CHAPTER FOUR
A fortnight wedded, and Theodore had learned the exact sound of his wife avoiding him.
It was a quiet sound, which was the trouble with it.
A door easing shut a beat before he passed it.
A step on the stair that stopped, reconsidered, and went back up.
She had a gift for being just leaving whatever room he entered, managed so smoothly that a less attentive man would have called it coincidence, and he had spent his life being the most attentive man in any room he stood in, and it had never once brought him less joy than it did now.
He took his breakfast at his desk, as he always had, and told himself it was habit and not avoidance of his own.
Through the half-open door of the morning room he could see the corner of the table where she sat, a single place laid, the footman by the sideboard with nothing to do but watch a duchess move food about a plate.
She ate almost nothing. He had the reports of it without asking, in the careful way the staff had of telling him things they thought he ought to know, and he did not act on them, because every action he could think of would require him to walk into that room and sit down across from her, and he had seen what his sitting down did to her face.
That was the part he could not get past. The face.
He had entered into matrimony with a woman who cast her gaze to the floor when he came into a room.
She did it without seeming to know she did it, her eyes going down and to the side, her whole self-drawing in by some fraction as though to take up less of the air he might want.
The first time, on the morning after the wedding, he had thought it grief, and granted it.
By the end of the week he understood it for what it was, which was fear, the particular braced civility of a creature that has been handed from one owner to another and is waiting to learn the temper of the new one.
She recoiled from his courtesy as though courtesy were a thing that came with a bill attached.
He met her twice that week in the ordinary traffic of the house, and made a poor business of both.
The first was in the hall, where he was drawing on his gloves and she came down with a shawl, and he found he had nothing to say to her that was not either a fabrication or too true to be uttered before a footman.
He inclined his head. He told her he hoped the house was comfortable, that she had only to ask the housekeeper for anything wanting, and he heard the words leave him with their backs already turned, the polite nothings a man offers a guest he would rather not detain.
He saw them land. He saw her take the shawl a little closer about her, and arrange her face into the smooth attending blankness she kept for him, and he went out into the square with the door shut behind him and was angry the length of two streets without being able to name a single person to be angry at but himself.
The second time she did not know he saw her.
He was in the passage to his study and she was on the landing above, and for the space of a held breath she looked at him, openly, the guard down because she believed herself unobserved, and what was in her face was not fear and not blankness but a kind of grave careful weighing, as though he were a sum she had been set and could not make come right.
Then a board gave under his boot and her eyes came up and the shutter came down with them, and she withdrew, and he went into his study and shut his own door and sat for some time over a letter he did not read.
***
The door between their rooms had not been opened since the wedding night.
It stood in the panelled wall, and the handle answered as readily to her side as to his, and every night it remained closed, and he had decided, with the cold completeness he brought to all his decisions, that he would not be the one to open it.
He had bought her, plain and simple; no amount of polite fiction could alter the truth of the transaction.
He could at least decline to collect, could leave her the one square foot of choosing in a life that had been spent for her over a card table by a brother who should have been horsewhipped for it.
He told himself this was decency. He suspected, on the worse nights, that it was cowardice wearing decency’s coat, and that the difference between the two was the one sum he had never been able to do.
So when Augusta arrived to dine, and the table was laid for three for the first time since the wedding, he took his place at the head of it with the grim sense of a man who had agreed to be examined and the certainty that he would be found wanting, and watched his wife come in with her face already arranged, and prepared to say as little as the evening would let him.
Then the soup came, and his aunt looked down the length of the table, and the evening began.
“You are not eating, child. We may be a cold family, but we have never been a thin one. It alarms the servants.”
Lady Augusta said it down the length of the table without troubling to lower her fork, and Ellen, who had been moving a piece of turbot from one side of her plate to the other for several minutes without committing it anywhere, looked up and ate a forkful of it to be obliging.
“There.” Augusta turned across the table. “Theodore. Your wife is being managed by an old woman at her own dinner, and you sit there like a portrait of yourself. Have you nothing to add?”
“You manage everyone, aunt. I gave up objecting before I was breeched.”
“He did not give it up. He never began. He was an agreeable infant and an impossible boy, and somewhere between the two he decided speech was a tax and he would pay as little of it as the law allowed.” Augusta came back to Ellen, and her voice dropped off its performance into something nearer kindness.
“You kept a house before this one. On a great deal less, I am told. What does a young woman do, when there is not much?”
Ellen set down her fork. It was the first question the house had put to her that wanted a true answer, and Theodore, who had been attending to his plate, found himself attending to her instead.
“You learn what a thing costs, my lady. Not the price of it. The cost. A fire costs coal, and coal costs the laundress if you are short that quarter, so you let the fire go out and put on another shawl and do the accounts in gloves. After a while you can look at a room and see where the money has stopped going. The varnish. The blacking on the railings. The flowers that ought to have been changed and were not.”
“Most young women of your acquaintance could not tell you the cost of their own gloves.”
“Most young women of my acquaintance have stopped being my acquaintance.” She said it without any bid for pity and reached for her water.
Augusta laughed, a short genuine bark. “I begin to think Theodore has done one sensible thing in his life and walked into it backward, which is the only way he was ever going to manage it.” She moved on, the way she did, through the spring’s matrimonies, who had taken whom, a stream of names that asked nothing of the table but a murmur.
Ellen gave the murmurs. Theodore gave fewer.
“And the brother got his colors in the summer and is gone for a soldier somewhere unpleasant, the way the spare ones do. A pretty creature, to be sure. But the whole regiment is a collection of dandyish ornaments. The uniform exists for nothing else but their own vanity.”
Ellen’s hand stilled on the stem of her glass.
The glass did not so much as ring against the cloth.
Her hand simply stopped where it was for the length of a breath, then went on and lifted the glass to her mouth as though the journey had never been interrupted.
Her face remained an impenetrable mask, revealing nothing and yet, it was precisely this perfect composure that betrayed her.
Theodore had watched men school their faces at the card table over exactly that much nothing, which was how he knew it was never nothing.
He set the observation beside the others and did not let his eyes rest on her long enough to be felt.
The ladies withdrew not long after, which in a house of two ladies meant Augusta steering Ellen off to be talked at kindly until she could decently go up. Theodore took a glass he did not want into the library and was halfway down it when the door opened without a knock.
“I have sent your wife to bed,” Augusta said.
“She was asleep on her feet and too well-bred to confess it.” She shut the door and came to the fire and sat, uninvited, in the chair across from his.
“Sit down. I am going to say a thing you will dislike, and you are going to hear it out, because I am old and I am your aunt and I have earned the saying.”
He sat. “Say it.”
“You have been wedded a fortnight.”
“I am fully acquainted with the date appointed for my nuptials.”
“Are you acquainted with the fact that your wife believes you cannot bear the sight of her?”
“She believes a great many things that are not so.”
“Then tell her which.” Augusta waited. “No. You will not, because telling wants speaking, and you ration speech the way a miser rations candle-ends.” She set her hands in her lap.
“You sleep on one side of a wall and she on the other, and the door between is never once opened, and a girl of twenty does not read a shut door as delicacy, Theodore. She reads it as a sentence handed down.”
“I will not go to a woman who looks at the floor when I come into a room.” He said it evenly, and it was the most he had said at one time all day.
“I did not pay eight thousand four hundred pounds for the privilege of frightening her in her own bed. The door is not locked. The handle answers to her side as readily as to mine. When she wishes it opened she may open it, and until then it stays as it is, and the choosing is hers. I have given her almost nothing in this matrimony that she would have chosen. I mean to leave her that one thing to choose.”
Augusta studied him for a long moment over the fire.
“That is either the most decent sentence I have ever heard out of you,” she said at last, “or the most cowardly, and I cannot for my life tell which, and I have begun to suspect that neither can you.” She lifted a hand before he could answer.
“Hear the rest. She cannot read your silences. No one can. You have gone through your whole life trusting that restraint speaks on your behalf, and it does not speak, Theodore, it sits there saying nothing, and people put their worst fear into the nothing. Her worst fear is that she has been bought and set on a shelf. You may be the gentlest keeper in England. She has no earthly way of knowing she is not in a cage.”
He turned the glass a quarter-turn on the table and did not drink from it. “And what would you have me do.”
“Something she can see.” Augusta rose, settling her shawl.
“You are clever enough to find a way that costs you nothing. Costing you nothing is the only generosity you have ever permitted yourself.” She crossed to the door, and there she paused.
“Persist with her. She is worth the persisting, which is more than I will say for most of what you have spent your money on.” Then she was gone, and the fire murmured in the grate.
Theodore sat with the warning lying on the rug between his feet where she had dropped it.
***
In the morning he had violets sent up to her sitting room.
The house was never without flowers now, by his standing order, but those were the housekeeper’s hothouse roses, and these he had carefully chosen himself from a girl with a basket at the corner of the square, a small tight bunch gone soft at the edges, and he gave them to a footman with no word as to whom they came from.
Augusta had told him to do something the girl could see.
He had committed an act open to her view, yet ensured she could not discern his true character within it; the contradiction did not escape him, nor did it alter his conduct, which spoke a truth regarding his own nature that he scarce cared to have revealed to him before breakfast.
Four days later he crossed her empty sitting room while she dressed in the next room with the door ajar.
A plain calf-bound book lay open on the table by the window where the ribbon marker held it, and pressed flat between the two pages, their color already going from purple toward the brown that pressed flowers go, were the violets.
She had not thrown them out. She had taken them apart, head from stem, and laid the small flowers in a row down the gutter of the book and shut the weight of the pages on them to keep them.
He stood over the book and did not touch it, and did not let himself decide whose hand she imagined had sent them, because there was no honest answer to be had from a row of withered flowers and the line of a girl’s neck through a half-open door.
He closed the book gently, the marker back where it had been, and left the room before she could come out and find him there, charting the one territory she had meant to keep forever hidden from his view.