Chapter 10
“Lady Cassandra, warnings offered sweetly are usually meant to be swallowed like poison.”
Cole had crossed the floor without remembering doing it.
He had seen the fan creak in Melody’s hand from forty feet off, and watched the small white line come up at Cassandra’s mouth that meant the blow had been struck.
The part of him that had spent four years deciding when to intervene and when to leave a thing alone had decided this one before he had quite chosen to.
He kept his voice low, and did not look at Melody. There was no need of a public scene to know what had just transpired in this one, and Melody had been the object of quite enough public scenes for one evening.
“I beg your pardon, Your Grace?” Cassandra said.
“I overheard a little of your kind concern for Miss Carrow. It struck me as the variety of kindness that has a small sharp point in the middle of it. I thought I would say so plainly, while we were all still in the same room.”
“You misunderstood me.”
“I have a good ear, Lady Cassandra. It has been the saving of me on several fields. I should be reluctant to begin doubting it now.”
She recovered quickly, the way she always recovered, and the smile she summoned was the public one, warm and untroubled, calibrated for the matrons at six paces.
“I am sorry if I gave any other impression. I was speaking only as a friend.”
“Then I shall speak as one too. Friendship offered in public is generally meant to be witnessed. The next time you wish to befriend Miss Carrow, do it where no one can see, and I shall believe you.”
“Your Grace is mistaken in me.”
“I am willing to be. Mistake me back, then. Convince me. I am a man who has been wrong about people before, Lady Cassandra, and I will own the error gladly when it is shown me. Only do not stand here and tell me my own ears deceived me. They are the part of me I trust most, and they were closer to your mouth than to your wishes.”
She had no answer ready. He had not meant to leave her without one, though on reflection he found he did not mind.
He bowed, the precise inch the title required, and turned to find the Carrows.
The assembly was breaking up. Carriages were being called in the yard, and Sir Marcus had Lady Carrow on his arm and was steering her through the press with the careful concentration of a man whose wife had spent too many hours upright in slippers that pinched.
Melody walked a few paces behind them with her chin level and the broken fan held carefully closed at her side, managing the room exactly as she had managed it all evening, which was to say at a cost no one but he was meant to see.
“Sir Marcus. Lady Carrow. May I see you down?”
It was a small attention and a public one, and the eyes that had been watching the assembly all night took it in, as he had meant them to.
He gave Lady Carrow his other arm. They went down through the press together, the Carrows and the duke, and the press parted for them in a way it had not parted for the Carrows alone, and Cole was not above the calculation that this, also, was the work.
In the yard the lamps were smoking. The Carrow carriage came up, the horses borrowed for the evening on the cheaper terms a family of reduced means made, and Sir Marcus handed Lady Carrow up first. Melody waited a step behind.
Cole had a moment with her in the lamp lit cold while her father was occupied with her mother, and he used it.
“Are you quite well?” he asked, low, while her father was busy at the carriage step.
“Perfectly.”
He looked down at the closed fan in her glove. “Your fan is broken.”
“It has been broken before,” she said. “They mend.”
“Miss Carrow.”
She did look at him then, just once, briefly, before her father turned back, and there was a furious bright thing behind her composure that was not for him, or not only for him, and he understood with the cold clarity of a soldier who has miscalculated wind that he had not done her a kindness.
“You cannot fight every whisper, Your Grace.”
“I can begin with the ones spoken near me,” he said.
“And what of the ones spoken when you are not near? You cannot stand at every door for me. You cannot ride through every drawing room. The county does not whisper less when the duke is across the room. It whispers differently, and only one of us has to listen to it on Sunday at the lych-gate.”
“I do not need a champion.”
“No. You needed one years ago.”
It came out without permission. He heard it in the same instant she did, and saw it land, the small startled stillness in her face, the way she absorbed a true thing without yet knowing what to do with it.
He had named a fact about the two of them that he had not, before that moment, fully understood himself, and he was not certain whether having said it aloud made it better or made it a thing they would now both have to live with.
“Good night, Your Grace,” she said, very steady. “Thank you for the dance. It was almost worth the cost of the fan.”
She went up into the carriage, and Sir Marcus shut the door, and the horses leaned into the traces, and Cole stood in the smoking lamplight watching the carriage take her out of the yard and into the dark of the high street with the bright thing she had not let him see still going on behind her face.
He had needed one years ago. She had needed one years ago.
The thing he had said into the cold had been the only true sentence he had managed all night, and he was not sure he had earned the right to it.
A hand fell on his shoulder.
“Greenstone. A word, when you have one.”
Lord Harbury was a square, comfortable man twenty years older than Cole, the kind of country peer who knew everyone’s grandfather and most of their debts, and Cole had known him since boyhood and respected him without quite liking him, which was a thing one came to recognise as a useful arrangement between gentlemen.
“My lord.”
“Walk to my carriage with me. I have a thing to say and I would as soon say it under the noise of the horses.”
They walked at Harbury’s unhurried pace through a yard loud with stamping and the calls of grooms.
“You did a fine thing tonight, my boy. Dancing with the Carrow girl. A handsome gesture. I will not pretend the county did not notice. We all noticed.”
“It was not a gesture.”
“All things done in public are gestures. That is the whole inconvenience of public life. A man may mean a thing in his heart and the world will only see what he did with his hands.” Harbury stopped by his carriage and did not get in.
“Listen to me, Greenstone. I knew your father. I am going to give you the kind of advice a friend of your father’s may give a young duke who has been home five minutes, and you may take it or leave it as you please.
Society forgives a duke nearly anything.
A duke may wed where he likes, and the world will swallow it, and in two seasons no one will remember it was thought a folly.
That is the cushion of rank. You may rely on it. ”
“And.”
“And society does not forgive a woman for being publicly unwanted. Twice. The first time it pities her. The second time it begins to think she must have done something to deserve it. There is no harder ground in England than that, my boy, and I have watched it kill better women than Miss Carrow. If you mean to court her, court her. Enter into matrimony with her, her, if you mean to, and quickly. But do not parade her one more season and then think better of it. She will not survive a second public withdrawal. She would not have survived the first if she were not made of something stiffer than the rest of us.”
The yard noise went on around them. Somewhere a man was swearing at a horse.
“You will forgive me,” Cole said. “It is good of you to speak.”
“It is not good of me. It is honest of me. There is a difference, and at my age I have ceased to confuse them.”
“You are of the sound opinion that I will not enter into matrimony with her.”
“I do believe you mean to. Most men your age mean a great many things. I am asking whether you have measured what you mean against what your mother and her friends will spend the winter trying to make you mean instead. I have watched five young dukes come into their titles in my time, my boy. Three of them formed love-matches, and were fortunately possessed of fortunes sufficient to survive the indiscretion. One wedded for duty and was wretched. The fifth meant to enter into matrimony for affection and wedded and wedded for peace in the end, because peace at home is a thing a man underestimates until he has been at war inside his own house. Be sure you know which kind of man you are before the season opens. That is all I ask. Good night, Greenstone.”
Harbury stepped into his carriage and was gone, and Cole stood in the yard with a cold settling under his coat that had nothing to do with the October air.
The man was right in a way he did not want to look at, because the right of it required him to be careful in a way he had not yet thought through, and being careful and being honest were two different operations, and they did not always lead to the same place.
He rode home alone through the cold and the dark, and the Abbey was unlit when he came in.
There was no calling for Finch. He went straight to the study, took out paper himself, trimmed his own quill and sat down to write a note he had been turning over in his head the whole length of the road home.
There was no flattery in him, and no impulse to explain. He wrote a single sentence and stopped, because he had finally understood that what he owed her was not a defence of himself.
I will not speak of what you owe me. You owe me nothing. If you permit me, I will speak only of what I owe you.
He sealed it with his own ring, the way he had sealed the first one, and left it on the salver for the morning post, and went up to bed and lay a long time looking at the ceiling.
He was not granted much sleep. The Dowager had risen by the time he came down, and she had taken her coffee in the morning room, and she had plainly been waiting for him with the patience that had become her chief weapon.
The Dowager set down her cup. “You will be glad to hear the Eversleys are going to London.”
“I shall send my felicitations to the high road.”
“You are not amusing this morning, Cole.”
“I am very seldom amusing before breakfast. It is one of my few constancies.”
“Do not be flippant with me. They open the Mount Street house this week. The little season is beginning. Lord Eversley has business in the Lords and Cassandra will be presented at the first Carlton House drawing room of the season. They will, naturally, expect to see you in town.”
“Will they,” he said, into his coffee.
“They will, and you will go. You have been six weeks at the Abbey playing at country gentleman, Cole, and the county has had its share of you. London has not had its first glimpse of the new Greenstone, and London is the place that matters. A duke who hides in the country becomes a country duke. There is no quicker route to losing the standing of the title than being thought unequal to the place where it is used.”
“And what am I to do in London, madam?”
“What dukes do. Attend the Lords. Take your seat. Show yourself. Dine where the Eversleys dine. Stand up at the Almack’s openings. Begin behaving like a duke among his equals, and not like some infatuated second son, fixed in melancholy devotion over a baronet’s daughter in a country lane.”
He had been ready for most of it. The infatuated second son he had not been quite ready for, which had been delivered with the small smile of a woman who knew exactly which word would carry.
He set down his coffee cup and took a moment, because the answer wanted thinking, and a hasty answer to his mother was always a worse one than a slow.
“Very well,” he said. “I will go to town.”
She inclined her head, satisfied.
“On one condition,” he said.
“You are in no position to make conditions.”
“I am Greenstone. I am in every position to make conditions, including this one. I will go to town. I will take my seat. I will dine where you wish me to dine, within reason. But Miss Carrow must be invited among them.”
The cup in her hand stopped on its way to her mouth.
The cup stopped on its way to her mouth. “I beg your pardon.”
“You heard me. If London is the place that matters, then she will be in London, where it matters. The Carrows have an old connection through Sir Marcus’s late sister, who wedded into the Linwoods.
The Linwoods keep a house in Brook Street.
It would cost you nothing to write a line, madam.
It is the sort of small office a great house does for a neighbour, and the kind of small office no one would think to remark upon if it were done at once and without fuss.
I would consider it a personal kindness. ”
“You cannot be serious,” the Dowager said.
“I have not been more serious in some months. You wish me to behave like a duke among his equals. Very well. The first thing a duke does among his equals is choose where to direct his consequence. I am directing mine. Either Miss Carrow comes to town, or I do not. Those are my terms.”
“You will make a public commitment of it before you have made a private one. That is a mistake, Cole, of a kind a man of any rank can afford only once in a life.”
“Then I shall spend it. I have spent worse things on smaller. Good morning, madam.”
He rose, bowed the precise minimum, and went out, leaving his mother with her coffee cooling and the morning sun coming in across the table, and a small piece of his chest very lightly, very steadily, beginning to thaw.