Chapter 8
“You made her uncomfortable.”
The last carriage had gone down the drive a quarter of an hour since, the Eversleys’ lamps swaying away into the dark, and the Abbey had begun the long settling sounds a great house makes when it empties, footmen carrying off the plate, a girl somewhere snuffing candles down a corridor.
The Dowager had not gone up. She sat by the drawing-room fire with a glass of ratafia she was not drinking, waiting for him, because she always waited for him now, having discovered that the surest way to govern a soldier was to be where he could not avoid you.
“I made no one uncomfortable,” she said.
“I gave a small dinner. If Miss Carrow was uncomfortable, it is because she sat at a table she has the wit to understand she no longer fits, surrounded by the evidence of it. That is not cruelty, Cole. It is only a mirror. You may resent a mirror, but you cannot in justice blame it for the face.”
“You sat her across from Cassandra Ridge and let your friends ask her in turn whether she enjoys her small quiet life. That is not a mirror. That is a stage you built, and you sold tickets to the Eversleys.”
“I invited two families to dine. The arrangement of a table is not a crime.”
“The arrangement of that table was the most carefully fought engagement I have witnessed since Vitoria, and I include Vitoria.” He stood instead, one hand on the cold marble of the mantel, and watched the fire rather than her, because his temper was nearer the surface than he liked and her face would only bring it up.
“You served her nutmeg. You cannot have known that, I grant you. But you knew the rest. You knew exactly what you were doing to her, course by course, and you did it in your own house, to a guest, and called it a small dinner.”
“I will tell you what I know.” The Dowager set down the glass.
“I know you cannot repair a boy’s promise by making a ducal mistake.
That is the whole of it, Cole, and all your soldiering metaphors will not change it.
You gave your word as a younger son who could afford to give it.
You cannot honour it as a duke who cannot. ”
“I was a man when I made it. Not a boy. A man of five-and-twenty who knew his own mind better than I have known it since.”
“You were not Greenstone.”
“No.” He turned from the fire and looked at her. “I was merely honest. It is a thing a man can be at five-and-twenty that becomes inconvenient later, when he has acquired enough to lose by it. I have not yet decided to find it inconvenient. You will be the first to know when I do.”
The fire cracked and settled. Beyond the windows the park lay black and the rain had stopped and the gravel shone.
“Cassandra Ridge is suitable,” the Dowager said, more quietly, as though quietness were a fresh weapon she was trying since the others had failed.
“She is well born and well dowered and well taught. She would never embarrass you, never cost you a friend in the Lords, and never make a county whisper. She is everything the position requires. I am not asking you to feel for her what you imagine you feel for the other. I am asking you to be sensible, which is a different and more durable thing, and which lasts a great deal longer than a garden in summer.”
“Suitability is a poor substitute for truth,” Cole said.
“It wears the same clothes and keeps the same hours and you may live a whole life beside it and never once be known. I have seen men wed suitability. I buried one or two of them, in fact, men who went into the ground having never said a true thing to the woman who wept over them. I find I would rather be embarrassed by the truth than comfortable with the substitute. It is a soldier’s preference, perhaps.
We grow tired of arrangements that look well on paper and slay people in the field. ”
His mother looked at him a long moment, and something in her face that was not quite tenderness and not quite defeat moved and was put away.
“You will break this house against that woman,” she said, “and call it honesty while you do it.”
“Or I will mend it. You have decided which without troubling to learn about her. That was always your error, madam. Not cruelty. Incuriosity. You have never once been curious about a person you had already priced.”
“I have buried a husband and a son in this house, Cole. Do not lecture me on what I have or have not troubled to learn.”
It stopped him, because it was true, and because grief was the one ground on which he could not in conscience advance against her. He let the silence stand a moment in her favour.
“I am sorry for Henry,” he said, more quietly.
“I am sorry I was not here, and sorry you carried it alone, and sorry the title came to a son you would not have chosen for it. I cannot give you back the son who wanted it. I can only be the one who came home. But I will be that one as I am, madam, and not as a copy of him, and the woman I wed will be a woman I could say a true thing to across a breakfast table for forty years. That is the whole of my requirement. You may call it sentiment. I have buried men who had nothing else, and I assure you it weighs more in the ground than a marquess’s interest in the Lords. ”
He left her with that, which was perhaps unworthy, and went out into the corridor where the candles had been taken down to every third sconce, and there, by an unlucky arithmetic of timing, he found Cassandra Ridge.
She had not gone with her parents. She had stayed, on some pretext of a forgotten shawl, and she waited in the half-dark, and she knew, the way her mother knew it, every use a corridor could be put to.
“Your Grace. Forgive me. I left my wrap in the music room and could not find a servant to send.” She did not move towards the music room. “I am glad of the chance, in truth. I have wanted to say something to you all evening, and one cannot say a serious thing across a dinner table.”
“Lady Cassandra.”
“It is about Miss Carrow. I hope you will not think me forward.” She arranged her face into concern, and it was very well done, smooth and warm and entirely without a join.
“I am fond of her. We were girls together. And it grieves me to see her, forgive me, raised. Lifted into an air she cannot breathe. A woman gets used to her place, Your Grace, she makes a peace with it, and then to be singled out, courted in front of everyone, set up where the whole county can watch, only to be set down again. It is the setting down that breaks them. I would not see her broken for a kindness. Some kindnesses are crueller than neglect.”
It was beautifully constructed, and he gave it that much. There was even a grain of true thing in it, which was what made it dangerous, because the cruellest lies are the ones built on a floor of fact.
“You wish to protect her,” Cole said.
“I wish her happy. As you must.”
“I am asking a narrower question. When you speak of sparing Miss Carrow the pain of being raised and set down, do you mean to protect her from the fall, or to remove her before she can climb? Because those are not the same act, Lady Cassandra, whatever they may look like from a little distance, and I find the difference between them tends to be the whole of a person’s character. ”
“You make it sound a calculation. It is only concern.”
“Concern is a fine thing. It is also the easiest sentiment in the world to counterfeit, because it requires nothing of the person professing it but a lowered voice. You have lowered your voice charmingly all evening. You lowered it over the soup when you wondered aloud whether she goes to town. You are lowering it now. I have begun to attend less to what your voice says than to what it is arranged to accomplish.”
For the briefest moment something flashed behind the concern, quick and cold, and then the warmth came back over it like water closing.
“Can the two not occasionally resemble each other?” she said. “Protecting and removing. They are often the same mercy seen from different sides.”
“Not when one is honest.” He inclined his head, the precise minimum the rank required. “Your shawl is in the music room, I believe you said. I will have a footman bring it to your carriage. Good night, Lady Cassandra.”
He slept no better that night, though the reason was a kinder one.
He spent the small hours with his own campaign papers in place of the household letter-books, the dispatch box that had come home with him still strapped and unopened, full of the detritus a man carries through four years of war and cannot bring himself to burn.
There were orders in it, and a deceased lieutenant’s watch he had never managed to return.
And, folded into a memorandum book, in his own cramped field hand, the drafts and half-drafts and copied lines of letters he had meant to send and sometimes had.
He found her name a dozen times. He found a line copied out and kept, as a man keeps what he cannot afford to lose, dated the month after Henry had passed away, in a hand gone wild with cold and grief and the bone exhaustion of a battle survived.
Everything is changed, Melody, and nothing is.
I am a duke and an orphan of my own family in the space of one letter and I find the only thing I am sure of in any of it is you.
He had written that line in a tent outside Bayonne, with his brother three months departed and a coronet he had never wanted settling on him like a wet coat.
He had sent it, he was nearly sure he had sent it, and she had read nothing at all on the morning she stopped going down early to meet the post.
He sat with the memorandum book open on his knee for a long time.
It would be the easiest thing in the world to take it to her.
To lay the drafts in her lap and say, look, here, in my own hand, dated, proof, I did not abandon you, the fault was never yours and never mine, and here is the evidence that we were robbed.
It would acquit him entirely. And it would, he understood slowly, turning the cold pages, do nothing whatever for her, because the thing that had happened to Melody was not a question of his guilt.
He had been imagining it as a court, with himself in the dock and these papers his defence.
But she had not spent four years believing him guilty.
She had spent four years being pitied, going down early to a post that held nothing, learning in front of a whole county to expect the worst and call it wisdom.
No draft in a memorandum book undid a single morning of that.
Proof that he had written would not give her back the years she had spent learning not to hope.
It would only ask her to be pleased on his account, which was one more thing demanded of a woman who had been asked to bear too much already.
He closed the book on the thought. He would tell her the truth when the truth could serve her and not before, and he would not, whatever it cost him, hand her his own innocence as though it were a gift she was obliged to thank him for.
***
When morning finally came, he settled upon a book instead.
It was a novel, the sensational kind, three volumes of inheritances and ruined abbeys and a heroine forever fainting onto conveniently placed sofas, the sort of book a serious person was supposed to despise and secretly devoured.
He had remembered, somewhere in the long night, a thing she did with books, a thing she had confessed to him once and then sworn him to secrecy over as though it were a crime.
When a story made her anxious for the people in it, when she could not bear the suspense of not knowing, she read the last page first. She said it let her enjoy the middle.
She said a person who knew the ending could attend properly to how it was reached, instead of gnawing herself to pieces over whether it would come right.
He had teased her without mercy. She had told him he had no soul and could keep his suspense.
He sent the first volume only, with the last pages uncut, and a note in his own plain hand.
I have not read the last page. I await your bad influence.
The reply came back within two hours, which told him she had not been able to leave it alone, that she had sat with it and argued with herself and lost, and the knowledge of that warmed him absurdly out of all proportion to its cause.
A footman brought in the book, returned, with a folded paper tucked under the ribbon, and the pages still uncut.
She had not read a word of it, or had been at great pains to appear not to have.
Your Grace must not encourage my vices.
He read it standing at the estate office window with the morning coming grey and clean over the wet park, and he laughed aloud, a real laugh, the first since he had come home.
It startled Finch at his ledgers and a footman at the door, a sound so unfamiliar in that careful house that both men looked up as though a window had blown open.
He sat down at once and wrote underneath her own line, on the same paper, because a fresh sheet would have been too formal for the thing passing between them.
I prefer them encouraged.
“Take it back to Carrow House,” he told the footman, and held out the book and the note and, after a moment, did not let go of them.
“And the second volume with it. Tell her the first is no use to her without it, since she will want to know whether the abbey burns. It does. The ending is happy and I have spoiled it on purpose, so that she may attend properly to the middle, which is the only part of any story worth a careful reader’s time. Tell her I said so. Word for word.”
The footman, who had served three masters and never once been asked to carry an opinion, repeated it back gravely and went out into the morning with two volumes of ruined abbeys under his arm.
Cole stood at the window and watched him go down the shining drive, and did not, for once, feel like a man four hundred miles from anything that mattered.