Chapter 19
“Smile, Miss Carrow. In London, one must never look wounded unless one has chosen the audience.”
Cassandra said it sweetly across the small distance between the carriages, leaning a little out of the Eversley barouche, the friendly hint of one cousin to another, country and otherwise.
The hint was loud enough to be heard by the Beresford’s passing the other way, and Lady Beresford’s head turned at the exact angle of a head that wished to be seen turning, and the angle had been bought.
Hyde Park was full at the fashionable hour.
The Row carried a slow polite stream of barouches and curricles and one or two phaetons trying to look more daring than they were, and the November air was bright and cold and useful for setting the colour high in a lady’s cheeks if a lady wished her cheeks set high.
Melody did not wish hers set, having a steady colour she had earned through four years of country lanes and having set it as steady as it would go before she stepped into Lady Linwood’s barouche.
“Lady Cassandra,” Lady Linwood said, in the warm uninterested voice of a hostess greeting a draught. “How well you ride out today. Quite blooming.”
“You are kind, Lady Linwood. Mama and I find the air does us so much good.”
“It is a great preserver of complexions, the November air. And of conversations one would not otherwise survive.”
Lady Eversley inclined her long head from her side of the barouche, smiled at nothing, and did not engage.
Cassandra was in pale grey with a darker pelisse and a hat that had cost more than the Carrows had spent on hats in any of their lives, and she had a gloved hand on the rail with the negligent confidence of someone already given her cue.
“We were on our way to the Berkeley,” Cassandra said. “But seeing you, of course we must stop. I had hoped to find Miss Carrow today. There has been a very tiresome thing going about, and I should like her to hear it from a friend before she hears it from a stranger.”
“How thoughtful of you,” Melody said.
“It is the least one can do. Mama and I were speaking of it only this morning. We agreed it was unfair, the way these things attach themselves. No one blames a girl for treasuring old hopes, Miss Carrow. Truly no one does. One only wishes she had been spared the season for it, when the old hopes are the very thing the season cannot help noticing.”
Lady Carrow’s gloved hand closed very slightly on her reticule. Melody put her own hand over her mother’s without looking at it.
“I am not certain what hopes you mean, Lady Cassandra.”
“Are you not? Then perhaps the tale has not reached as far as I feared. I shall not be the one to tell it to you, in that case. It would be unkind.”
“I did not ask you to tell it to me. I asked which hopes you meant.”
“The old county ones, my dear,” Cassandra said, and her smile conferred it like a delicacy.
“The ones a man may form at five and twenty and is at liberty to forget at thirty. Nothing of any consequence. It is only that London does notice when a young woman appears to have travelled some distance on the strength of them.”
“Hopes are less embarrassing than ambitions disguised as concern, Lady Cassandra. I find they travel rather better.”
The corner of Lady Linwood’s mouth moved a half-degree. Lady Eversley did not move at all.
“What a clever way of putting it. Mama, did you hear how cleverly Miss Carrow put that. She has such a country way of saying a thing.” Cassandra adjusted the hand on the rail. “But cleverness is not what a duchess is built upon. You know that, I think. A duchess must be bred to the role.”
“A duchess must first be chosen for it, Lady Cassandra. The breeding is for the dogs.”
That landed harder than the previous one. Lady Beresford, who had not entirely passed, made a small noise in her throat behind her glove. Lady Eversley’s eyes came up at last from the rail.
“Forgive me,” Lady Eversley said. “I did not catch the remark.”
“I should not repeat it, Lady Eversley. Your daughter has heard it. She will tell you over tea.”
“It is good of you to spare me, Miss Carrow. So little is spared in town.”
The hooves came at a walking pace from the side, the sound that a single horse makes when its rider is taking him in carefully against an assembly of carriages, and Melody did not have to look to know whose horse it was.
Lady Carrow’s hand tightened under hers.
Lady Linwood, who had been waiting for him and had set this scene up in part by going out at this hour at all, leaned back into the cushions of the barouche and made room for him at the side.
“Lady Eversley. Lady Cassandra. Lady Linwood. Lady Carrow. Miss Carrow.”
He had taken his hat off as he came up. The dark bay he had ridden was steady against the rail, and Cole was at the level of the barouche window without dismounting, and he did not look at Cassandra at all.
His steel-blue eyes had sought out Melody before the bay had quite stopped, and they stayed there.
“Miss Carrow.”
“Your Grace.”
“Do you wish me to answer her, or do you wish me to stand here while you do?”
He had said it low, against the side of the barouche where Lady Eversley could not hear and the passing curricles could not.
The gloved hand he had set on the rim of the door he set there in such a way that the gesture could be taken, by anyone watching from a yard off, as the bow of a duke greeting a friend.
She did not look at him.
“Stand there.”
“Yes.”
He did not move closer or lean in. His weight went a degree back in the saddle, and he made of himself a thing that was simply present at her shoulder, as a wall is present, as a tree at the end of a lane is present, and he let her finish.
Cassandra had felt the shift in the wind even before Cole spoke. Her smile held its place, though the smile she had brought out of the barouche had been built for an audience that did not include him.
“Your Grace. We were only enjoying a small conversation with Miss Carrow.”
“I gathered. Lady Carrow, I hope I find you well. Lady Linwood.”
“You find us very well, Your Grace,” Lady Linwood said. “We were discussing the breeding of duchesses. Miss Carrow had just observed that the breeding is for the dogs.”
“I had not heard that one. I shall remember it.”
“Your Grace will forgive a country phrase,” Cassandra said.
“There is nothing to forgive. I have not the country, Lady Cassandra. I have only the phrase.”
Lady Eversley, who had been long in the world and was not yet ready to lose, set her hand on her daughter’s arm and stopped her speaking. “We shall not keep you, Lady Linwood. The Berkeley will be impossible if we delay. Miss Carrow. Your Grace. Good afternoon.”
The Eversley coachman, who had been waiting for the small movement of her glove, set the horses on.
The barouche pulled away with a tidy clean noise of harness, and Cassandra did not look back, which was a discipline.
Lady Beresford, having seen what she wanted to see, set her own carriage moving and was out of the Row in under a minute.
Cole stayed at the side of the barouche.
“I shall not ride beside you, Miss Carrow. I have been seen here long enough.”
“You have.”
“I should like to call this afternoon. Lady Carrow, if I may. I have a matter I had hoped to put to your daughter, and I should prefer to put it in your drawing room rather than in your park.”
Lady Carrow’s voice was very small and very polite. “Of course, Your Grace. We shall be at home from three.”
“I shall come at three.” He inclined his head a fraction further, as a man does when his civility is for a woman who has been frightened. Then he straightened, and his eyes touched Melody’s for less than a second. “Miss Carrow.”
“Your Grace.”
He set the horse at a walk down the Row and was gone in a few strides through the bright thinning crowd.
Melody did not watch him go. She set her gloved hand against the seam of the other glove under her cloak and pressed her thumb hard into it and counted, as she had been counting for many years, until the ringing under her ribs had subsided to a level she could manage.
The count went to eleven before she stopped. She had once needed only seven.
“Well,” Lady Linwood said. “That was educational.”
“Lady Linwood.”
“I shall not say more, Miss Carrow. I have a rule about not making a triumph of a woman who has been ambushed. I shall say only that you should not be ambushed alone again this season. I have been at it since before you were born and I find I am not yet finished with it. I shall arrange the next four engagements myself, with my own card.”
“You are very kind.”
“I am not kind. I am very entertained, which is a more durable thing.” Lady Linwood turned to the coachman. “Home, Wilkes. By the long way. I should like to give Miss Carrow some time to recover her cheeks before her mother undertakes to put new ones on her.”
The barouche moved off into the slow stream towards the gate.
Lady Carrow’s hand was trembling under hers, and Melody held it more firmly without saying anything, because she had not the strength, in the immediate aftermath of one ambush, to be the comfort of another woman.
They went down the Row in silence, the long way as Lady Linwood had directed, and the cold settled into the silence the way cold settles after a fire has done its work.
By the time they reached Brook Street the sky was the dull silver of an afternoon that meant to be over by four, and the lamps in the lower windows of the Linwood house had already been lit.
***
It was twelve minutes past three when the knocker sounded.