Chapter 19 #2
Melody had been counting, against herself, the minutes between the half hour and the moment he arrived.
She had told herself she would not count and had counted anyway.
The dress had been changed, because the cloak had picked up dust off the Row and the dress under it had picked up some of the cloak’s reaction to it.
The second blue was the one she wore. Her cream pelisse she had taken off and not put on its replacement, and she had chosen the small back drawing room because the front one had too many windows on Brook Street and she did not wish, today, to be in a room where she could be seen arriving in it.
Lady Carrow was with her. So was Lady Linwood, with her sewing, which was a kindness Melody had not asked for and was grateful for.
Sir Marcus had gone out at his daughter’s polite request, taking his hat and his hurt feelings together, and would be gone for an hour, which was the most Melody had felt able to ask of him.
Smithson came in at the half-open door at twelve minutes past three exactly, with the announcement already half made.
“His Grace the Duke of Greenstone.”
“Show him in, Smithson, please.”
Cole came in with a flat leather case under his arm, the case Melody had not seen before and did not need to see twice to identify. He set it on the low table by the door before he came across the room, which was the first proper thing he had done in any room since his return.
“Lady Linwood. Lady Carrow. Miss Carrow.”
“Your Grace. Please sit.”
He sat in the chair Lady Carrow indicated, the one across the small Pembroke from Melody, and Lady Linwood went on with her sewing in the window seat with the placid attention of one who had been chaperoning tender attachments since George the Third had a young face.
Lady Carrow put her hands in her lap. The clock on the mantel coughed and did not strike the quarter.
“Miss Carrow. I shall not waste your afternoon. I have come because I have a thing I should rather put in your hand than into a letter, and a thing I should rather say to you than write.”
“Yes.”
“Mr Crewe found the letters.”
Lady Carrow’s needle paused in mid-air. Lady Linwood’s did not, which was its own discipline.
“All of them, Your Grace?”
“Twenty-six full letters and twelve drafts that were never sent. They went, between the spring of ’11 and the summer of ’15, to a number of places that were not Carrow House.
Some were returned. Some were held at Greenstone House under headings that did not require immediate attention.
A few went to a Bath direction that was no longer yours.
None reached you. That is the substance of it. ”
She had set both hands on the arms of her chair when he began the sentence, and they had stayed there for the length of it, and she did not move them now.
“I see.”
“I do not bring them to you to prove anything. I am very aware that proof of a thing does not undo the years of the thing’s absence.
I am aware that putting paper into your hand at three on a Wednesday in November does not restore the four Christmases or the three summers or the day in April of ’14 when you would have wished to know that I had written from the cold.
I am aware that the writing did not reach you, and that for a piece of paper, the only thing that matters is whether it reached the hand it was sent to.
Mine did not. I came to tell you so. I came to ask whether you wished to see them. ”
Lady Carrow’s needle had stopped entirely, and Lady Linwood’s had not, which was the second small discipline she had practised in the hour.
“Your Grace,” Melody said.
“Miss Carrow.”
“Do you understand what is cruel about this?”
“Tell me. I shall not defend myself against it.”
“You have given me back the man I held close to my heart after teaching me how to survive without him.”
The room was very quiet. Lady Linwood’s needle went in and came out and went in and came out and did not, in the next ten seconds, look up, which was a kindness Melody would remember. Lady Carrow was looking at her own hands.
Cole did not answer at once.
“Yes,” he said. “I understand it.”
“You did not know you would do that.”
“No. But I have done it. The not knowing is mine. The doing is mine also. I shall not stand between them and ask you to choose which I am to be held to.”
“That is very fine of you, Your Grace.”
“It is not fine. It is the least clean version of the apology I have for you. There are no clean versions. I have only the ones that are true.”
She put her hand over her mouth for a moment and then took it down, because the gesture was a luxury and she had a sentence to finish.
“Why now? Why not in September? Why not in October? Why not in the parish room or the lane or the garden or the dinner or the conservatory? Why have you waited until I am in town in a borrowed gown with the Eversleys still on the back of my neck to put twenty-six letters in front of me?”
“Because Mr Crewe found them this morning, Miss Carrow. I did not have them until this morning. I should have had them in September. I should have torn the house apart for them on the day I came home. I did not. I assumed the post had been the post and that it would be enough to begin again at the present. I was wrong on both counts, and I have spent the eight weeks since being shown that I was wrong, and this morning I was shown the last of it.”
“Your mother,” Melody said.
“Yes.”
“I would not ask, Your Grace. I have not asked.”
“You have not asked. I shall tell you anyway. The household did the work. She did not need to do it directly. She had only to fail to be troubled by it. There is a written line in this case, in her hand, attesting to the existence of the letters and the failure of their delivery and her regret at the consequence. I did not ask for an apology. I asked for an acknowledgment. She has given the second. I have not asked her for the first, and I shall not.”
“You have a line,” she repeated. “From her.”
“In this case,” she repeated.
“Yes.”
“Then I should like to see the letters, Your Grace. And the line.”
He rose, and did not approach her. The low table by the door was where he had set the case, and he went back to it, took it up, and brought it across the room, and set it on the Pembroke between them.
The case stayed closed under his hand, and nothing in his gesture or his look suggested that the case was now in any sense his to direct.
“They are yours. Read them in whatever order you please. Burn what you wish to burn. Keep what you wish to keep. I shall not ask whether you have read them. I shall not ask whether you have answered them. If you wish to speak to me of any of it, you may send for me at Greenstone House. If you do not wish to speak to me of any of it, I shall not interpret the silence.”
“You will not press me for an answer,” she said.
“No, Miss Carrow. I have already pressed you, by writing the letters in the first place and being unable to make them arrive. I shall not press you again.”
“That is a fine sentence too.”
“I have spent eight weeks rehearsing it. I find it does not come out as well as I had hoped.”
That undid her, very slightly. She put her hand to her eyes and brought it down again and was steady by the time the hand reached the arm of the chair.
“Your Grace. I shall read them.”
“Thank you.”
“You may go.”
“Yes.”
He bowed to her, and to her mother, and to Lady Linwood in the window seat.
Lady Linwood looked up from her work at last and gave him a small grave inclination of the head, the only thing she had said to him in the whole hour, and worth more than most of what had been said to him in town.
Then he was out of the room, and Smithson was seeing him to the door, and the door closed, and the carriage did not at once move off in the street outside, which Melody noticed without quite understanding why she had noticed it.
Then it did move, and the sound went down Brook Street and was gone in the general sound of the late afternoon.
The case sat on the Pembroke between them.
“My dear,” Lady Carrow said, very gently. “Shall I leave you with it?”
“No, Mama. Not yet. I shall not open it yet. I shall sit in the chair I am sitting in and I shall keep the case where it is until I have stopped shaking, and then I shall take it upstairs.”
“You are not shaking.”
“I am very nearly shaking. I have not, in many years, missed the difference.”
Lady Linwood set down her sewing. “I shall ring for tea, Lady Carrow. We shall have it in this room. Miss Carrow will not, I imagine, drink any of it. The having of it on the table will give her something to look at besides the case, which is the immediate office a tea tray is required to perform.”
“You are very kind, Lady Linwood.”
“I am not kind. I am very useful, which is the only reason to be two and sixty.”
She rang for tea, and the tray came in a few minutes, and they sat in the small back drawing room as the afternoon went grey at the windows and a lamplighter went down the area steps next door.
The case stayed where Cole had put it on the Pembroke, and Melody did not take her hand off the seam of her glove for the next forty minutes.
When at last she stood to go upstairs with the case under her arm, she found that her hand had pressed the glove seam through.
The inside of her thumb, where she had not let herself look at it for the better part of a year, was bleeding very slightly, in the small clean way a thing bleeds that has been worn down by an old habit it has not been able to break.
She went up to her bedroom with the case in both hands, and the second blue caught against the rail of the stair, and she did not stop to free it.