Chapter Twelve
She watched her father’s carriage come up the Calder drive from the head of the stairs in the blue rooms, and the careful weeks she had built since the wedding went stiff and small in her chest.
He came out of the carriage bringing his weather with him, the warm expansive good humour he wore in other people’s houses.
Behind him, his man let down a trunk, a hat-box and a dressing-case and put them on the gravel where the household could not fail to see them.
Sir Alistair took a moment to look up at the front of Calder, and the expression he wore spoke of a property whose purchase he had arranged with its silent message clear: he had come to collect.
By the time she reached the drawing-room, the wall was up and mortared, and she took the chair at the edge of the room that let her watch both men at once.
“There she is.” Sir Alistair rose and took both her hands, and the warmth of it carried to the far end of the room, where it was aimed. “You look well, my dear. Marriage becomes you.” He did not let go of her hands. “I see His Grace has the managing of you well in hand. I am easy at last.”
“Good afternoon, Papa. You had a dry road, I hope.”
“A tedious one, and long. But what are miles to a father?” He kept her hands a beat past the warmth of it; the small pressure that meant sit down, be pleasant, do not embarrass me before the company.
“I have said to everyone who would listen that I always knew you would come to a great house. It only wanted the right man to see past the temper to the housekeeper underneath.”
“You said no such thing to anyone, Papa, until the settlement was signed. Before that you said I would die a poor man’s burden.” She did not look away from him. “I have the letters. I keep everything.”
Rowan’s attention moved to her, without sharpness, and she kept her eyes off him, because looking at him would have been asking for help, and she had made a lifelong policy of not asking.
“Good afternoon, Papa,” she said again, and sat, put her hands where he could see them, and let him begin.
“She was never an easy girl, Your Grace. I told you as much before the wedding, and I will not pretend to you now that she was.” He settled back into his chair, comfortable, a man returning to a favourite subject.
“But there is a firmness that answers with Theodora. A steady hand, nothing more. I hope you have found the trick of it. It took me many years, and would I wish that apprenticeship on any man? I would not.”
“That firmness took you twenty years to acquire, Papa, and I was the surface it was practised on,” Theodora said. “We remember the apprenticeship from different ends of the rod.”
“There, Your Grace. You see how it is. She cannot let a kindness stand. I never met her equal for it, and I have loved her through every year of it. The world may believe that or not as it pleases.”
“That was not a kindness. It was a boast, and I declined to applaud it. There is a difference, though I allow it is a fine one, and you have made a long and comfortable career in the gap between.”
Theodora waited, out of a habit she could not yet unlearn, for the thing that always came next: the moment when the room agreed, when the man who held the power nodded, when the description became the truth, and she became, once again, the difficult daughter who was fortunate to be tolerated.
A hundred tables had taught her the pattern, and she did not expect this afternoon to be any different.
“Explain the firm hand to me,” Rowan said.
Her father smiled. “Nothing sinister in it, my dear fellow. Nothing in the least sinister. She runs easier for knowing where the edges are, that is all, and I should think any man who has kept an estate knows the value of a fence.”
“The words are plain enough. What I am asking is what you mean by them.” Rowan’s voice stayed perfectly pleasant, and he had not moved, but something had changed in the atmosphere, the drop that comes before weather.
“You say she is not easy. I have found her a great many things in six weeks, and easy is not the complaint I would have reached for. Tell me what she does. Plainly. I learn more from the particular than the general, and you have known her longer than anyone alive.”
“Oh, the particulars.” Her father waved a soft hand and appealed to the room at large, though the room held only the three of them.
“Does a father keep a catalogue of his daughter’s faults?
It would be a poor sort of love that did.
You will forgive me, Your Grace. I have never had the clerk’s habit. ”
“And yet you were sure enough of them to warn me by letter, three times, before I had met her. A man does not warn without particulars. He only frightens. So, you had them in mind. What were they?”
The room was very quiet. Theodora had gone still in a wholly different manner than usual, both feet flat on the floor and her weight lifted off the back of the chair, because the question hanging in the warm air was one she had wanted to ask her entire life and had never once heard a soul put to her father’s face.
“She contradicts,” Sir Alistair said, and the ease had to be manufactured now rather than merely worn. “In company. She has always contradicted me in company. You will grant that is no small thing in a wife.”
“Name the last occasion.”
Her father spread his hands, genial still, inviting the room to observe how unreasonable the demand was. “It was constant, Your Grace. A trial to me for years. Ask anyone in the county and they will tell you the same.”
“That is a feeling and not an occasion. Give me one, with a date near enough to hold. You say it happened without number, so a single instance should come easily to your hand. I find one true instance worth a great deal more than a hundred vague ones.”
Her father’s smile held, and holding it had begun to cost him. Theodora watched the cost with an attention that frightened her. She had spent her whole life as the only person in any room who could see that particular price being paid. Here was a second witness who was doing the collecting himself.
“There was a dinner,” Sir Alistair said, warm and reasonable again, spreading the warmth about the room to see whether any of it would stick.
“Before the wedding, in my own house. She corrected me before your face and Mr Rede’s, over a matter of the tenants.
You were there. You saw it. I make no complaint of it, mind. You pressed me, and so I have said it.”
“I was there. I remember it exactly.” Rowan inclined his head, courteous, relentless.
“She corrected you over a rent that had been charged twice, and she was right. The tenants had the money back by her hand before the soup was cold.” He did not smile.
“That is the instance you have chosen. A true correction of a false statement.”
“You are determined to take her part. Well, and why should you not? A husband ought to. I am the last man in England who would say otherwise.”
“I am determined to know which part is true.” Rowan let that sit. “You wrote to me that she was ungovernable. I have watched her govern this house and two of my estates better than the men I pay for the work.”
“A wife’s cleverness at figures is one thing, Your Grace. Conduct is quite another.”
“You wrote that she was extravagant. She has spent forty pounds, and thirty of it went to a dying woman who has never once thanked her, because she took care that the woman should not know from whom it came.” He was not counting on his fingers, though the effect was of a tally read aloud.
“You wrote that she imagined slights. I have read the paper, Sir Alistair. Every slight that she named was real.”
“You may thank the paper for a great deal, then,” her father said, and the geniality was still there, a shade thinner across the top. “It has told you so flattering a story. Papers are obliging in that way.”
“I do not thank paper. I read it.” Rowan let that land. Rowan set his hand flat on the arm of the chair. “Which of the things you told me about your daughter would you care to stand behind, here, in front of her? Name one, and mean it.”
Nobody in the room said anything at all.
Theodora looked at her father and watched him fail to find the exit.
The geometry of his escapes was familiar to her down to the last angle, the pivot to warmth, the appeal to a shared masculine understanding, the rueful laugh that turned the subject into a jest a reasonable man would not press.
She saw him reach for each of them and find them closed, one by one, because Rowan had shut them with the same patient specificity Theodora had spent her life wielding alone and being called shrewish for.
To sit in a chair and watch her own weapon in another man’s hand, used in her defence, left her with no idea at all what to do with her face.
“I see the marriage has made her clever at recruiting champions,” her father said at last, and the warmth was gone out of him altogether, and what lay under it was the face she had grown up beneath. “I had hoped you would prove less biddable than she is.”
“Careful, Sir Alistair.” Rowan stayed exactly as quiet as he had been all afternoon.
“You have called me biddable in my own drawing-room. I will overlook it this once, because you are her father and I gave her my word that nothing here would become a scene.” He rose.
“You will not do it twice. And you will not, while you sit under this roof, describe my wife to me as a thing to be managed, because I have met the woman you were describing, and she does not exist. I dislike being lied to about my own household more than almost anything in the world.”