Chapter Eighteen
Theodora came up to her own morning-room a week before the ball to find that her sister had turned it into a battlefield, and that the battle was to be fought over her.
There were silks over every chair, and a woman from the town with pins and a measuring-tape and the reverent expression of a general given an unpromising position and a large budget.
Cecily was in the middle of it all with a plate of colours held up against the light, flushed, hopeful and entirely certain that she was doing a kindness.
Theodora stopped in the doorway and read the room as she read every room, and what she read moved the old cold thing in her chest, the specific dread of being improved.
“No to any of it,” she said from the doorway.
“You have not even looked at them. Theo. Only look, only for a minute. I have had them out since eight.” Cecily’s hands were full of blue. “This one against your hair would be a triumph, and I chose it myself. I did not let her choose it for me.”
“I have looked. I have been standing in this room my whole life, in one house or another.” She did not come further in.
“The woman with the pins was usually hoping to make me passable enough to marry off. Now she is hoping to make me magnificent enough to be believed, and I want you to understand that those two errands are the same, and I decline them both.” She came in and did not sit among the silks, because sitting among them would have been half a surrender.
“Send her home, Cecily. Kindly, and paid, but home.”
Cecily’s face fell.
“I do not understand. I do not understand it at all.” Her chin had gone unsteady.
“Every single person in that room will be looking at you, and I cannot do one thing about it. I cannot walk in front of you. I cannot answer any of them.” She pushed the blue at her.
“This was the one thing I could do with my own hands.” She stopped, and started again.
“It is not vanity. It is armour, and you of all people believe in armour. You told me so when I was frightened of the Marsdens.”
“I believe in armour I have chosen.” Theodora sat, at last, on the one clear chair, away from the silks, and the choice of chair was itself an argument.
“Sit down.” She waited until Cecily perched.
“You have arranged a transformation. The plain, difficult, disbelieved Duchess walks into that ballroom remade, so that the room gasps and revises its verdict. And it would work, Cecily. That is the trouble. It would work, and it would prove them right.”
“How can it prove them right? It would prove them wrong, Theo, wrong about every last thing they have said about you, and you know perfectly well that it would.”
“It would prove that I was only worth seeing once I had been made beautiful.” She said it plainly, without decoration.
“If I walk in transformed, the story becomes, how lovely she is after all, who knew, the Duke was right to persevere.” She let the words sit.
“The gown gets the credit. The modiste, you, and my husband get the credit, and I get to be the raw material everyone else improved.” Her voice stayed level.
“I have spent my life being that, Cecily. I do not intend to buy a silk one and call it my vindication.”
Cecily sat down slowly on a heap of dove-grey satin.
“I did not think of it that way.”
“You could not have. You have never once been the person a room decided to improve. It is a particular education, and I have had all of it.” Theodora’s voice gentled, because the anger was not at Cecily.
“The room has spent a month being told I am mad. If I answer that by being suddenly, expensively beautiful, I have answered a lie about my mind with a defence of my face, and I have conceded, in the answering, that my face was ever the question.” She leaned forward.
“It was never the question. My father made very sure the question was always my face, my temper, or my manner. Anything except the one thing he could not afford anyone to examine.” She held her sister’s eye. “Whether I was right.”
“Then how will you look?” Cecily’s voice had gone small. “If not beautiful, what is there left for a woman walking into a room of that kind, Theo? What is there?”
“Exact. I will look exact.” She gave it no more weight than that.
“It is the one thing beauty cannot counterfeit, and the one thing that room has been told I do not possess. They expect a wild-eyed creature let out of the country. I am going to give them a woman who knows to the shilling what everyone present is worth, and is not afraid to be asked.”
“You cannot buy that in the town.”
“No. I have been assembling it for years, at some cost, and I am finally, this week, in a position to wear it in public. That is a kind of magnificent, Cecily, and it is the only kind I will accept, because it is the only kind that is mine and not the modiste’s.”
It was Rowan who settled it, coming in from the passage where he had plainly been standing longer than was strictly polite, and leaning in the doorway with the unhurried attention he gave to arguments that he had decided not to win by force.
“I heard most of that,” he said. “I make no apology for it. It was the best conversation in the house, and I am not a saint.” He looked at the silks, and then at his wife.
“For what it is worth, and I have no vote here, I have no interest in unveiling a prettier wife at that ball. I did not marry a gown. I would find it a poor evening’s work to have the county admire one. ”
“You would prefer me to go in my oldest grey and prove a point.”
“I would prefer you to go in whatever you please, and I mean that with a precision you are not used to hearing it meant. Wear sackcloth, if it pleases you. Go in the gown you have had for years and mended at the cuff, or in cloth-of-gold and a crown, if the fancy takes you.” He walked into the room.
“It changes nothing that matters.” He looked at her steadily.
“They are going to listen because you will stand in the middle of that room and be so plainly, so undeniably right that the story breaks in their hands.” He paused.
“The gown does not do that. You do that. It may as well be a thing you like.”
Theodora looked at him for a long moment. He had done it again, the thing she was still learning to trust, handing her a choice entirely with nothing folded under it.
Theodora turned that over. She had braced for the wrong argument twice in one morning now, but had been wrong twice.
“You said it yourself,” Rowan went on. “Armour you have chosen. Not armour chosen for you, to make you into the woman the room would consent to believe.” He shrugged.
“That is a different garment entirely from the one your sister was about to build, though they may hang identical on the rail. The difference is not in the silk. It is who chose it, and for what reasons.”
And that, Theodora found, she could do.
She rose and went to the silks, and went through them not as a woman being dressed but as a woman shopping, which she had never in her life been permitted to be.
She pushed aside the blue Cecily had wanted.
It was beautiful, would have made her a picture, and belonged in its whole intention to the room.
Past the dove-grey, the rose and the things chosen to make her lovely, she found, near the bottom, a deep dark green that nobody improving her would have selected.
It did not flatter in the obvious way, and did not make her a picture.
What it did was make her more entirely herself, severe, exact and unmistakable.
A colour a woman wore when she had stopped asking to be liked and started intending to be reckoned with.
“This one,” she said. “Not because it is magnificent. It is not magnificent, but it is correct, which is a different and better thing.” She held it against herself and looked, not at the glass, but at her sister and her husband.
Cecily said something delighted. Theodora did not hear a word of it.
Rowan had not moved from the doorway, and he was looking at her with the green held up under her chin, and his face had gone still in a manner she had no file for.
He drew breath. Whatever had been assembled behind it did not come out.
“I will wear a gown I chose, to a room I did not arrange, and I will not apologise for the state of either. That is the whole of my toilette.” She handed the green to Cecily.
“You may send the woman home. Pay her for it and her trouble, and tell her she has dressed a duchess after all, only not by the road she was expecting, but that the duchess is very well satisfied.”
The modiste was paid and sent, a little bewildered. Cecily gathered up the rejected silks slowly, folding each one square, saying nothing at all, which from Cecily was the largest thing she could have said. Rowan lingered in the doorway.
“You are not frightened of it,” he said. “The room. I thought you might be, with it a week off. You do not seem to be.”
“I was frightened of it this morning. That has stopped, in the last quarter-hour.” She smoothed the green over the chair.
“A woman who is going to do a thing does not need to be beautiful for it. She needs to be ready, awake, and not sorry.” Her chin came up.
“I find, a week out, in a green gown of my own choosing, that I am all three. I have not been all three at once since I was a child, before I learned that being ready, awake and not sorry was, in my father’s house, the most dangerous condition a girl could be caught in. ”
“It is not dangerous here.”
“No, it is not,” she said, and looked at the green, and at the man in the doorway who had bought her a room she was permitted to be reckoned with in.
“Here, I find, it is only an ordinary day. I intend to spend this one getting ready to be exactly myself in front of everyone who was promised I could not be.”