one winter of that period away from home. Sir Marcus took the family to relations in the next county for economy, the way families do when a house is dear to heat and company is free. Letters to Carrow House that winter would have wanted forwarding to the relations’ address, and forwarding is precisely where letters disappear.
A redirection asks much of a country post. It is the commonest grave in England for a letter that was honestly sent. ”
“So a letter from me, in that winter, to a house standing half empty, redirected by a clerk to an address he could not read, in a hand stiff with cold.” Cole heard his own voice flatten.
“And a letter from her to me, sent to the Peninsula but routed first through a house in town where my mother was burying my brother and had opinions about the match.”
“I did not say that last part, Your Grace.”
“No. You were careful not to. I am obliged to you for the care.” Cole stood, because sitting had become impossible. “It is not proof.”
“It is not proof,” Hewitt agreed. “It is a great deal of opportunity and no proof at all. A man may hang opportunity on a wall and look at it, but he had better not hang anyone else on it.”
It was good counsel and Cole took it, and it did nothing whatever for the cold thing turning over in his chest, because he had asked his mother a direct question in her drawing room and she had given him a true answer to a question he had not asked, and a man did not do that by accident.
A man did that with practice. He set the thought down where Hewitt could not see it and turned to the other business of the morning, which was the only kind of business that had ever steadied him.
“The Hatcher boy. The foot.”
“Mending, Your Grace, though he will not walk easy again. The pay you settled has the family above water. The mother asked me to say, in her words, that she would name the next dog after you, which I believe she intends as the highest honour in her gift.”
“Tell her I am moved, and that the dog had better be a clever one or it will disgrace us both.” Cole signed the order Finch slid before him, a matter of timber for the Hatchers’ roof, and then three more, a widow’s rent forgiven, a drainage advance to a tenant the south fields had nearly ruined, a place found for a discharged soldier who could no longer hold a plough but could keep a gate and a ledger.
He did each of them properly. Spain had taught him that a man who attends to the small mendings keeps his hands steady for the large breakings, and his hands, this morning, wanted keeping steady.
***
He went to Carrow House at three, on foot, because the day had cleared and a man who arrives in a duke’s carriage to walk a country mile has misunderstood the exercise.
Melody came out to him with her bonnet already tied and Sarah a careful six paces behind, and she gave him a curtsy of exactly the correct depth and a face of exactly no information, and they set off down the lane between the beeches with the maid trailing at the distance that made the walk respectable.
“You are persistent, Your Grace,” she said, when they had gone far enough that the house could not hear them.
“I have been called worse.”
“By me?” she asked.
“Often. I counted it encouragement.”
“You ought not to have. I meant every word as discouragement of the firmest kind.”
“I am aware. It is one of the things I have always admired in you, that your insults are so well constructed a man could frame them. But you will forgive me if I decline to take instruction on my own feelings from a hostile witness.”
She walked a few steps without answering, and he let her, because with Melody the silences were where the real conversation happened and the words were only the part she allowed.
“The roses were a great extravagance,” she said at last. “Two dozen. In September. You might have fed the Hatchers a week on what they cost.”
“The Hatchers have their timber and their pension and the promise of a clever dog. I did not rob them for your roses. And it was not extravagance. It was the cheapest thing I have ever sent anyone, because it cost me nothing to choose. I have known which roses to send you for five years. I have simply been waiting for an address.”
“No man should remember a sentence so useless. I said it to be clever. Girls of two-and-twenty say a great many things to be clever. It signified nothing.”
“No man who is truly attached considers any trifle of small account.”
It was out before he had weighed it, plain and early and far too soon, and he watched the shock take possession of her, marked how the quietness of her countenance was utterly shattered by its passage, and then watched as, by a supreme effort of will, her composure closed over the hurt, leaving her expression as unreadable as before.
She stopped being a woman walking with a man and became Miss Carrow receiving a duke, and the change was so complete and so practised that it would have been beautiful if it had not been aimed entirely at keeping him out.
“You should not say such things, Your Grace. You do not know me any longer. You know a girl from a garden who has been lifeless for some years. It is unkind to court her apparition in front of the living woman who has to walk home afterward.”
“Then let me know the living woman.”
“She is duller than the apparition and a great deal more expensive to maintain. You would be disappointed.”
“I have been shot at by Frenchmen for four years. My capacity for disappointment is not what it was.” He slowed, because the thing he had come to say had arrived, and it would not wait for better ground. “Melody. Miss Carrow. I wrote to you.”
She stopped walking so completely that Sarah, six paces back, nearly walked into the moment and then found something fascinating to study in the hedge, and the lane went still around them, and Melody stood with her face turned half away and her gloved hands folded in front of her and did not look at him.
“I received nothing,” she said.
“I know the post was uncertain. In a war letters go astray, whole sacks of them, and I told myself for four years that this was what had happened, that the silence belonged to the post and never to the woman. Or so I told myself.”