Chapter 7
“Mama, if you say only a small dinner once more, I shall begin to suspect it includes royalty.”
“It is only a small dinner,” Lady Carrow said, for the fourth time, and then heard herself and laughed despite her nerves, a small startled sound in the close dark of the carriage.
“Oh, very well. It is a dinner of unknown dimensions to which we have been graciously condescended, and I have retrimmed my gown for it, and your father has had his good coat brushed, and we shall all of us be perfectly at ease and enjoy ourselves enormously.”
“We shall be measured and weighed and sent home lighter than we came. But yes. Enormously.”
She had known what it was the moment the invitation came, written in the Dowager’s own hand on paper thick enough to stand up by itself, so very glad of the Carrows’ company, the Eversleys also expected, a small family party.
Those four words about the Eversleys turned a dinner into a stage and Melody into the entertainment.
A woman did not reach seven-and-twenty in a county this size without learning to read the architecture of a cruelty from its foundation stones, and this one had been built to be looked at.
***
Greenstone Abbey came up out of the October dark as they turned in at the gates, lit from within at a dozen tall windows, vast and golden and entirely sure of itself, and Melody felt the old self stir in her, the two-and-twenty self who had once walked these gardens as a girl who might belong to them.
She put a thumb to the seam of her glove and pressed until that part of her lay down again.
The hall alone could have housed Carrow House twice over.
There were footmen enough to field a cricket eleven, and portraits climbing the stair into the shadows, deceased Greenstones in every fashion of the last two centuries looking down with the mild contempt of people who have never once wondered whether they were wanted in a room.
The silver, when they were brought through to it, was not polished thin.
It was deep and heavy and uncountable, and it threw back the candlelight without a single worn place in the engraving, and Melody understood, looking at it, exactly how thin her mother’s teapot was, and exactly what the Eversleys had been brought to watch her understand.
Cole met them himself, which he need not have done, and which the Dowager plainly had not expected, because something passed over that fine cold countenance when he crossed the room to the Carrows before he had greeted the marquess.
“Sir Marcus. Lady Carrow. Miss Carrow.” He bowed to each of them and lingered not at all longer on Melody than on her parents, which she noted and was obscurely grateful for. “You are very welcome. I hope the roads were not too bad.”
“The roads were excellent, Your Grace,” said her father, who would have said the same of a swamp.
“I am glad of it. Come and be warm. My mother has put us in the small drawing room, which means only that you can see the whole of the company at once instead of losing half of it round a corner.”
The small drawing room held the Eversleys in full state.
The marquess was a florid silent man who appeared to have delegated all speech to his wife some decades ago and never reclaimed it.
Lady Eversley inclined her long pale head.
And Cassandra rose from the best seat by the fire in a gown the colour of crushed apricots, lovelier than any woman had a right to be at a small family dinner, and came forward with both hands out as though Melody were the one person in England she had been longing to see.
“Miss Carrow. How well you look. I do believe the country air suits some complexions far better than town ever could.”
“And how kind of you to come so far for it,” Melody said. “I hope the Abbey does not feel small to you, after London.”
“Oh, everything feels small after London. One grows used to it.” Cassandra turned the remark over and found it satisfactory. “But there is a great charm in smallness, I always say. A small society. A small acquaintance. The same dear faces year upon year. It must be so restful.”
“Restful is certainly a word for it.”
They went in to dinner, and the table was where the evening had been designed to do its work.
The Dowager sat Melody well down from the duke and directly across from Cassandra, so that the whole length of the meal Melody had the choice of looking at the woman intended for him or at her own plate, and she chose the plate as often as pride allowed.
The Dowager opened the attack herself, over the soup, in the voice of a woman bestowing a compliment.
“I was saying to Lady Eversley only this morning how much I admire Miss Carrow’s steadiness. So few young women have it now. You have a settled quality, my dear, a sort of repose, that one used to see in women of a certain age and almost never sees in girls. It is most restful to be near.”
There was that word again, restful, passed down the table like a dish everyone was determined she should eat. It made her sound forty. It made her sound finished. Melody set down her spoon with great care.
“Your Grace is too kind. I have always thought repose much overrated. It is generally only impatience that has given up hope.”
Cole made a sound into his wine that he converted, not quite in time, into a cough.
“Miss Carrow has a great wit,” Cassandra said warmly. “We were all quite in awe of it as girls. Of course in town one finds wit on every sofa, it becomes rather wearing, but in the country it must be such a distinction. Do you go to town at all now, Miss Carrow? I cannot recall.”
“Not for some years.”
“No. Well. It is a great expense, town, and so much trouble for a family, the opening of a house and the carriages and all of it. One quite understands.” Cassandra’s understanding was the most lavish thing on the table.
“I always say a woman is happiest where she is known. And you are so very known here.”
“Melody had three offers her first season,” Lady Carrow said, too quickly, and Melody closed her eyes for the length of a breath, because she could hear in it the exact note of a mother who has watched her child mocked one beat too long and forgotten that the worst thing one can do in such a room is to defend.
“Did she,” said Lady Eversley, to her fish. “How fortunate. And does Miss Carrow enjoy the quiet country life? Some natures are so suited to it. The same walks. The same small occupations. There is a contentment in it that those of us with larger establishments quite envy.”
“I enjoy any life that lets me choose my own occupations,” Melody said. “I have found that the size of an establishment has very little to do with how much of one’s day belongs to oneself. Some of the largest houses in England keep their mistresses busiest, I understand, arranging things.”
It was a hit, a small clean hit, and she watched it land on Lady Eversley, who ran the largest establishment at the table and was at that moment arranging a matrimony across the soup.
The Marchioness’s long face held still, and yet her eyes came up from the fish, and for the first time that evening she looked at Melody as at a person rather than a draught.
Cole set down his glass. “Miss Carrow has the best head for figures in the county,” he said, to the table at large, as though it followed naturally from the talk of occupations.
“I had the parish relief fund three columns wrong last week and could not find it. She found it in under a minute, standing up, while half the parish wives watched. The Hatcher family has coal this winter on the strength of it.”
“How very useful,” murmured Cassandra, in the tone one uses for a clever servant.
“It is the most useful thing anyone did in this parish last week,” Cole said, and the pleasantness did not leave his voice, and somehow that made it land harder. “Including me.”
The next course came, and with it Melody’s undoing, small and domestic and entirely private.
It was a fricassee of some kind, rich and pale, and the smell of it reached her before the footman had set it down, the warm sweet sharpness of nutmeg, and her stomach closed against it the way it always closed when a room was watching her.
She could not eat nutmeg at the best of times.
She certainly could not eat it across a table from the woman she was being measured against, with a duke at the head of it and her mother’s three offers still hanging in the air like smoke.
She moved it about her plate. She had grown expert, over years of difficult dinners, at the choreography of appearing to eat, the small architecture of a fork that is always busy and never lifts, and she performed it now and trusted that no one was looking closely enough to see.
Cole was looking closely enough.
He did not make a thing of it. There was no leaning down the table to ask loudly whether the dish was not to her liking, which would have turned every face towards her plate.
He caught the eye of the footman behind his chair and said something low.
A few minutes later, while Cassandra was explaining the superiority of London orchestras to a marquess who had not asked, a dish of pears poached in wine was set quietly at Melody’s place, and the fricassee was taken away, and no one at the table remarked it because there had been nothing to remark.
She remembered the pears too well. She had eaten them at this table once, five years before, and had said how good they were, and that was the whole of it, a girl liking a pudding, the kind of thing no one remembered.
“You remember too many useless things,” she said, very low, when the talk had moved on and his ear was the only one near enough.
“I have never considered you useless.”
“That was not what I said.”