Chapter 11
“What does one wear to receive an apology from a duke? Something old, I do believe it is best he be among familiar disappointments.”
Lady Carrow lowered her embroidery very slowly, as a woman lowers a teacup she has discovered to be full of something other than tea.
“Melody.”
“I am wearing the grey, Mama. I have decided. The grey says I am not trying, which is the only message I am willing to send him before noon.”
“The grey is two seasons old.”
“That was the principal recommendation.”
She had not slept at all. The carriage had come up the lane an hour after midnight, and her father had come up with the news from the inn, in his voice, that the duke had said what the duke had said in front of half the county.
She had lain in the dark afterward staring at the ceiling with Cole’s words still turning in her chest. No.
You needed one years ago. It had been the kind of true sentence one is not ready to hear in front of a stable boy, and the man who had let it out without quite meaning to, was coming this morning at eleven.
She had two hours to choose between the grey and the blue, and the grey was winning, because she could not, in any honesty she could face, give him the blue.
The note had come at nine. If I may call at eleven, I should be grateful. That was the whole of it. He had not signed it Greenstone. He had signed it Cole, which was either a small recovered intimacy or a small calculated one, and she did not, yet, know how to tell those two things apart.
He was prompt to the chime. Sarah brought him in to the drawing room, where Melody and her mother were arranged with appropriate informality, embroidery on Lady Carrow’s lap and a book Melody was not reading.
The morning sun came in across the turned carpet and made the room look, for an hour, like one with no economies.
“Your Grace.”
“Lady Carrow. Miss Carrow.” He bowed and did not approach the chair until invited, and when invited he took the one Melody indicated rather than the one nearer to her. He had paid attention to small things, and she noted it.
“It is good of you to come,” her mother said, and rose. “I have a letter that wants finishing and I have been putting it off all morning. I shall be in the library if you have need of me, Melody.”
The door closed behind her. Lady Carrow’s letter was a fiction so transparent that Melody had to look at the window to keep her face.
She was alone in a room with him now in a way she had not been alone with him in five years and more, and the laughter that came up wanted to come up for that, and not for her mother’s diplomacy.
“You owed me no call this morning, Your Grace.”
“I owe you several. I thought I would begin with the one nearest the door.”
“I should vastly prefer the use of plain English, if you are indeed capable of it.”
“I am working at it. The title makes me sound like a man giving an after-dinner speech, and I dislike it as much as you do.” He sat with his hands on his knees. He had decided already what he meant to say, and was simply waiting for his courage to arrive. “I came to apologise.”
“For dancing with me.”
“For not understanding what I was asking of you when I did. I came home with my head full of an account of you I had carried four years and not once corrected, in which you had been waiting and would be glad to be found. I have begun to suspect that account did not match the country I came home to. I do not yet know the whole shape of what was different. I would like to. I have come this morning to ask, if you will let me ask, what these years were.”
“You have come this morning,” she said, “to make yourself a great deal more uncomfortable than you need to be.”
“That is generally what an apology requires. The ones that cost nothing buy nothing.”
“Upon my word, you enjoy a vast store of the most ingenious expressions, Your Grace. I begin to suspect you composed them on the ride over.”
“I composed them through the night, if you must know. I did not trust myself to think of them in the carriage. A man who composes on horseback is generally the dullest man in any room he subsequently enters.” He let that sit a moment.
“I will be plain. I do not ask you to absolve me. I ask you to tell me. There is a difference, and I have only learned it lately, and I would prefer to be on the right side of it before I am much older.”
She had not expected that. The grand apology she had braced for, the rehearsed speech, the man who had stood in front of a mirror and worked the cuffs of an explanation. A sentence that ended in a question she had not braced for at all.
She looked at her hands in her lap and did not answer at once.
“You wish me to give you a list.”
“I wish you to tell me what you can bear to tell. No list. I do not deserve a list.”
“That is a great deal to allow yourself, Your Grace. Deciding what you deserve. Most men of my acquaintance have decided themselves into rather more than that and called it humility.”
“Then I shall trust your judgement of what I deserve and content myself with whatever you choose to give.”
The clock on the mantel ticked away the passing moments.
She had counted to twelve before she spoke, and not because the answer was difficult to find.
Those years she had by heart. She had lived in them, hour by hour, and she could have given him a map of them with the towns named. The difficulty was the giving.
“I waited for letters,” she said.
“Yes.”
“And then, when no letters came, I waited for explanations. I assumed that you would write when you could, and that when you wrote there would be a reason for the silence. I waited several months for the explanation. It seemed natural that an explanation should take time, with a war in the way.”
“Yes.”
“Then I waited for myself to stop waiting. That was the longest. I had not known until then that waiting is a habit. One thinks of it as a state, a kind of standing still. It is not. It is something the body does every morning whether one wishes it to or not. The waiting goes on long after the hope it began with has gone, and it took me, I do believe a year and a half to teach mine to lie down.”
He did not interrupt, only listened with the steadiness he had learned at field hospitals, where a man trains himself to keep what he hears off his face.
“While I waited, people watched. At first they pitied me kindly, which was the worst, because there is no answer to a kindness one would rather be without. The girls I had been at school with were wedded, and they came to call, and they did not know what to say to a woman who was very visibly not wedded, and so they said nothing at all and looked very gentle while they said it. After a year the kindness curdled. They began to look at me as though I were a cautionary tale. The girls who had once envied my prospects began pitying me, which is an arithmetic of pleasure I should not recommend you study. And my own mother and father grieved with me. They were as good as parents are ever good. They comforted me, and at the same time they were mourning, and the mourning was the loudest thing in the house, because they had held you in their highest esteem, you see. They had been almost as glad of you as I had been. And so I had to be brave for them, apart from standing as a powerful beacon of caution to others. It is a great deal of work, to be brave for the people who are too sad to be brave for you.”
His hands were still on his knees, and he had not moved.
“And in all that time,” he said at last, “you did not write to me.”
“No.”
“Why?”
She did look at him then.
“A woman does not chase a gentleman who has risen high enough to pretend not to hear. That is the whole of it. You were Lord Cole when you left and Greenstone before you came home, and somewhere in those four years it became impossible for me to write a letter that would not look, when it arrived, like a beggar’s.
I could not bear to be the person who had written it.
Not to you. Not to anyone. Pride is a very small comfort, Your Grace, but it is the only one a woman in my position is permitted, and I was not going to give that up too. ”
“I would have heard you anywhere.”
“That is a beautiful sentence and a useless fact. The beauty does not undo the years it would have cost me to send the letter that proved it. And if I had sent the letter, I would not believe it, even now. I would think you were saying it because the letter had arrived. I would think you had heard me because I had made you. I shall never know now whether you would have, and that is a thing I have made peace with.”
The peace had cost her. The cost was in her voice when it landed on the word, and she did not look down to see what her hand had done with the arm of the chair.
There was no need to look. Her fingers were closed on the wood the way they closed on fans, the way they closed on most things when a true thing got out before she could stop it, and her knuckles were complaining and the wood was old enough that some part of it was likely going to surrender before she did.
He had taken in the chair-arm at the same moment he took in her voice, with the trained attention a man gives a horizon, where everything that moves is counted, and for one second she thought he was going to come across the carpet and lay his hand over hers and undo her composure entirely.
He did not move, only sat where he was and lowered his voice instead.
“I will not touch you, Miss Carrow. I have not earned it. I am only saying it aloud so that you may stop holding the chair against my arrival, if you would like to. The chair is unoffending. I am the one your anger has business with.”
“You make a great deal of presumption,” she said, “about where my anger has business.”
“I make a great deal of guesses. They are not all right. The chair was one of them, perhaps. I shall sit very still and offer no further opinions on furniture.”
“That is good of you.”
“I am not asking you to forgive me before you finish being angry.”
The sentence was so exactly the right one that it unsettled her more than any of the other true things he had said that morning.
A man who knew enough to say it had paid attention, somewhere along the line, to the shape of her hurt, and a man who paid that kind of attention was not safe, because he was far harder to refuse than one who did not.
“You are putting me at a disadvantage, Your Grace.”
“That is not my intention.”
“It is, however, your effect.”
“Then I shall accept the effect and apologise for it tomorrow.” He paused, only a beat.
“May I call again? Not to apologise further. I have done what apologising I trust myself to do this morning. I should like to walk with you. Wherever you choose, however many of Sarah’s six paces behind us she would like. Tomorrow afternoon.”
“No.”
“Very well.”
She had expected him to argue, and the not-arguing was worse than the argument would have been, because the not-arguing meant he had heard the no and accepted it, which meant the no had been a real one and not the opening of a negotiation, and she did not know whether she was disappointed by having been believed.
He rose, and bowed, and went to the door, and his hand was already on the latch when he turned.
“Tomorrow,” he said, “I shall ask again.”
“That is not accepting refusal.”
“It is accepting today’s refusal. I have hopes for the tomorrow’s.”
“You ought not to.”
“I have a great many hopes I ought not to have. I have run my whole life on the income of them.” He smiled, small and undefended.
“I shall be honest with you, Miss Carrow. I do not know how to court a woman I have already hurt. There is no book on it that I know of, and the men I served with were the wrong men to ask. I expect to do it badly. I ask only the patience to do it badly without being shown the door for the first attempt, since I shall improve, in time, if I am permitted to.”
“And if you are not permitted to?”
“Then I shall be shown the door, as I deserve to be, and shall go through it with what grace I can manage. But not, I beg you, today. Please allow me at least call again, even if the answer is again no. I would rather hear no from you in your own drawing room than wonder, in mine, what the answer would have been.”
She did not have a sentence ready for that. The danger of him was not the practised charm, which she could have armoured against, but the unpractised honesty, which she could not.
“Good morning, Miss Carrow. Thank you for your time.”
He went out, and the latch closed behind him, and the drawing room was quiet again.
The morning sun was still coming in across the turned carpet, and Melody sat for some moments without moving.
If she moved she would have to acknowledge what her body was doing, and her body, having held itself rigid for the whole of his call, had begun, very quietly, to shake.
She closed her hand around the chair-arm one more time, not hard, just for the steady purchase of it.
She would, she was nearly sure, ask Sarah for tea in a minute, though not quite at this one.
The first thing was simply to sit, and be in a room he had been in, and not weep, and the order of those was important, because she had not yet decided which she was the least sure of doing.