Chapter One #2
“Then keep the next thing you write,” Rowan said.
“Whatever it is.” He turned his glass once and let it alone.
“I asked you a moment ago whether you always did this in company. That was your father’s question in my mouth, and I withdraw it.
I dislike watching a house spend its own people and call the spending economy. ”
“You will find that most houses cannot tell the difference. My father’s least of all. He has had the longest to practise.”
“Gently, my dear. Gently.” The warmth stayed in her father’s voice, but the temperature underneath it dropped. “His Grace did not ride forty miles to referee a family quarrel, and I will not have him made to.”
“On the contrary,” the duke said. “I begin to think it the only part of the evening worth the road. Go on, Miss Loxton. What does the house spend?”
She had reached the edge of what she would say in front of the man who signed the notices, and she stopped there. Correcting a lie was one thing. Opening a vein in company was another, and she had already paid for the confusion once.
“More than it admits,” she said. “That is as far as I will carry a stranger on a single dinner’s acquaintance. Ask me again when you have earned the second course of the answer.”
“Fair enough,” Rowan said. “I will.”
“You keep putting the questions to her and the courtesies to her father,” Rede said, without troubling to set down his glass. “At this rate, a man cannot tell which of them you rode down here to marry.”
“I came to see whether the woman I was offered was the woman I was described,” Rowan said. “She is not, and I find I am glad of it.” The duke turned back to her. “You said the house forgot to stop needing to be run. When was that?”
“The winter I was nineteen.” She had not meant to answer, but answered anyway, and twice in one evening was more than she cared for.
“My mother died in January. She had kept the house, the still-room and half of the rents that my father found tedious. That was most of them.” Her thumb moved once on the stem of her glass and went still.
“No arrangement was made for who should take it up. There is never an arrangement made for that. It falls, and it fell on the nearest pair of hands, and the nearest pair of hands were mine.”
“And your father’s hands?”
“Were occupied. My father’s hands are always occupied, Your Grace. It is their chief accomplishment.”
“Guard your tongue, Theodora.” The warmth did not come with it this time.
“You will notice, Papa, that I have said nothing untrue. That is the difficulty with me. It has always been the difficulty with me.” She looked back at the duke.
“You may write it on your list under whichever heading you keep for daughters who will not lie to make an evening pleasant. I have found the heading is usually a wide one.”
“I have not decided the heading.”
“No. You are the first man to sit at this table in some years and leave it open. I do not know yet whether to be grateful or on my guard. In my experience the two are rarely offered apart.”
“Then take both,” the duke said. “I find I can afford it.”
Mr Rede looked between them once more, gave it up, and reached for the wine.
Sir Alistair turned the conversation, gracefully, toward the neighbourhood, and Cecily caught it up before it could touch the ground.
“There is to be a subscription ball at Harding, Your Grace, if the weather holds, and they have done the rooms over very finely, or everybody says so. I have not seen them myself, but Mrs Anstey has, and she is not easily pleased,” she said and then continued. “I have very great hopes of it.”
“And will your sister have hopes of it?”
“Theodora says the Kelmar set will come the moment they hear there is a duke in the county and stay away again the moment they hear he is difficult. She said it at breakfast, and I laughed, but I ought not to have repeated it.” Cecily’s colour went up. “She was only jesting.”
“I was not jesting in the least. I was describing them.” Theodora set down her glass. “Forgive my sister, Your Grace. She was raised to smooth a room, and I was raised to weigh it.”
“You weigh the room,” the duke said. “Then weigh this table, before the ladies withdraw. What is on your list? We have come too far into frankness to retreat now without everybody noticing.”
“You wish me to?”
“I find that I do. Your father’s version of this house has been offered to me at considerable length, and I am beginning to suspect it is the wrong one.”
“Then here is the right one, and I will keep it short, so my father may enjoy his wine.” She spoke no louder than she had spoken all evening, and the table leaned in to catch it.
“The man who cleared my place checked my face before he lifted the plate, and not my father’s.
The boy at the wine looks to me when the decanter runs low and calls it looking to no one, because he has not yet worked out that the house has two masters and only one of them dines at its head.
” She turned her glass a slow half-turn and left it where it stood.
“Beddoes has waited at my shoulder for the nod since I was nineteen. My father believes himself served by instinct. He is served by a timing I taught the man in a still-room, the winter my mother died and the house forgot to stop needing to be run.”
“That will do, my dear.”
“You asked for the collection, Your Grace, not the flattering half of it.”
“I did,” Rowan said. “I am not in the habit of asking for half.”
Cecily looked from one to the other and found no help in either face. Her father’s warmth had gone fixed at the edges and had stayed there.
When the cloth was drawn, and Cecily rose to leave the gentlemen to their wine, Sir Alistair found a reason to draw Theodora aside with him, into the cold margin of the room where the candlelight thinned against the shutters.
“You will ruin this,” he said. The warmth went off his voice the instant there was no company left to wear it for. “You have ruined every arrangement I have ever let you near, for the pleasure of proving that you cannot be led, and you will ruin this one.”
“I corrected a lie about eleven shillings, Papa.”
“You reminded a duke, on the one evening he came to consider you, that you are a woman who reminds dukes of things.” He straightened the shawl at her shoulder, a tenderness performed for the room behind them, but his fingers on the wool were not tender at all.
“Hear me, since plain speech is the only dialect that you respect. Calder does not want a clever wife. No man in his position does. He wants a wife whom her father has called clever and who proves, on nearer acquaintance, perfectly biddable.”
“And you know what he wants.”
“I know the shape of what such men require. There are conditions attached to a man of his rank.” He straightened, unhurried.
“There will be terms. A household ordered as he wishes it ordered, a tongue kept where he wishes it kept, a wife who does not correct him across the fish. You would do well to learn the particulars before you are asked to set your name to them.”
“You have read my letters before I did for so many years that you have forgotten they were addressed to me,” she said. “Now you would read my marriage before I do as well.”
“I would have you weigh a thing, for once, before you overturn it. Your sister’s future is in this.
The servants’ places are in this.” His hand stayed where it was on her shoulder.
“The terms will not be softened for your comfort, and I will not stand between you and the cost of refusing what I have gone to great trouble to arrange.” He smoothed the wool once more. “Do you understand me?”
“I understand you perfectly, Papa. I always have. It is the one accomplishment you have never thought to praise.”
“Then let me see it in the drawing-room tomorrow.” He released her shoulder. “Smile at him, ask after his horses, let him find the biddable half you keep so well hidden that even I have begun to doubt it exists.”
“I keep no biddable half. You mistake the quiet I spend on the servants for the quiet you imagine you are owed. It is a common error under this roof, and I stopped correcting it years ago, because correcting it only ever taught you where to press.”
She looked past his shoulder while he spoke. Her father read a lowered eye as surrender, and she had no intention of handing him one for nothing.
Through the open door, at the long table, the duke sat with his wine untouched before him.
He was not attending to Mr Rede, who had said a little too much earlier and was now saying a good deal more to cover it.
His attention had gone to Beddoes clearing the last of her place, the old butler lifting her glass and her folded napkin and carrying them out himself, without giving them to the footman standing at his elbow for that purpose.
The duke’s gaze followed Beddoes as far as the door. Then it lifted, past the cleared place, across the length of the warm table and into the cold margin where she stood with her father’s hand on her shoulder, and it found her already looking back.
“Those are the terms,” her father said again, low and certain, and took his hand off her shoulder at last, the matter being closed.
Across the room, the man who was meant to have been won over that evening had still not looked away.
Her father went on talking somewhere at her shoulder about arrangements and about gratitude, and she let him talk.
In twenty years under this roof nobody had read her further than the first line.
Here was a stranger four hours in the county, holding her look across the length of the table, taking his time over it, and in no hurry whatsoever to be finished.