Epilogue #2
The boards were the dark blue she had carried in her muff and across six doors of Brook Street.
The gold on the spine had not faded. She opened it to the front, which she had not opened to the front since the morning of the wedding breakfast, and she looked at the inscription in his hand at five and twenty.
Until I return with the right to ask properly. —C.A.
She did not, this morning, cry. She had been told twice already at the breakfast that she looked born to the title, and she would not, in the third quarter of the morning, undo the work by weeping at a book in an empty library.
The crying she would do later, in the small private rooms upstairs, by herself, into the cushion the housekeeper had been told to leave on the chair.
She set the book down on the table beside the case.
She heard the door behind her.
“Reading old evidence against me?”
“Old courtship, Your Grace. There is a difference.”
“I can improve upon it,” he said.
“Can you?”
“I have the advantage of being present.”
He came across the library without hurry.
The white cravat he had been wearing for the church and the breakfast he had taken off, and he had not yet put on whatever he meant to wear for the afternoon.
The open collar of the linen at his throat made of him a man younger than the man who had stood at the altar at ten, the man she had been told twice this morning that she had begun to look born to.
He stopped a yard from her. He had not, since the November of the morning room, come closer than a yard without asking.
“You have escaped them.”
“I have escaped them for ten minutes. They have not yet missed me. They will, in five minutes more.”
“Then we shall not waste the five minutes.”
“No.”
“What were you reading?” he asked.
“The inscription.”
“Ah,” he said.
“It was answered three months ago, Your Grace. I had not yet read the answer into the page. I think I should, this morning, like to read it in.”
“You shall not write in the book.”
“I shall not write in the book, no. The writing is yours. I shall only read.”
She read it under her breath, the way a woman reads a thing she has known by heart for six years to make sure the words are still the same. Until I return with the right to ask properly. —C.A. They were the same. They had a future to them, now, that they had not had on the day they were written.
“You sent me yellow roses, in October,” she said.
“I did.”
“I told my mother they were ridiculous.”
“You shall have told her many things in October you have since revised.”
“I have. The roses I have not, on consideration, revised. They were ridiculous. They were also honest. I have spent the winter in the corner of the small drawing room at Carrow House revising my opinion of the difference between the two. I have not yet settled it. I shall settle it in time.”
“And the lemon ice,” he said.
“I shall not eat lemon ice, Your Grace, in any year of my life I have remaining. I shall accept that one piece of the past unaltered. The lemon ice will not be improved by reconciliation. It shall remain a small concentrated symbol of everything that was unkind in the autumn of ’15, and shall be excluded by formal arrangement from any plate in this house. ”
“Mrs Holt has been told,” he said.
“Has she.”
“She has been told since February. She received the instruction with the gravity she has been receiving instructions in this house for thirty years, and she has not, on the matter of the lemon ice, required any further word from me.”
“You are kind to my aversions.”
“I am attempting to be.”
“There is a thing I found in February,” she said, “when I had the week here to set the rooms to my own hand. A line of old accounts in your steward’s book, settled during the war in a name that belonged to no one.
A Mr Marsh. A butcher in Bawley. A draper at Norton.
The apothecary the winter my mother had the influenza. ”
He did not look away from her, which she gave him the credit of noticing.
“You found it sooner than Hewitt supposed anyone would.”
“Hewitt keeps a beautiful book. It is the only kind of reading my father never could abide and I have always cherished. You paid our tradesmen behind us, Cole. For three winters. While you were in Spain and I was going down early to a post that held nothing of you.”
“I did. I told Hewitt I would not pay another shilling of yours without your knowing of it, the autumn I came home, because I had begun to understand by then what the doing of it behind your back might look like once you saw it. I had meant to tell you. I found I kept choosing the hour badly, and then there were larger hours, and the matter waited. I am telling you now because you have asked, and because you have a right to be angry at having been managed in a thing you were never consulted on.”
She turned the inscribed book a quarter-inch on the table, the way she turned a ledger to catch the light, and was quiet long enough that he let the quiet stand.