Chapter Fifteen
“You have been circling a thing for days, Cecily. I have watched you circle it, and I would take it as a kindness if you would land on it before you wear a groove in my new carpets.”
Cecily had come to Calder for a long visit and had spent the first of it being so relentlessly pleasant that Theodora, who had been reading her sister since the girl could walk, had known within an afternoon that something was being kept back.
The girl went pale over her embroidery, and set it down in her lap and did not pick it up again.
The old dread arrived on schedule, the particular dread of learning what a person whom someone loves has been carrying quietly on one’s behalf.
“I do not know how to say it so that you will still let me stay to the end of the visit, and I have been trying to find a manner of putting it since Tuesday, but there is not even one.”
“Then do it badly and stay anyway. I have grown tolerant of badly said things lately, having produced a few of my own.”
“I knew about the paper,” Cecily said to the embroidery. “Not all of it. I never saw the clauses, and I did not know what was in them. But there was a paper, Theo, and I knew there was one before you signed.”
“Go on.”
“Papa told me there would be conditions that would frighten you, and he said that if I loved the family, I would help him keep you steady until it was signed. He said it in the little parlour with the door standing open, and I did it. I did the thing he asked me for.” Her hands had gone white in her lap.
“The question on the stair, the one I put to the Duke about whether the servants would be safe, that was Papa’s question.
He gave me the words and told me where to stand so that you would hear them, so that you would see how frightened everybody was and sign the sooner.
I have let you believe all this time that I asked it because I was frightened, and I was frightened, that is the vile part of it, I was frightened, and I still said his line.
” She made herself finish. “So, I was part of it. I have sat in your beautiful house all these days letting you be kind to me, and I was part of the thing that put the paper in front of you.”
The room went very quiet.
Theodora had risen from her chair without deciding to, and had gone the length of the room to the chimneypiece, and stood there with her hand flat on the cold marble and her back to her sister, because she did not yet trust what her face was doing.
“You are nineteen,” she said, to the marble. “He is a very persuasive man. You are not the first person he has enlisted against me, and you will not be the last.”
“Do not do that.” Cecily’s voice cracked.
“Do not be reasonable at me. I could bear anything but the reasonable voice. You use it on tenants you are about to disappoint, and I have heard you use it for years, and I always knew that the person on the other end of it had lost already but had not been told yet. Be angry. Please be angry, Theo, I would so much rather you were angry.”
And standing at the chimneypiece, Theodora discovered that she was.
It came up in her with a force that startled her, because she had thought herself past being surprised by her family, and here was a fresh surprise after all, the discovery that the one person she had spent her whole life protecting had, at the hour it counted, stood on the other side.
She had sold her mother’s garnets so that Cecily should have a season.
Their father’s rages she had absorbed, so that they should land on her and not on the girl.
The entire difficult reputation she had built partly as a wall for her sister to shelter behind, and the sister had, when asked, helped hold the door while the trap was set.
“You asked the Duke about the servants in order to move me,” Theodora said, and the reasonable register had gone out of her voice.
“I remember it. What I remember best is thinking, she is frightened, I must protect her from this too.” Her hand closed on the edge of the marble.
“So, I took your fear and added it to the weight I was already under, and I carried that as well, because it was yours.” Her jaw set.
“And it was a line Papa gave you. You handed me one more stone and told me it was your own, and I picked it up, because I always pick up your stones. I have been picking them up since you were four years old.”
“I know it. That is the whole reason I came.”
“You do not know, and that is the size of it. You have never once had to know, because I made certain you never did.” She turned round at last. “That was the arrangement between us, Cecily, and nobody wrote it down because nobody had to. I would carry it, and you would not have to know it was heavy.” Her voice did not soften.
“And you took the arrangement, and you enjoyed the not-knowing, and when Papa wanted a hand to hold the door you gave him mine, because it had always been my post to be the one the door closed on.”
“It was your post because I put you in it.” Cecily had the embroidery twisted in both hands and did not appear to notice.
“When we were small, and Papa came in with his face doing the thing his face did, I worked out that if I was very good and very quiet and you happened to be in the room then the temper went to you and not to me. Every single time he would shout at you, and, Theo, I am so sorry, but even though I was four, I made sure you were in the room. I put you in the room. I would find a reason to send you in.”
“And when you were older,” Theodora said. “When it was no longer a thing you had worked out by accident.”
“I told myself you were braver, and that you were older and could bear it better, but I knew it was not the reason even while I was telling it to myself.” She had stopped looking at the embroidery but would not look away from her sister either, now that she had begun.
“The reason is that it hurt less to watch it happen to you than to have it happen to me. That is all it ever was. And when I was small I daresay I did not know any better. I was four, nobody blames a person of four, and then somewhere along the line it stopped being a thing I did without thinking and started being a thing I did. This last time, with the paper, with Papa in the parlour telling me what to say on the stair, I was not four. I knew exactly what I was doing, and I did it, and I want to say I did it for the family, but I did it because it was easier and because he was pleased with me afterwards.”
“And what was it?”
“It was cowardice, and I have hunted about for a kinder word since the day I came, but there is none. There is only cowardice, and it was paid for out of your skin for years and years.”
Cecily was crying now, without drama, the tears simply running while she sat very straight and let them run, and that was the thing about the moment that got through Theodora’s anger.
A girl performing remorse cries differently.
This was somebody setting down a weight she had carried in secret since childhood and discovering that it hurt worse than the carrying ever had.
“I am not going to tell you it is all right,” Theodora said.
“It is not all right. I want you to sit in those words for a while, because I have sat in it for twenty years and I have never once had company in there.” She looked at her own hands.
“I have found out this month that I can finish our father whenever I choose, but I will not. You may sit in that with me too.”
“I will sit in it as long as you want me to and even longer. There is nowhere I would rather be than in a room where you are angry with me out loud.”
“Good, then.” Theodora sat back down, across from her sister. “Now tell me why. You helped him keep me steady all that time, and it was comfortable, you have said so yourself. Why come and put it in front of me?”
“Because I watched you at the wedding,” Cecily said, “and you were being walked up an aisle to a man whose face you were reading for the amount owing. I am sorry, that is a poor thing to say about your husband, but you were, and I had helped walk you there. I told myself it was for the best, for the family and for the four thousand pounds, all of it.” She pressed her hands flat together.
“And then I came here, and I have watched you in your own house all these days, and nobody is managing you, Theo. You are running an estate, helping a groom’s boy and quarrelling with a duke while laughing. ”
“You were watching me from somewhere, then.”
“From the still-room window, and I was not spying. I was shelling peas, and I happened to look up.” Her voice dropped almost to nothing.
“It is a wall that has held,” Theodora said, absurdly, and heard her own voice go unsteady on it, and did not trouble to steady it, because she had spent many years steadying her voice for this exact person and she was, all at once, tired of the labour.
They sat with it, the two of them, for a long time, and it did not resolve, because things of that weight do not resolve in an afternoon, and Theodora did not pretend that it had.
But when Cecily rose at last to go and dress for dinner, Theodora called her and made herself hand over the one true thing she had.
It fell short of forgiveness, since forgiveness was not yet hers to give, but it stood next door to it.
“I am glad you told me badly,” she said, “and stayed.”
***
It was at dinner that Cecily did the thing that mattered, the thing Theodora would remember long after the confession itself had softened into history.
Rowan had asked, courteously, over the soup, some ordinary question about Loxton, the sort of question a man asks his wife’s sister to be pleasant, whether the old orchards there still bore, whether the little church was as cold as its reputation.
And Cecily, who might have answered pleasantly and let the evening stay comfortable, set down her spoon instead and said: