CHAPTER TEN
“Keep your purse close on a market day, Your Grace. Wrenford’s an honest town, but honest will empty a purse faster than thieving ever managed.”
Mrs. Selby said it with the grim satisfaction of a woman who had been emptying her own purse in this market for thirty years, and Ellen, walking beside her up the cobbled hill with the footman a pace behind, found that she was very nearly happy, which surprised her, since she had not had the sensation in long enough to be uncertain she recognised it.
It was the first time she had been off the estate in nearly on two months.
The morning was bright and cold and full of the ordinary racket of a country town, the stalls and the geese and a man crying eels, and nobody on the hill knew or cared that the woman in the good pelisse had been bought with her brother’s debts.
“They will stare,” Mrs. Selby had warned her in the carriage.
“Mind you don’t take it for the London sort.
London stares to find your fault. Wrenford stares to settle whether you’ve two eyes and a nose like the rest of us, and once it has settled the question it will sell you a fish and think no more about you. ”
And so it proved. A woman at the butter stall stared, decided, bobbed, and sold her nothing, since Ellen wanted no butter, and was perfectly friendly about it.
A child stared until its mother cuffed it.
The man crying eels offered His Grace’s lady a special price and then, on reflection, the ordinary one, which Mrs. Selby pronounced the highest compliment Wrenford had in its gift.
“You see,” she said, steering Ellen on by the elbow. “You are settled. Nobody will trouble to be cruel to you here. They have not the leisure for it, with the geese to sell.”
“We shall call on Mrs. Aldous first,” Ellen said, “before the silk. A rector’s wife made to wait grows opinions, and I have opinions enough aimed at me as it is.”
Mrs. Aldous proved round and warm and delighted, and pressed seedcake on them before they were fairly seated.
“I had said to the rector only Sunday, we shall never see the new duchess, she will be a London creature and find us all very dull.” She poured with a generous hand. “And here you are at my own table, and not London in the least. Tell me you mean to stay in the county and make an old woman happy.”
“I mean to stay, Mrs. Aldous. The county suits me far better than the town ever did.”
“Then you are wiser than your neighbors, for half of them cannot wait to be gone the moment the leaves turn.” She leaned in, lowering her voice to the pitch of confidence she plainly could not resist. “And you will have grander neighbors than you bargained for, I’m afraid.
You know Greaves Court lies just across the river from your own little place. ”
“My husband named the earl to me once. A political acquaintance, he called him.”
“Political.” Mrs. Aldous gave the word a small significant turn.
“I daresay. They do not speak, the earl and your duke, not these nine years and more, and nobody quite remembers the why of it, only that it was something in Parliament and that the earl has never forgiven it. He is not at all liked hereabouts; indeed, he is held in very poor regard, Your Grace, and I shall say no more than that in my own parlor except that he has been buying up half the river through London men these four years, farms and meadows and water-meadows, all through agents so a body can never quite lay a hand on him, and the families that sold are mostly sorry they did.” She straightened, suddenly prim.
“But I am indulging in mere tittle-tattle, “But I am indulging in mere tittle-tattle, and the rector says it is my one besetting sin, and I shall stop. Shall I have the pleasure of offering you another piece?”
Ellen took the cake. “And the families who sold. Are they about the parish still, or did they take their leave?”
“Some stayed, poorer. Some went. And one or two the earl’s men helped on their way, if you take my meaning, though I am sure I never said any such thing.
” Mrs. Aldous’s eyes were shrewd under all the round kindness.
“You have a particular look about you, Your Grace, when I speak of it. The look of a woman holding a question she means to keep.”
“I have a great many questions, Mrs. Aldous. I am only beginning to learn which ones the county will answer.”
“Ask me any of them, and I shall tell you which are safe to ask aloud and which you had best put only to your own hearth. It is the most useful thing a clergyman’s wife ever learns, and the slowest.”
“Then I shall ask you one, and you may decide which sort it is.” Ellen turned her cup. “The land down toward the river, below the Burton holding. It has changed hands, I am told, and not lately. Who holds it now?”
Mrs. Aldous’s round face did a small careful thing, a shutting and an opening, the look of a woman deciding how much daylight a question could safely bear.
“Now there is a hearth question, Your Grace, if ever I heard one. London men hold it. Names on a paper, and the names mean nothing, for I have asked, in my idle way, and so has my husband in his.” She lowered her voice without seeming to.
“But the parcels run all one direction, if a body troubles to walk them, and they all lie on the way to the same door, and it is not a door I shall name over good cake in my own parlor. I will only say it is a great door, and a cold one, and six miles north of yours.”
Ellen took the cake, and filed every word of it beside what Mr. Burton had told her of his lost forty acres and what she had set Crewe to discover, and said only that she found country gossip a great deal more instructive than the London kind.
She came away with a standing invitation and a cutting of late marjoram in damp paper, and went down the hill to the draper’s with the morning still bright on her and the puzzle of the river land turning quietly at the back of her mind.
The draper’s was halfway down the hill, and she stood at the window turning a bolt of grey-blue against her wrist, thinking it would make the gown she had been promising herself since the wedding money made such things possible, and in the dark of the window glass she saw, crossing the street behind her, a man in a red coat.
She turned without deciding to.
It was Vance.
He had not seen her. He stood laughing at something a brother officer had said, his head back, his coat brushed, exactly as he had stood in her own morning room with the whole afternoon before him, and her breath went somewhere she could not find it.
Then his glance came idly along the street and passed over her and snagged and came back, and in the half-second before he arranged his face she saw the truth of it, the surprise, and behind the surprise a quick cold reckoning, the face of a man handed a column of figures he had not expected to add.
Then it was smoothed away into a smile that reached his mouth and stopped there.
He crossed to her and bowed.
“Miss Middleton. What a remarkable surprise.” He caught himself, smooth as glass. “Forgive me. Your Grace.”
“Charles.” It came out too quickly and too gladly, and she heard it leave her mouth and could not call it back, and saw the small flick of his eyes that registered it and put it away for later. “I did not know your regiment was anywhere near.”
“Quartered just out of town for the autumn. We have the old barracks down by the mill.” He glanced past her shoulder, once, the first of several times she would count before the thing was done.
“I had heard the duke kept a place in the county. I did not look to find the duchess at a draper’s window. ”
“You have been near, then. Lately?”
“The better part of two months. We came up at Michaelmas.”
The better part of two months. The figure went into her like cold water down the back of the neck.
Two months quartered seven miles from her door, after a whole summer of silence, after the September notes that had begged her to wait, and he had not sent so much as a line nor ridden out nor done one single thing but laugh in a street with a brother officer until she happened to stand in his path at a shop window.
“Two months,” she said, and was proud of how level it came. “You have been a busy man, Lieutenant.”
“Soldiering is a wearisome pursuit, made up of a vast deal of trifling employments.” The practiced smile again, still without warmth, and again the glance past her shoulder. “And how do you find marital life, Your Grace? You are looking very well on it.”
“Well enough.”
“Only well enough?” He tilted his head, and something sharpened under the idleness, an attention that had not been there a moment before.
“They say your duke is a cold sort of man. Severe in the Lords, severe at home, by all accounts. I confess I have wondered how a creature as warm as you were would find such a household.”
She understood, all at once and very clearly, that he was asking her a question he meant to keep the answer to.
She did not know yet what for. She only knew that the warmth she had folded and unfolded all summer until it wore through had never once been turned on her the way his attention was turned now, which was the attention of a man taking an inventory.
“You should not believe everything that is said in the Lords, Lieutenant,” she said.
“My husband is a great deal kinder than his reputation, and a great deal more watchful, and I have found both qualities a comfort.” It was truer than she had meant it to be, and she heard the truth of it surprise her own ear.
“Watchful.” Vance gave the word the same small turn Mrs. Aldous had given political. “He keeps you close, then. Is he much in the country, your duke, or does the Lords claim the better part of him?”
“He is where his business takes him.”
“And does his business take him often from home? A man with his interests must be a great deal in town through the season.”
“I do not keep his diary, Lieutenant.” She said it lightly enough, but a small cold instinct had woken in her that she did not pause to name. “Why should his comings and goings interest you?”
“Idle curiosity, Your Grace. The county is dull, and a great man’s movements are the nearest thing we have to news.
” He smiled, and the smile did not warm, and his eyes went past her shoulder a final time, to a point across the street she did not turn to find.
“I must not keep you from your silk, nor from your good woman there, who is glaring at me most respectably. I hope I may see you again, Your Grace. The county is a small one.”
“So I am told,” Ellen said, and did not add that she hoped so, because she found, with a small clean shock, that she no longer knew whether she did.
He walked away up the hill to rejoin the brother officer, and did not once look back, and she watched the red of him go until Mrs. Selby’s hand came to rest on her elbow, light and steadying and without a word in it.
She went back into the draper’s and bought three yards of a green silk she did not want and would never make up, because the grey-blue was at the window and the window faced the street and she could not stand at it another moment.
***
She rode Heather hard that afternoon, up the south ride and along the river and home, and brought the mare into the yard dark with sweat and blowing.
Hibbert took the reins, ran a hand down the wet chestnut neck, and looked at Ellen rather than at the horse.
“You’ve warmed her well, Your Grace.”
“I am sorry. I rode her harder than I ought.”
“She’ll take no harm of one hard afternoon.
It isn’t the mare I’m minding.” He loosened the girth without hurry.
“A horse will carry your trouble a mile or two for you, my lady, and gladly. But she can’t carry it home and set it down.
That part stays yours, and galloping only puts off the doing of it. ”
“You are very philosophical, for a groom.”
“Forty years behind horses, my lady. A man learns to read what’s sat on the saddle as well as what’s in it.” He turned the mare toward the cooling walk. “Go in and set it down, Your Grace, whatever it is. It will be lighter by morning or it will not, but it will never be lighter out here.”
The riding had not helped, which she had known it would not and had done anyway, and Hibbert had read the whole of it from the ground, which she had not bargained for.
At dinner the duke looked at her once.
It was a long look, level and complete, the look of a man reading a page he already half knew, and she felt it find the color the ride had left and the something underneath the color, and then he turned to his plate and did not look at her again for the whole of the meal, and the determination not to look was vastly more conspicuous than the original glance had been.
Augusta carried the dinner alone, glanced between them once, and for the first time in Ellen’s memory asked nothing at all.
She came to Ellen’s door before bed, which she did not often do, and stood in the passage with her candle and did not come in.
“Sleep if you can, child,” she said, and her face for once was unarmed. “And if you cannot, do not lie there building a case against yourself in the dark. You will lose it. We always lose, against ourselves, at that hour.”
Then she went off down the passage to her own room, and Ellen stood a moment in her doorway, oddly steadied and oddly seen, and then went in and closed the door and proceeded to do precisely the thing she had been warned against.
She lay awake that night and told herself she had done nothing wrong.
It had been a chance meeting on a public street with her own housekeeper three feet off.
She had been civil and nothing more. There was nothing in it to carry to anyone, nothing to confess, and nothing that any wife alive might not have done.
She told herself this, and told herself again, and somewhere in the course of its third repetition, she understood that a woman who had truly done nothing did not lie in the dark rehearsing her own innocence, and that the rehearsal was itself the confession, and she turned her face to the wall and did not sleep.