Chapter 23 #2
“He has, Your Grace. He chose me in a garden in the summer of 1810, and he has not since unchosen me, and you have spent four years undoing his choice on his behalf because you did not trust him to undo it himself when the title came to him. He had not undone it. He has not undone it. He has, on the contrary, very patiently and at his own cost made it visible to a county and a town that had been told otherwise. The choosing is finished. The acknowledging is what you and I are now in disagreement about, and the acknowledging is not your office to give or to withhold. It is mine.”
The Dowager did not answer at once. She put her hand on the back of the chair beside her, the small composed gesture of a woman who had been on her feet two minutes longer than her knee was accustomed to and was not going to mention it.
Across the morning room she looked at Melody with the face she had not, in this acquaintance, worn before.
“You have prepared this.”
“I have rehearsed it five mornings, Your Grace. I am sorry it sounds prepared. I have not, in four years, had the opportunity to prepare anything I might say to you, and I have not been able, in the rehearsing, to make the sentences sound less prepared without making them less true. I have preferred the truth to the polish. You will forgive me the trade.”
“Cole.”
He was standing in the doorway.
He had come in by the back of the hall, where the stair from his rooms gave on the morning room corridor, and he had been there long enough to hear her last sentence and one before it, and he was, Melody saw at the briefest glance, very pale.
“Madam. Miss Carrow.”
“Your Grace,” Melody said.
“You will leave us, madam.”
“Cole.”
“You will leave us. I have not asked you to leave this house. I have asked you to leave this room. The morning correspondence will keep until ten.”
The Dowager looked at her son, then at Melody. She put her hand off the back of the chair and crossed the room without speaking, and as she passed Melody at the door she paused.
“Miss Carrow.”
“Your Grace.”
“You did better than I had expected.”
“I had thought so, Your Grace.”
The Dowager went out into the corridor at a measured pace.
The door did not quite close behind her, which was a courtesy to propriety she had managed to leave in place even in defeat, and Melody and Cole were alone in the morning room with the door at half-open and the Dowager’s correspondence on the small table by the chair.
Cole did not come further into the room. He stood three paces from the doorway with his hands at his sides.
“Miss Carrow.”
“Your Grace.”
“You will sit.”
“I would rather not. Standing has been the discipline of the morning. I do not wish, just yet, to give it up.”
“Then I shall stand also,” he said.
“You need not,” she said.
“I need to.”
She put her hand into the front of her pelisse for a moment, looking for the seam of a glove that was not in her hand because she had left the gloves on the front hall table, and the hand came out empty and went back down at her side.
“I have a number of things to say to you, Your Grace. I have rehearsed them five mornings. I shall say them badly. You will permit me the badness, because if you ask me to say them well I shall not be able to say them at all.”
“Yes.”
“I feared, until last week, that you remembered me only when convenient. I feared that you mistook guilt for affection. I feared, until two evenings ago, that you would make a public gesture of me at the Ridges’ ball that would have used me as a piece.
I feared, with every walk down the corridor of this house and every word from your mother and every passing of the Eversleys’ carriage in Brook Street, that I would be made the jest of the ton twice.
I do not know how a woman survives that twice, Your Grace.
I had not, in the autumn, expected to survive it once. ”
“Miss Carrow.”
“I have not finished. The fifth fear is the worst. I feared, all the while, that I still held you close to my heart which was the worst humiliation of all, because the rest of the fears were of what other people might do to me, and the fifth one was of what I might do to myself. I have read your letters. I have read your note. I have danced the country set with you. I have not been able to stop my feelings for you, Your Grace, for any of it. I have given the question a full afternoon at home and a full evening at the ball, and a great many hours since. The not stopping is the fact, and I am very tired of carrying it alone.”
She lifted her chin half an inch, because to look down at the carpet at this moment would have been to lose the thread.
“Cole.”
He took half a step towards her and stopped, the way she had once seen him stop at the entrance of the conservatory in his mother’s London house, the way she had once seen him stop in the door of the parish room in the country.
“Melody.”
“Did you come home for me, or did you come home and remember me?”
He did not answer at once.
“That is the question I have spent eight weeks teaching myself to be ready for, and I find this morning I have not been ready for it long enough. I shall answer it. I shall answer it as well as I can. I cannot promise the answer will be the one you have come here for. I can promise that it will be true.”
“That is what I have come for.”
“Then ask me anything, Miss Carrow, and I will not protect myself with pride.”
The morning room was very quiet. The clock on the mantel had not struck the half.
In the hall outside, Sarah was waiting. Somewhere in the house the Dowager was sitting in another room with her morning correspondence in her lap.
On the table at the window the household letters lay where she had set them, and the door of the morning room stood at the four inches the Dowager had left it at.
Melody, who had walked six doors down a street she had refused to walk for three weeks, stood three paces from the man she had not, in over five years, stopped being devoted to, and the answer was what was now to come.
She did not say Cole a second time. She had said it once. The once had been enough.
She set both her hands very carefully on the back of the chair the Dowager had been holding a minute before, the way a woman sets her hands on a chair when she means to ask a question she cannot afford to ask without something to hold.
“Then I shall ask, Your Grace.”