Chapter 16
“London has already decided what it wants from you.”
The Dowager said it from the morning room of Greenstone House before he had taken off his gloves, sitting in the chair she always sat in, her travelling weight set down behind her by the maids and her town composure already arranged across her shoulders.
The journey had agreed with her in the way it had always agreed with her, by giving her something to manage.
“London is allowed to want a great many things, madam. It does not always get them.”
“It got the last duke and the one before that. It is in a strong run of form.”
“Then it shall have to be patient. I have been here an hour. The drawing rooms have not had time to compose their first cruelties.”
“They composed them in October. They have been keeping them on a shelf for your arrival.”
He gave her the point. The town was a body of opinion in armchairs, and the armchairs had been seated for some weeks.
Upstairs Beale was already laying out the better of the two coats that London expected, and Finch was in the small library with the engagements running across two pages already.
Cole, putting his arms into the sleeves of a coat he had not worn since ’11, understood that the city had begun the work of measuring him before he had crossed the threshold of the house.
***
He looked in at his club first. White’s of an early afternoon in November was a quiet place, but not, he found, this November. Four men at the long table by the window looked up when he came in, and two of them looked at each other before they looked at him, which was its own greeting.
“Greenstone. Welcome to town.”
“Lord Pringle.”
“Sit down. We are working on the proposition that the war was a great deal of trouble for very little ground. Sit down and persuade us we are wrong.”
He sat down at the table. The glass that was put in front of him he did not drink from.
“You have come up to be presented.”
“I have come up because the season started without me. The presenting will follow.”
“And the courting.” A man across the table whose name was Drinkwater and who had been at Eton in Cole’s year smiled at the glass.
“We have been hearing about the courting all autumn. The county post has been more interesting reading than the dispatches. There was a kite, I am told. There was a dance. There was a fan that gave its life in the line of duty. Was she not the girl who waited too long?”
The room did not go quiet. The room did not need to. Cole set his glass down without looking at it.
“You will not call her that again.”
Drinkwater laughed, briefly, before he had read the air in the room. The laugh stopped a second after it should have. Drinkwater looked at his glass.
“I did not know Greenstone was sentimental,” said Pringle.
“Sentiment is what fools call honour when they have never practised it.” Cole picked up the glass and drank. “I am happy to lend you the difference, gentlemen. I have a great deal of it about me at present and it has nowhere to go.”
“You will not deny the courting.”
“I will not deny anything you may verify by the calling card on her father’s salver.
I am calling on Miss Carrow. I have been calling on Miss Carrow for the better part of two months.
The county post is a slow gossip but a thorough one, and I expect it has spared you the inconvenience of needing to ask me directly. ”
“You have not said you mean to wed her.”
“I have not said it to you, Pringle. I shall say it to her, when I have earned the saying. That is the order of these things in any drawing room I have ever respected. If your information requires a different order, I commend you to a different drawing room.”
There was a small careful pause. Then Pringle, who was the cleverest of them and the only one Cole had ever genuinely liked, laughed for real, and the table laughed with him, and the moment was past.
“He is not to be teased about the girl, then.”
“He is not to be teased about Miss Carrow.” Cole said her name plainly. He wanted them to hear it plainly. “I shall buy a round and we shall talk of horses, which were far more interesting than the dispatches and have the additional virtue of having no opinions about my private affairs.”
They talked of horses, and he bought the round, and he stayed exactly long enough to make it clear that the conversation had moved on at his pleasure and not at theirs. He left with Drinkwater following him to the door with a quiet word of apology that was not quite an apology.
“I did not mean it ungenerously.”
“You did not mean it at all, which is the difficulty. A man should mean a thing before he says it of a lady. Good afternoon, Drinkwater.”
He walked the short distance to the Ridge house in Cavendish Square because he wished to walk, and because he wished to have the air on his face before the next room.
London was bright with the late autumn sun and full of carriages, and a knife-grinder was working on the corner of Bond Street, and Cole counted the number of liveries he passed, because he was a soldier still and counting was the work the body did when the mind was holding itself in reserve.
He had not meant to call on the Ridges. The Dowager had arranged it, and the arrangement had landed on his salver before he had finished his cup of chocolate, and he had judged that to refuse a courtesy call on his second day in town would be its own statement, which was a different sort of statement from the one he meant to make.
Cassandra received him in a green drawing room with too many mirrors.
Her mother sent a polite excuse from upstairs, which was a small kindness Cole was almost grateful for, and then they were alone with a pot of tea between them and a footman by the door, and Cassandra was lovelier in London than she had been in the country, which he had not foreseen.
“Your Grace. You have come to ours first.”
“I have come to yours because my mother required it. You have a frank invitation to disbelieve any other reading of it.”
“You are unromantic this afternoon.”
“I am direct. Romance is for the evenings.”
She laughed the public laugh, the good one, and she poured the tea with hands that did not shake at all.
Cole was reminded, observing her, that the thing the country had hidden about Cassandra Ridge was that she was very nearly as practised as her mother and considerably more dangerous, because the practice was decorated with charm.
“I will be plain with you, Your Grace, because we are old enough to be plain. I think Miss Carrow will be miserable as a duchess. Not for the reasons you suppose I mean. Not because I dislike her, though I do not hold her in my affection, and I shall not pretend to. I think her habits of mind are not suited to it. She has spent her life in a small room. A duchess does not have a small room. She has a stage, and she does not get to choose the play, and she does not get to leave early, and a woman who built her composure out of being able to walk away will not find what she needs in a position from which there is no walking away.”
Cole set down his cup. “Is that concern or strategy?”
“Your Grace, among families like ours, the two are often indistinguishable. I offer you both for the price of a single article. In truth, it is the most advantageous bargain proposed to you since your arrival in town.”
“You are entirely convinced of her future wretchedness,” he said.
“I am very sure she will not be happy.”
“That is a different sentence, Lady Cassandra. The first asks me to spare her. The second asks me to spare you. I shall not pretend not to know the difference.”
“And I shall not pretend not to have made it.” She set down the cup with her eyes steady on his.
She was not, in this room, hiding anything she had ever been hiding in the country, and Cole understood at last that the country had been her costume.
“I should not be the worst duchess of Greenstone, Your Grace. I have been raised to it since I could walk. I do not claim to hold you in my affection, as I do not, and you would not believe me if I did. I say that I would do the work, and I would do it well, and your house would benefit, and your interest in the Lords would have a friend in mine, and the county would in time forget that you had thought, for a while, of doing otherwise. That is all I am offering. It is more than affection. It is competence.”
“It is also a bargain you have proposed in November of a hard year for the country, in a room with too many mirrors, to a man whose mother arranged your invitation. You will forgive me if I do not, in this hour, find your offer of competence as detached as you have made it sound.”
“You think me strategic,” Cassandra said.
“I think you a great deal more honest than I had expected. That is not the same as detached. I am not blaming you for either, Lady Cassandra. I am only telling you what I have heard.”
“Thank you for the plainness.”
“Will you consider it?”
“I have considered it. I have been considering it since the morning you sat down at the parish charity table beside Miss Carrow and were heard, by a great many of the women working there, telling her about altered expectations and the dignity of a peaceful unattached life. I have considered it again every morning since. I shall give you the answer plainly, because plainness has been the rule of the afternoon. I am not going to wed where the family interest would benefit. I am going to wed where my own affections lie. I take the point that this is a more selfish proceeding than the one you offer. It is, however, the proceeding I have decided on. I would rather be the worst duke of Greenstone in a hundred years than the most efficient man who ever closed his own throat for a marquess’s seat in the Lords. ”
She did not flinch, which he had not expected, and she inclined her head the precise inch, and stood.
“Then I shall have to congratulate Miss Carrow, when the time comes. I shall manage to do it without choking.”
“You will manage everything beautifully. You always do.”
He went out, and stood on the step a moment longer than was necessary, because the air on his face was useful. Then he walked back towards Greenstone House by way of Bond Street, where he was nearly run over by a man with a hatbox.
He saw her by accident.
He turned the corner into Brook Street and the Carrows’ carriage was at the Linwoods’ door, with Sir Marcus on the step paying off the driver and Lady Carrow being handed down by a footman.
Melody came down after her mother. She was plainly dressed in the dark blue, the one he remembered from the country, and her glossy raven tresses had been dressed by Sarah, rather than by the modish hands of a London woman, serving only to heighten the brilliance of her bright grey eyes.
She had a small black travelling reticule on her wrist that he did not recognise.
He checked his step at the corner, choosing to remain in the shadows of her notice, letting her pass without the burden of an encounter.
The thing in his chest was not what he had expected to find there.
Pride came first, and desire only after it.
She had come, and she had taken the second-best blue and Mrs Ashby’s trim, and the East Meadow had not been sold.
She had stepped down into Brook Street with her chin level and the small reticule on her wrist and her parents about her, and she had done it on her own terms. The terms were better than anything London would have given her.
He had not earned the right to be proud of her, and he stood at the corner anyway, because he was, and there was no help for it.
She went into the house. He turned the other way and walked the long way back to Greenstone House so that he should not have to pass the door.
***
The Dowager had decided the seating of the first dinner before he came down for it.
He saw the table card laid against the silver as soon as he entered the dining room.
Cassandra Ridge was on his right, in the place a duke seats a woman he means to honour.
Melody Carrow was three seats down on his left, near enough to be held by the steady gaze of his steel-blue eyes for the duration of the meal, yet far enough that the company would understand, implicitly, she was present by his allowance and not as his equal.
The message was as plain as a flag, and the message would be carried home by every guest who attended.
He stood at the head of the table looking at the cards.
A footman waited at his elbow with the sort of patience that meant the footman expected to be told to do nothing.
Cole understood the small fight that was coming, and understood it would not be won this evening by a public reordering of the seating that would humiliate his mother in her own house in front of the very guests she had invited to observe.
“Leave them,” he said to the footman. “The cards stand. They will not stand long. Tonight, however, they stand.”
He had decisions in front of him that wanted a longer view than a dinner.
He took up Cassandra’s place card and looked at it and put it down again where the Dowager had set it.
Cole had been at war for four years. He had developed, against his preference, an unromantic understanding that some ground was held by giving it up at the right hour, and that the holding of it was the holding of the day, not the holding of the field.
He would lose tonight, and do it on purpose. The thing he meant to win was not at this table, and the Dowager’s cards would teach the room, by the end of the evening, what she had not learned to teach it any other way.