Chapter Sixteen
Rowan came back from three days in town with the shape of the thing assembled and a temper he was keeping on a short lead.
He did not go up to change but went straight to the estate room, where Rede had been waiting since noon, hat in hand, still standing, having plainly spent the morning putting bad news into an order that would not hurt.
“Do not soften it, Rede. Four people in London have already tried.”
“Your wife’s father has been busy.” Rede announced.
The story was a month old, dating from the very civil interview at Calder, and Sir Alistair had been dining out on it in a dozen houses without once having to raise the subject himself.
It ran that the Duke regretted the marriage.
It ran further that he had been deceived into making it, that he had discovered his duchess to be exactly the unstable creature her father had warned him of, and that he kept her in the country because he dared not risk her in town.
“And the pretty finish,” Rede said, “is that he blames himself. Poor grieving father. Says he ought to have been plainer about her temper before the wedding, and he takes it very hard, and everybody tells him he must not.”
“That is a very complete story for a month’s work.”
“Oh, it’s an old story. He’s only had to change the names.
” Rede spread his hands and let them drop.
Nobody, he said, had needed persuading of a syllable of it, and that was the difficulty, because they would rather it were true.
A duke content with a clever, difficult wife was a standing insult to every dull marriage between Calder and the coast. A duke taken in by a scheming girl and her plausible father was a comfort, and comfort went out of the county’s drawing-rooms by the yard.
Sir Alistair was selling the comfortable version and the market was strong, and Rede, who took nothing hard as a rule, was not enjoying the account he had to give of the houses he had heard it in.
Rowan set his knuckles on the edge of the estate table and made himself do the slow thing first. Before he spent anger, he liked to know precisely what it was for, so that it should go to the right man and not the nearest one. Counting the month backwards, he found the hinge.
“He cannot manage her any longer,” he said.
“That is the shape of it.” Sir Alistair had come to Calder to inspect the property, only to find it beyond his control: the husband unyielding, the wife respected, and no means to connect with either of them across a carpet he did not own.
So, he had gone round. Having lost the marriage, he would make it a public failure, being the one thing that might yet shame a man into ending it.
And if the marriage ended, or was merely allowed to go cold, she would come back to him isolated and discredited, within the reach of the one man in England licensed to say what she was, and nobody left in the room to say otherwise.
Rede began to speak and thought better of it.
“This is not aimed at the marriage, Rede. It is aimed at her only ally. He means to make me an expensive person for her to be married to, so that I decide she is not worth the cost.”
“That is a colder reading than I had got to.”
“It is the correct one. I have had three days on the road to reach it.” The elegant part, the part he could not help admiring even though he wanted the man in the sea, was that anything done in her defence confirmed the story.
If he doted on her, he was the deceived fool doting on his scheming wife.
Cool, and he became the disillusioned husband, and the thing was proved out of his own conduct.
“Two jaws,” he said, “and we are standing between them.”
“You sound very nearly admiring.”
“I am. It has not made me want him any less dead.”
Rede put the hat down on the table at last and asked what a man did between two jaws.
“You do not thrash. Thrashing closes both of them.” Rowan turned the inkstand a quarter round and left it where it stood. “You wait for the man who built the trap to put his own hand into it.”
“And how does a man do that?” Rede wanted to know.
“I do not make him. He will do it unprompted.” The words came slowly, arriving in his mouth as he found them.
Sir Alistair had forgotten the one player at that table who was not the Duke of Calder.
All these years of certainty that Theodora would never be believed, every wheel of the engine cut to fit that certainty.
It had been true in her father’s house. It was not true in this one.
He held Rede’s eye until Rede stopped looking about for somewhere else to put his own.
“Let her stand in that room and be believed, once, by one person who matters, and the trap does not spring. It inverts. Every jaw he built for me closes on him, because none of it works while she is speaking.”
“So, you mean to hand her the largest room in England to not be silent in.”
“I shall put it in front of her. Whether she takes it is hers.” Rowan put his hand on the bell-pull but did not pull it. “Who has withdrawn?”
Three houses had withdrawn their invitations that week, all of it done quietly and with excuses that would pass inspection.
An illness had appeared at the Somervilles.
A prior engagement had surfaced at the Pooles.
The third had not troubled to invent anything at all.
“And the assembly committee,” Rede said, “has been letting it be understood that the Duchess of Calder might find the season’s ball a fatiguing sort of evening, and would not be pressed to attend, and everybody would understand, in her delicate state. ”
The phrase sat in the room among the dust and the estate ledgers. Rowan did not pick it up, but he asked whose it was.
“Lady Iris Danforth’s, and she’s proud of it.
” Rede pulled a face. She had appointed herself chief mourner at the marriage, and asked after the Duchess’s health in the sweetest voice in London.
“She has said more than once that it is such a pity,” Rede said, “she had so wanted to be fond of the new Duchess, only one cannot be fond of a person one is not permitted to meet, and whose own husband keeps her hidden away in the shires.”
Rowan said nothing for a moment. Across the table, Rede stopped talking, stopped fidgeting, and waited.
“What is the date of it? The season’s ball.”
“Two weeks Thursday.” Rede stared at him, and then set out, with some warmth, the objection Rowan had spent the ride home answering to himself.
The room had spent a month being told she was mad.
It would be watching for it. Every stumble, every sharp word, every silence would go down as the proof it had been promised, and the Duchess of Calder had never once in her life spared a sharp word to make an evening pass easier.
“You would be feeding her to it,” Rede said.
“Rede, you have already settled what she can carry. Every person she has ever met settled that within a month. It is remarkable how much agreement there is in this county about a woman nobody has troubled to ask.” It was out before he had weighed a syllable of it, and Rede took it standing, having done nothing all day but ride out to a friend with bad news that the friend had asked for plainly.
The estate room went very quiet. “That was not for you,” Rowan said.
“I have been carrying it since Tuesday, and you were the nearest thing to hand, and even though I told myself on the road that I would not do precisely that.”
“Spend it on me, if it helps.” Rede retrieved the hat and turned it again. “I’ve a thick skin and nobody to defend with it. Only see there’s some left over for her father.”
“There is no sending in it, and there will not be.” Rowan put his hand back on the bell-pull.
“I am going to ask her whether she wishes to walk into it herself. It is a different sentence, and she will hear the difference, because she has spent her whole life being sent and rarely asked.” He let the bell alone again, and gave Rede his instructions in the order he had worked them out on the road.
“Go home tonight. Come to the ball. Stand near the door and stay near it. And whatever happens, on no account cross the room to her, since a man hurrying to a woman’s rescue in front of a room that had been told she wanted rescuing would finish her within a quarter of an hour. ”
***
He found her in the small library after dinner, at her end of the table that had become theirs, and he did not begin gently, because she had taught him that she preferred a thing set down entire to a thing broken up small to spare her.
“Your father has spent the month telling society that I regret you,” he said, then sat, and laid the rest of it out in front of her, item by item: that she was unstable and he kept her in the country because he dared not risk her in company.
Three houses had withdrawn their invitations that week, quietly, with excuses.
The assembly committee let it be clear that she would find the season’s ball fatiguing and would not attend.
“And Lady Iris Danforth is asking after your health in a tone that has nothing to do with concern. I have had it from four people in town and confirmed every line of it with Rede.” He left nothing folded underneath.
“You would have had it in pieces from a servant by Friday. I would rather you had it whole, from me, tonight.”
She took it without expression. The blankness was not an absence of feeling. It was the training of a house in which feeling shown had always been feeling used, and he had stopped mistaking the one for the other some weeks ago. She turned it over a while before she answered.
“He begins where he always begins,” she said.
“He cannot hold the leash, so he sets the pack on me instead. I did wonder what he would do with the quiet.” She squared the papers under her hand without looking down at them.
“If he cannot have me difficult in his own house, he will have me mad in everybody else’s.
And you are telling me because you are deciding whether the cost of me has grown too high.
That is fair. It has grown high, and it will grow higher.
” She met his eyes, and there was nothing hopeful anywhere in it.
“A wise man would let the season pass without me. The story goes cold for want of fuel, nobody remembers by next autumn, and you are the sensible duke who weathered a difficult beginning. I would advise it, if you asked me. Advising people how to spend me cheaply is the one accomplishment I have had a great deal of practice in.”
“I did not ask you that.”
“You will, in time. Every man does. I am only saving us both the interval.”
“You keep answering a question I have not asked.” He was not impatient.
He was picking his way, and it took him a moment to find the shape of the habit he had been watching her keep with everybody in the house.
She heard the cruel version of it before the sentence was finished, and answered accordingly because that was what she had been trained to expect.
He said as much, plainly, and did not dress any of it.
“You have made quite a study of me.”
“I have. So let me ask a hard thing of a lifetime’s training. Let me finish an actual sentence before you answer the one you are afraid of. Just this once. Let me reach the end of my own.”
She was quiet, and inclined her head a fraction, which from her was a treaty.
He said her name, and waited until she looked up.
“I am not asking whether the cost of you is too high. I settled that at your father’s table in an afternoon, and I have not reopened it since.
” He set his hands flat on the table. “There is a room, two weeks from now, the largest room of the season, and it has spent a month being told a story about you by the man who has been telling stories about you since you could walk. They believe it. Each one of them.” He did not hurry what came after.
“I could keep you out of that room and protect you, and let the story stand because challenging it is dangerous, and you would be safe and hidden and precisely where your father has always wanted you, out of the sight of anybody who might see the truth.”
“And the alternative?”
“You could walk into it. On my arm or on your own, whichever suits you, it changes nothing that matters to me.” He held her eyes.
“The point is not to help me look content, and I need nothing proved, so you may leave that out of the reckoning as well. The point is to enter a room that has already judged you, entirely, in advance, on a lie, and to stand in the middle of it and let it find out, in front of itself, that it was wrong.”
“You are asking me to walk into a trap on purpose.”
“I am asking you to stop being safe. Safe is what you have been your whole life, and it has cost you everything.” He did not look away.
“And I am asking whether you want, once, to be seen. If the answer is no, tell me tonight plainly, and I will not raise it again this year. I would rather have your true answer than your brave one.” He turned his hand over on the table between them, palm up, but did not reach across it.
“It is the first invitation you have ever been handed that was addressed to you and not to your keeper. I wanted it in your own hand before you decided what it was worth.”
She was quiet for a long while, but when she spoke, her voice had gone low, even and certain.
“They have written the evening already,” she said.
“In their heads, each one of them, down to how the mad duchess behaves when she is finally let out. I know the scene. It has been played over me in a hundred smaller rooms, and I was never once cast in anything but the one part.” She stood and gathered the estate papers together in three movements, a woman who had decided and saw no reason to sit with it.
“I find I should very much like to walk into a room full of people holding a script, and not say a single one of my lines.”
“Then we go.”
“We are agreed.” She did not sit down again.
“And when it turns, and it will turn, you will do one thing for me.” She held his gaze.
“Do not cross the room to me. I have watched you learn a great many things about me. Learn this last one. The worst thing you could do to me in that room is arrive to save me. Let me be the one who is standing. I have earned the standing, and I will not have it taken away from me by a kindness, least of all yours.”
“I had already reached it,” he said. “Rede has his instructions. Nobody crosses the room. The room comes to you.”
She carried the papers out, and at the door she turned and looked back, but it was not at him. Rowan, who had watched her the entire evening, could not afterwards have said what the look had been for.