Chapter Fifteen #2
“Your Grace, before I answer that, there is a thing about Loxton you ought to be told, because nobody in my family has ever once said it at a dinner table and it is well past time somebody did.” Her voice shook, but she continued.
“Everything at Loxton that is still standing is standing because of my sister. Ask about the orchards. They bear because she had them pruned the year Papa wanted the money for cards, and she paid the men out of her own pocket.” The shaking worsened the further in she got.
“There is a roof on the church because she found the fund he had let lapse and put it back. The tenants are alive and on their own land because she sold her jewels to cover what he had spent, twice that I know of, and she has never once mentioned either time to me.”
She looked at the empty place at the table where her father would have sat, and delivered the rest of it there.
“And every single time, for years, he stood up at a table such as this one and took the credit for it in front of company, and called her difficult when she was too tired to smile while he did it.” Her chin came up.
“I sat at those tables and I let him, because it was easier. I am not going to sit at another one and let him.”
Nobody at the table reached for anything.
Theodora sat entirely still, because in six-and-twenty years, at a hundred dinner tables, not one person had ever said the true thing aloud, in company, to a third party, on her behalf.
She had said it herself, once or twice, and been called dramatic for it.
She had watched it go unsaid so many times that she had long ago stopped expecting the words to exist at all.
And here they were, in her sister’s shaking voice, spoken to a duke over cooling soup.
The strangest part was what failed to happen next.
The ceiling stayed up. Nobody was punished.
The truth was simply said, and it sat on the table among the dishes.
“I know,” Rowan said quietly to Cecily. “I have read the paper. But I am glad to hear it from someone who was in the room. It matters more, said by a witness. Thank you.”
And Cecily, who had spent every word of that speech braced for the sky to come down, let out a breath that was half a sob, and picked her spoon back up.
Theodora, across the table, looked at her sister who had finally, terribly late and at real cost, said the thing she should have said earlier.
She found that the neighbour of forgiveness had moved, in the course of one dinner, a good deal closer to the house.
***
Cecily came to her that night, in her nightgown with a candle, as she had come to Theodora’s door as a child after their father’s worst evenings, and Theodora, opening to the knock, had the whole of their childhood arrive on the threshold with her.
“I do not expect you to forgive me tonight. I did not come for that.” The candle was unsteady in her hand.
“I only wanted to say the rest of it before I lose my nerve, which I always do by morning. You told me at the wedding to hold on to one thing, that you chose it. I have held on to it.” She got the candle level.
“And I want to give you one back to hold, if you will take a thing from a person who has not earned the right to hand you anything.”
“What is it?”
“That you are not the woman who survives him. You said it to me this afternoon, that you did not know who you would be once he was finished, because you had only ever been the one surviving him.” Her voice was very quiet in the cold passage.
“But I have watched you all this while, and you are not that woman, Theo. You are the person who keeps things alive.” She drew an unsteady breath.
“The orchards, the tenants, the groom’s boy, the church roof, and me, Heaven help me, you kept me alive too, all these years, and I paid you in silence, but you kept me anyway.
” The candle steadied at last. “When he is gone you will still be the one who keeps things alive. That does not end with him. It is the only part of your life that was never his.”
Theodora stood in the doorway and found that the shapeless weight of the afternoon had a shape after all, and the shape was this: her sister on the threshold with a candle, handing her back a self that did not depend on being endured.
“You should not have led with the confession,” she said, when she could. “You should have led with this.”
“I could not have because the one buys the other. You would never have believed a good thing from a person who had not first told you the bad one.” Cecily almost smiled.
“And you taught me that. It is yours, you said it about Papa’s compliments years ago.
That a kindness with no confession under it is only a bill arriving early. ”
“I did say that.” Theodora looked at her sister for a long moment, but she stepped back from the door.
“It is cold in the passage. Come in, and do not imagine it means the thing is mended, because it is not, and will not be for a good while yet. But you may be cold and unmended in a warm room instead of in a corridor. It is the most I have tonight.”
And Cecily came in, and they sat up for a while in the blue rooms. Some time after midnight, Theodora looked up and found her sister asleep upright in the chair with her mouth open and her candle burning down beside her, entirely undefended, in a house she had every reason to believe she had no right to be safe in.