CHAPTER EIGHT #3
“It was one regardless, and a fair one.” He looked down the long garden, the cleared beds, the tied pears, the whole of it brought back by her hands from being nobody’s for a decade.
“Should you wish the lowlands to be examined, I shall see that it is done immediately. And if the garden wants anything, men or money or glass, you have only to tell Crewe. You did not need to set Coyne to keep it from me.”
The color rose in her face that the cold had not put there. “I did not bid him keep it from you. I asked no one’s leave, which is a different thing entirely, and I should do it again tomorrow.”
“I know. That is precisely why I am telling you that you never required leave to begin with.” He inclined his head. “Good afternoon, Duchess. Mind your hands against the frost. Chapped knuckles are a poor wage for lavender.”
“You sound almost as though you would mind the chapping.”
He considered it as though it were a serious question, which to his own surprise it was. “I would prefer the duchess of this house to keep whole hands. It is a small preference. You need not build anything upon it.”
“I shall build exactly as much upon it as it will bear, which by your own reckoning is nothing at all.”
“By my own reckoning,” he agreed, and very nearly smiled, but did not, and turned for the house.
He walked up the path and did not look round, because if he had looked round he would have wanted to say more, and he had already said a great deal more than was his habit.
***
Augusta found him in the library that evening with a book open that he was not reading.
“That is the Cowper.” She did not trouble to hide her satisfaction. “You told the child at her own tea table that you could not abide Cowper.”
“She left it on the library table. I picked it up.”
“You sent to town for your own copy, Pearce tells me, that you might dislike it more accurately.”
“A man may read a thing he has not read. It is not a confession.”
“At your age it is not improvement, Theodore. It is a symptom.” She sat without being invited.
“I have watched you ignore handsomer and better-born women than this one without learning the color of their eyes, and now you have by heart the girl’s reading, and the hour she rides, and which door she comes in by. What do you imagine you are about?”
“Being a careful husband to a young woman in unfamiliar country.”
“You were a careful husband to the idea of her in London. You did not send for her books in London.” Augusta leaned toward him over the fire.
“Say the true thing, once, to an old woman who will carry it to her grave with everything else of yours she is already carrying. It will cost you less than you fear.”
“There is nothing to say. She came to this matrimony grieving a man who did not deserve a moment of it, and she is settling, and she has begun to look at me as though I am a person and not a sentence handed down. That is the whole of what I want from it.”
“What man?”
He should have foreseen it, but had not. “It does not signify.”
“It signifies enough that you have a watcher’s letters on your desk that are not about drainage.
” Her eyes did not leave him. “I am old, Theodore, not blind. There is a name you are keeping from the girl and from me, and you are keeping it the way you keep everything, by deciding all alone that the keeping is kinder.”
“And if it is kinder?”
“Then one day you will decide a thing alone that is not kind in the least, and you will not know the difference until it is done.” She rose, unconvinced and too old to argue a man out of a thing he was gripping with both hands.
“Leave the name where it is. But hear this. The girl will forgive you a great deal in time. She will not forgive being managed, because she has been managed her whole life by men who name it affection, and she can smell it now at forty paces.” At the door she paused.
“She has more courage in her than you have allowed for, Theodore. I should hate for you to discover it too late to be of any use to her.”
When she had gone he poured a brandy and drank half of it and let his mind go, as it did most evenings now, to the lieutenant.
The man had not moved. His watcher in town reported Vance still in his quarters near Wrenford, his debts at their old level, his company no worse than before, and Theodore turned every harmless line of it over each night regardless, the September notes, the red coat at the Cresswell rout that had nearly put Ellen on the floor of the card room, the fact that she had not spoken the lieutenant’s name once since they came into the country.
He told himself the attention he paid the man was prudence, the proper vigilance of someone with a flank to guard, and that the girl would come to her senses in her own time, and that he could afford to wait.
He set the glass down half finished. He had a long practice at calling things by the names that let him sleep, and he was beginning, very faintly and far back where he did not have to look at it directly, to suspect that prudence was not the name of this one.