CHAPTER SEVEN #2
“What is left of it?”
“That’s a longer tale than you’ll want at a gate, my lady.” The flush deepened, and the woman looked sorry she had said it.
“Then you shall tell me the longer tale another day, Mrs. Burton, for I mean to learn this country properly, and I shall need people who will give me the truth of it and not the version fit for a duchess.”
“You’ll get the truth up this lane, my lady, whether you’ve a use for it or no.”
“That is exactly the lane I have been looking for.” Ellen gathered the reins. “Good day to you. I shall come back when I have the time for the longer tale.”
She rode home along the river with the wind at her back, and arrived in the yard with color in her face that no amount of managing had put there, and Hibbert looked at her and the mare both and said only that he had thought as much, and would she ride again the following day.
***
The accounts she had to fight for, in the end, though the fight was quiet and conducted entirely over a ring of keys.
Mrs. Selby received her in the housekeeper’s room standing, which was its own small statement, a tall straight woman of sixty with a face that had refused softer expressions for so long they no longer occurred to it.
“Your Grace asked for the household books.” The keys hung at her waist and did not move. “I keep them very particular. They have not wanted a second hand on them these eleven years.”
“I do not doubt it. I have seen the house, and a house this well run does not run itself.” Ellen sat, since the woman would not, and folded her hands.
“I have not come to take the books from you, Mrs. Selby. I have come to read them, and to take the stillroom and the kitchen garden off your hands, which I am told have been a burden to you that was never yours to carry.”
“The stillroom is no burden.”
“Then it is the only neglected thing in this house that is not, and I have walked the whole of it, so I know what I am looking at.” She let that sit a moment.
“You have run Wrenfield with no mistress over you for eleven years and made it look as though there were three of you. I am not here to undo that. I am here to lift the one stone off you that you have not had hours for, and to learn the rest from the person who knows it best, which is yourself.”
The keys still did not move. But something behind the woman’s refused face was doing arithmetic of its own.
“Last quarter’s books are in the press,” Mrs. Selby said at last. “I will send them up before dinner, as Your Grace instructed Coyne. The stillroom keys are these two.” She unhooked them, and held them a moment, and gave them over.
“The large is the door. The small is the spirit cupboard, and I will thank Your Grace to keep it locked, for the maids.”
“I will keep it locked.” Ellen closed her hand round the keys. “Thank you, Mrs. Selby. We shall get on.”
“We shall see, Your Grace.” But it was said without frost, and at the door the woman added, almost grudging, “The late duchess kept the small key on a blue ribbon. There is one in the second drawer, if Your Grace cares for it.”
“I should like that very much.”
She measured the fortnight that followed not in days but in what changed under her hand, the cleared beds, the pears tied in straight, the bay’s leg gone cool in six days and the gutter running clean, Heather out every fine afternoon until the grooms stopped watching to see whether the duchess could ride.
By the time Augusta’s traveling carriage came up the beech drive there was a brown line of sun across the back of Ellen’s hand where the glove had gaped, and the small stillroom key hung on a blue ribbon at her wrist.
Augusta came down from the carriage in a damp pelisse and a hat that was both dignified and entirely ridiculous, and stopped where she stood. “Child, you have not been getting nearly enough sun.”
“My lady, I have been out of doors every day this fortnight.”
“Then it is doing you no good at all, and we shall have to find a better sort of sun.” She crossed the gravel and folded Ellen into a brief firm embrace and let her go before it could become a thing that needed managing.
“Well. You are upright and you are brown and you have not run mad. I had wagered against at least one of the three.”
It was the first time anyone had put their arms round Ellen since her father’s demise, and she had held on a half-second too long, and Augusta had felt it and said nothing.
“You seem quite out of frame today.”
“I sleep well enough.”
“That is not the same as sleeping, but we will let it lie.” Augusta drew off her gloves. “Where is my nephew?”
“In his study. Where he is most mornings, and most afternoons, and a good part of every evening.”
“Of course he is. Give me tea, and tell me everything, and I shall pretend not to be prying while I do it.”
They had tea in the parlor that caught the afternoon light, and Augusta asked her not one direct question, which was how Augusta got everything.
“The weather here is softer than London,” the old woman observed, to the window. “One sleeps better. I always did.” A silence, into which she added nothing at all, and stirred her tea, and let the quiet do the asking for her.
“I sleep well enough,” Ellen said.
“Of course you do.” Another silence, longer, comfortable as an old coat. Augusta seemed wholly occupied with her cup.
“The duke is kind to the staff,” Ellen heard herself say, into one of the old woman’s long comfortable silences.
“I did not expect that, and I watched for it to be false, and it is not false. He pays a pension to a coachman who can no longer hold the reins, and no one was meant to tell me, and the coachman told me himself, weeping.”
“Mm.” Augusta turned her cup a quarter-turn on its saucer. “And does he know that you know?”
“I should think not. He goes to a great deal of trouble to be thought worse than he is.”
“Yes.” The old woman said it with an odd satisfaction, as if a thing long suspected had been confirmed by an unbiased witness.
“He has done that since he was a boy. It is a tiresome habit and I have never found the cure for it.” She set the cup down.
“Drink your tea, child. You have the look of a girl who has been living on resolve, and resolve is poor fare. Tell me about the garden. I am told you have frightened the gardener half to death, which is the best news I have had of this house in eleven years.”
“The mare has a crooked blaze and a good heart, and the housekeeper is a terror and we have come to an understanding, and the country is not the punishment I took it for.” She turned her cup on its saucer. “And I do not understand my husband at all, and I am beginning to think I never shall.”
“No one does, my dear.” Augusta set down her own cup. “No one has been permitted to do so, these eleven years, and the reasons for that are his to give you and not mine. I will tell you only the one useful thing I know.”
“Which is?”
“That he is not a locked room because the room is empty.” She looked at Ellen steadily.
“There is a great deal behind that door, and it was worth the locking, once, and he was a boy when he turned the key and never learned the turning back. You will get nothing by hammering. You will get a great deal, in time, by persisting.”
“And if I have not the patience to persist against a locked door for the next forty years?”
“Then you will be like every other woman who entered into matrimony with a difficult man, and you will manage.” Augusta’s voice gentled.
“But I do not think you are like every other woman, or he would not have written a groom three pages about a kind eye. Persist, Ellen. It cost me sixty years to learn that word, and I am making you a present of it over cold tea.”
Ellen did not mention the kitchen garden, and Augusta did not ask what she was holding back, and the tea went quite cold between them while the light moved across the floor.
She had her confirmation at dinner.
Augusta needled him through the soup and the fish, about his solitude, about a sober coat, about a vote in the Lords she pronounced wrong-headed in a tone built to be argued with, and Theodore, who gave the rest of the world two words and an unreadable countenance, returned every serve of it dry.
“You will end your days alone in that great barn at Lockton,” Augusta told him, “talking to the portraits, and the portraits will pretend to be from home.”
“The portraits and I understand one another. They do not give me advice across a dinner table.”
“They would not dare. I am the only one left in England with the nerve, and I shall not last forever, and then where will you be.”
“Quieter,” he said, “and worse advised,” and there was something under it that was almost affection.
“You see?” Augusta turned to Ellen, delighted. “Almost a compete sentence. I have seen him last a whole dinner less words.”
The corner of his mouth moved, and his eyes warmed, and for the length of a breath the locked room stood open and Ellen saw plainly what was kept in it, which was nothing more terrible than ordinary fondness, freely given to a woman he trusted.
He possessed it. That was the sum of the discovery, and the realisation settled upon her heart like a sudden, chilling weight.
Augusta caught her at the foot of the stairs afterward, when Theodore had gone to his study.
“You saw it,” the old woman said quietly.
“I saw it.”
“Then you know it is not that the man has no warmth in him.”
“No.” Ellen put her hand on the cold rail. “I know exactly what it is. He has it, and he has decided where it goes, and he has looked at me and decided I am not the place.” She went up two steps and stopped. “Do you know, my lady, I think I should have found the empty room easier to bear.”