CHAPTER NINETEEN #2
She had written him a letter telling him he might one day be written to as a person and not a creditor.
She understood, watching him keep his careful distance up there in the cheap gallery, that he had read it, and understood it, and was showing her, in the only language available across a crowded theater, that he meant to try.
A sudden tightening arose in her throat, which she compelled herself instantly to master.
“Your brother is in the gallery,” Theodore said, very quietly, beside her.
He had followed her glass. “I had my man keep him in view, and I will tell you the whole of what that means later, when you are ready to be angry at me about it, which you have every right to be. For tonight I will only tell you that he came alone, and sober, and bought the cheapest seat in the house to hear Mozart, which is not the act of the man who sat in your morning room.”
“You are managing me again. You say this only to soften my disposition toward you.”
“I am telling you a true thing because you are looking at it and have a right to know what I know about it.” He paused. “There is a difference, and I am learning it very slowly, and you will have to tell me when I get it wrong, because I cannot always feel the line from my side.”
It was, she thought, the most honest sentence he had given her since the dining room, and she did not answer it, but she did not move her arm away from where it had come, by accident, to rest against his.
At the interval she rose, and told Augusta she wanted air, and went out into the corridor alone, which was not wise, and which she did on purpose, because she had spent the whole first act feeling the earl’s box at her back and had decided she would rather meet the thing on her feet in a passage than wait for it to come to her in her chair.
He was there before she had gone twenty paces, as she had known he would be.
Greaves did not hurry. He came along the crush of the corridor with a glass of something in his hand and the same withheld bow he had given her at the Cresswell ball, and he stopped in front of her with the easy confidence of a man who had read a pamphlet about her that morning and believed he knew the shape of her now.
“Your Grace. You are brave to come.”
“Am I?” She let the two words sit, pleasant and empty.
“There has been such unkind talk. A folly, a moonlight walk, a young officer. I confess I never credited a word of it.” His eyes moved over her face, hunting. “I am glad to see it has not crushed you. A lesser woman would have stayed at home.”
“How thoughtful of you to be glad.” She did not give him the tremor. She did not give him the color rising, or the eyes going bright, or any of the small coins he had come to collect. She gave him a serene and faintly tired courtesy.
He tried a different road, the first having yielded him nothing.
“Talk is a difficult thing to stop, once it has begun to run. A printed sheet is bought up easily enough, I am told, but the memory of having read it is not bought up at all. These things have a way of coming back. At a christening, a wedding, years from now, when one had thought them safely buried. It must be a hard prospect, for a young woman, to know she will carry such a thing the whole of her life.”
“You speak as though you had given the matter a great deal of thought, my lord.”
“Only the natural sympathy of a neighbor.”
“Of course.” She let that lie in the air between them, and did not pick it up, and watched him understand that she had heard the threat folded inside the sympathy and had simply declined to be frightened by it.
A threat that does not land leaves the man who made it standing exposed, holding it in his hand with nowhere to put it down, and she let him feel that for a moment before she went on, in the same untroubled voice, and under it, in her own steady gaze held a half-second past comfort, she let him see one thing only, which was that she was not afraid of him, and had a reason behind it he could not yet see the whole of.
For a fraction of a second, his composure slipped, revealing a glimpse of the tumult beneath. He had come to read fear and found instead a woman looking at him as though she were the one holding the secret, and it unsettled the practiced warmth a degree.
“You take it very lightly,” he said, and there was the smallest edge in it now.
“I find the talk dull, my lord. It is about a river, mostly, the talk I have been hearing. Land, and old boundaries, and how certain acres came lately into certain hands. Tenants, and what they understood themselves to be signing.” She watched the edge in his face turn to something colder.
“It is not at all the talk you mean, I think. But it is the talk that is coming. I only mention it because you keep such careful count of what is said in drawing rooms, and I should not like you to be the last to hear this particular piece, when it is so very much about you.”
She had said nothing he could carry anywhere.
She had named no charge, made no threat, given no scene that any passing ear could repair to a card table.
She had only let a silver-haired man understand, in a public corridor, over the noise of two hundred people, that the hunt had turned, and that the quarry knew the ground now, and that she, the soft place he had pressed to get at her husband, was the one standing between him and the thing he wanted, and was not soft at all.
“Enjoy the second act, my lord,” she said, and inclined her head exactly the half-degree shallow of warmth that he had once given her, returning the discourtesy to him with the interest, and she walked past him toward the air, and did not look back, and behind her the most dangerous man she had ever met stood holding a glass and a silence that she had handed him and he did not know how to put down.
She found the cool of the upper foyer and stood at a window with her gloved hands flat on the cold stone sill until her heart came back down out of her throat.
Theodore found her there. He did not ask what had transpired. He came and stood at the window beside her, not touching, looking out at the lamps of the Haymarket with her, and after a while he said the only thing worth saying, which was a small thing, and the right one.
“Whatever you said to him,” he said, “he has gone back to his box looking as though the floor has moved. I have not seen that man’s composure slip in nine years.
You did in a corridor in five minutes what I could not do in nine years, which was make him afraid, and you did it without a weapon, in front of half of London, and broke not one rule doing it.
” He was quiet a moment. “I spent a great deal of my life believing the only safe way to win was from behind a wall. I am standing at a window watching my wife prove me wrong, and I find I have never in my life been so glad to be wrong about anything.”
She was quiet a moment, watching the lamps. “You said you would tell me the whole of what it means, that your man has watched my brother. Tell me now. I would rather have it tonight, while I am already too tired to be as angry as I ought to be.”
“He came to Pillard House in the autumn. Sober. He asked after you, and was turned from the door by my standing order, and he went away without a scene, which my man tells me was a new thing in him.” Theodore kept his eyes on the lamps.
“He has been going down steadily and quietly since, and selling the last of what he owns, and paying off small old debts no one was pressing him for, which is not the conduct of a man sinking. It is the conduct of a man trying to climb. I kept it from you. I should not have. I am telling you now because you have a brother in the cheap gallery tonight who bowed to you and asked for nothing, and you have a right to weigh that against everything else you know of him with all the facts in your own hand, which is a thing I have not always allowed you.”
“No,” she said. “You have not.” But there was no heat in it, and she said it still looking up toward the gallery, though the interval crowd had long since closed over the place where he had stood. “Thank you for telling me. It is the right size of a thing to be told.”
Ellen looked at the lamps, and at his reflection in the dark glass beside her own, and did not move away from it.
“The door is still undecided,” she said.
“I know it.”
“But you may stand at the window.”
“I am standing at the window,” he said, and they watched the lamps together, a little while longer, before they went back in to hear the rest.