Chapter 24 #2
Cassandra had been told, very plainly, by her mother that the morning was to clarify the matter of the ball.
She came in expecting the room she had been promised, which was the room in which the Duke of Greenstone, with his mother and her parents present, would set down some form of the apology a man of his rank was permitted to set down without losing the room.
She had dressed for the room. Her grandmother’s emeralds had been left off at this hour in favour of a small string of pearls, and the gown was a confiding lavender, the dress one wears to call on a near connection.
She saw, in the half-second of the room she had been promised, Lady Carrow seated, and Sir Marcus standing, and Melody at the window with her gloves still off, and an old blue book set on the small table at the window with the gold on its spine.
It cost her, Cole observed without satisfaction, very little to keep the face.
She was extremely well trained. The small adjustment of the face, the half-degree of the smile, took less than a second.
She inclined her head to Cole, then to the Dowager, then to Lady Carrow with the politeness that did not entirely conceal that she had not, until ten minutes earlier, expected Lady Carrow to be in the room.
“Your Grace. Madam.”
“Lady Cassandra.”
“Lord Eversley. Lady Eversley. You will forgive me for receiving you in the morning room. The drawing room has not been opened. Madam, you will, please, take the chair by the fire. Lady Eversley, the other. Lord Eversley, you will permit me to leave you standing, because what I am about to do should be done standing also. Sir Marcus. Lady Carrow. Miss Carrow.”
He had said it in the voice he had been taught at the Eton entrance ten minutes after his eleventh birthday, the voice of a younger son delivering a sentence in front of his elders, which had, in the course of four years and a title, become also the voice in which he addressed a regiment.
The room sat down at the address. He did not sit with them.
He stood in the middle of the room with his hands at his sides.
The inscribed book sat on the table at the window with the morning correspondence beside it, and Melody, who had not yet taken the chair she had been refusing for an hour, stood near the table with her hand resting an inch from the book’s spine.
“I shall not waste anyone’s morning. I intend to enter into matrimony with Miss Melody Carrow, if she will have me.”
The room, which had been very quiet, went quieter.
“She has not yet accepted me. I have not, since the night of the Ridges’ ball, called upon her.
She came to me this morning. I have not, in the conversation that has been had in the half hour since, pressed her to give me her answer.
I am not now pressing her. I shall not press her in front of you.
I am announcing my intention because the intention is mine, and because to leave the announcement of it to a season of drawing rooms would be to repeat in this room the failure I committed in three drawing rooms a year.
I have already committed it. I shall not, now I see it, commit it twice. Miss Carrow.”
“Your Grace.”
“You will give the room your answer, in your own time, or you will give it to me alone after these very good people have gone away. The choice is yours. I shall stand here for as long as it takes you to decide which one.”
She looked at the room. Her eyes went to the chair where her mother sat calmly near her father, both waiting patiently.
“I shall give it to the room, Your Grace, because you have given it to the room. The answer is yes.”
The room held its breath for the half-second and then Lady Carrow gave a small sound, which she at once put her hand over her mouth.
Lady Eversley gave nothing, which was a discipline she had practised for thirty years.
Sir Marcus inclined his head once at Cole, which was the only thing Sir Marcus had wanted to do for two months and the only thing he had not been permitted to do until this hour.
Cassandra spoke into the held room.
“You will forgive me, Miss Carrow. Old attachments make such embarrassing public addresses.”
Cole did not answer for her. He had set the rule in the Park.
“Old attachments are only embarrassing when they are one-sided, Lady Cassandra. Mine, it seems, was merely delayed by the post.”
It went round the room without a movement in it. Lord Eversley, who had not, in seven years of matrimony to his wife, made a single decision in any drawing room, made one then. The bow he gave Cole was the bow of a man surrendering.
“Your Grace. We have come, my wife will agree, on a matter Lady Carrow’s daughter has more accurately answered than the rest of us were equipped to. We shall not, on this morning, take any more of your time. Cassandra.”
“Papa.”
“My dear.”
“Yes.”
She went without further word, with her mother’s hand at her elbow and her father at the door.
She did not look back. The discipline of it was, Cole noted again, considerable.
He had not, in his acquaintance with her, ever quite measured the cost of the discipline, and he understood, watching her depart that the cost had not been small, and he hoped, without expecting it, that she would be allowed, in some other drawing room than this one, to set the discipline down for an hour and rest.
The Eversleys went out without a further word from any of the three of them. The morning room had four people in it now besides himself, and the front door of Greenstone House closed on the Eversley carriage, and the Dowager rose from her chair.
She came across the room. The path she took did not go to her son. She came to Melody instead.
“Miss Carrow.”
“Your Grace.”
“You have surprised me.”
“I hope to make a habit of it, Your Grace.”
The Dowager inclined her head a quarter of an inch, which was the deepest inclination she had given any woman in any drawing room in twenty years. Then she went out, by way of the small library, leaving the morning room to the four of them.
Cole turned to Sir Marcus.
“Sir. I shall come to you this afternoon. I had wished to come this morning. I find I have run the matter the wrong way round, and I am asking your consent in the room after I have asked your daughter’s in the room. I am sorry for the order of it.”
“Your Grace.”
“I am asking it now.”
“I have not, in any month since September, refused you in my own head. I shall not begin in front of my daughter. You have it. You have had it. I had not been able to give it to you because she had not yet been able to take it. She has taken it. Take her, Your Grace, and be good to her, or I shall come and find you with the stick I have for that purpose. It is in the cupboard at Carrow House. It is old, but it is, I believe still sound.”
Cole did not laugh, because Sir Marcus had not laughed.
“Yes, sir.”
“Capital! My wife and I shall now go down the street, with Sarah, who has been very good. We shall send up word at twelve when we are at home. You will come to us at three, Your Grace, to make this proper.”
“At three, sir.”
Lady Carrow rose, and was led out by her husband, and Sarah, who had been standing in the hall with the shawl, fell in behind them. The morning room door closed behind the Carrows for the second time in a quarter of an hour.
The door did not quite close. The Dowager had taught the household, twenty years ago, that the morning room door was not to be shut all the way upon any party that left two persons in the room, and the household had not, in twenty years, neglected the instruction.