Chapter Twenty-Two #2
“Let them. Whatever they say next, it will be about a thing I did and not a thing I was said to be.” She turned under his arm and came back to him.
“You may tell your friend Rede he can leave the door now. There is nothing left to guard me from. The worst this room could do to me was look at me. I am still standing, and still exact, and still, to everybody’s evident inconvenience, entirely sane. ”
“Theodora… I am not going to say the rest of it here.”
“Then do not say it here.” Her hand did not move in his. “You have been carrying that sentence since the library, and I have watched you carry it, and I have let you. Carry it a little further. I want it in a room with a door, and I want to be the only person in the county who ever hears it.”
“You shall have it exactly so.”
“I have not yet told you what I mean to set against it.”
“I am not in any doubt about what you mean to set against it.” The music turned them for the last figure, and he let the turn take her out to the length of his arm and bring her back in.
When the dance ended, the room found at last somewhere to put what it had been carrying all evening.
Other couples came onto the floor, hesitantly and then not hesitantly, and the ball became a ball.
The emptiness that had followed the Duke and Duchess about all evening closed up and was gone, so that when the set finished, they stood in an ordinary crowd, jostled and greeted and, in one or two brave cases, actually apologised to.
Mrs Poole was among the brave, or among the calculating, and in a room that had turned so fast the two were not easily told apart.
“Your Grace. I hope you will let me say I never truly credited the worst of what was told of you.”
“You withdrew your invitation on the strength of it, Mrs Poole, three weeks ago, in writing, and you gave my health as your reason.” Theodora’s courtesy did not waver by a hair. “I have the note. I keep my notes. It is nearly the only accomplishment my education left me.”
“I was misled. We were all misled.”
“You were, and by an expert, and I hold it against you a great deal less than you seem to fear.” She gave the woman the mercy and the measure of it in the same breath.
“I am glad to have you back, Mrs Poole. Your husband’s leases are held through Loxton and never were mine to renew or refuse.
They will be renewed on the old terms notwithstanding, because from this week they are administered by Mr Teague and not by my father, and Mr Teague has never once put up a rent to punish a wife for her dinner list.”
Mrs Poole withdrew, uncertain whether she had been forgiven or invoiced, and Theodora let her go uncertain, because uncertainty was the only honest thing she had to offer a woman who had been sure of the wrong side until the room turned.
Theodora received the rest of the apologies exactly as she had received the slights, filing them with the names attached, letting none of the filing show, though tonight the file was of a different kind.
“You are keeping count,” Rowan said, watching her face. “Even now. Even of the kind ones.”
“Especially of the kind ones. A slight tells you what a person will do to you when they believe you cannot answer. A kindness offered the moment answering becomes possible tells you exactly what the slight was worth.” She took a glass she had no intention of drinking from a passing tray, for the use of her hands.
“There is no bitterness in this, Rowan. I am only accurate. All these years have gone into learning who these people are, and I do not propose to unlearn it in an evening because the room turned.” She turned the glass once.
“I will be gracious. I will be perfectly gracious. But I mean to remember who was gracious first, when it cost them something, and who waited to see which way the floor fell.”
“Your sister was gracious first.”
“My sister was gracious when it cost her everything.” Theodora found Cecily across the room, being pointedly ignored by two of the families whose sons she might have married.
She was standing straight under it, learning in one evening the posture Theodora had spent a childhood acquiring.
“She is paying for me over there, in that corner, and she is not looking round to see whether I have noticed.” Her eyes did not leave the corner.
“She is nineteen, she is my sister, and I am going to go and stand beside her so that she does not pay alone.”
She set down the untouched glass, crossed to her sister, and Rowan let her go without following.
“You did not have to come over,” Cecily said, without looking round. “Everything is proved already tonight. There is no need to prove me as well.”
“I am not proving anything now. I am standing where I wish to stand, and I have waited many years to be able to say that and mean it.” Theodora took her sister’s arm as her sister had taken hers an hour before.
“Let them decline to speak to the two of us. I find it a great deal warmer than being declined when you are alone.”
Across the room Rowan watched them stand there but did not go to them.
Nearer the door, Lady Ferrers turned her head to keep the two sisters in view and let the man beside her talk.
Whatever the county had learned about a forged paper, it had been shown something else twice in one evening, and Theodora, at the cold end of the room with her sister’s arm through hers, went on watching to see which of them had eyes enough to look at it.