Chapter 12 #2
“No. That is the trick of asking properly.” Lady Cordelia’s eyes moved over her face, and some of the gaiety in them gave way to something quicker and kinder.
“You look tired, Miss Trent. Not ballroom tired. The other kind.” She did not press.
Viola was coming to understand that she never pressed.
But she set her chin and went on in a different key.
“I shall tell you something, and you may do with it as you please. The talk about you has changed. When you first came it was idle, a fortune, a mystery, something to say between dances. It is not idle now. It runs all one direction, and it runs against you, and in my experience talk that keeps so tidy a course has someone steering it.” She let that sit precisely one moment, then smiled.
“Which is why you will come on Thursday, and be seen at my table, glad and easy and very well defended. One cannot steer against a duke’s daughter, my dear. It has been tried.”
Viola looked at her — at this near-stranger who had decided, apparently on sight, to stand her friend — and felt her throat tighten. “Why are you so good to me?”
“Because you asked the modiste to raise your neckline and never once told anyone your own story to make yourself interesting.” Lady Cordelia stood and took up her gloves, brisk again.
“I have watched London try to make a scandal of a girl who is plainly nothing of the kind, and I find it has put me quite out of temper. Thursday, Miss Trent. Wear the cornflower silk. Modistes talk, my dear, and I hear it was made for you.”
When she had gone, Viola sat a long while at the writing desk by the window, her father’s letter of the week before open at her elbow, a fresh sheet before her, and found she could not write the thing that filled her.
Papa — she sent you money, year upon year, and it was taken before it reached you. You were never forgotten. You sat in the cold because someone stole the warmth on its way to you.
The pen hovered and did not come down. For how did one write such a thing? To put it in ink, in a letter he would read alone, with no one by him, in a house where the coal was still counted — no. It could not be told so. Some truths must be given with the hand held, not the pen.
So she wrote the small things instead. The weather, which was fine.
Hannah, who was well. A supper she was to attend on Thursday at the table of a duke’s daughter, which he would like, and would read aloud twice, and would pretend he had not.
She asked after the roof. She asked him, once more and meaning it, to come to London when matters at home could spare him.
Hannah would second her, she knew. She sent her love.
And at the last, with the watch chain lying cool against her wrist where she had wound it while she wrote, she added: I have learned a little more of Lady Warrington’s kindness, Papa, and I think, when I can tell you the whole of it, that it will make you glad rather than sorry. You were better loved than you knew.
She sealed it before she could scratch the line out, and sat with her hand flat upon it, and let the ache be what it was — grief with a sweetness in the middle of it.
* * *
Lady Cordelia’s supper, when Thursday brought it, was nothing like what Viola had expected.
The Asher house was grand enough, but it was grand the way a well-loved coat is good wool, worn easily, without a thought.
There were no more than fourteen at table.
Mr. Asher proved a broad, comfortable man who said little, beamed much, and looked at his wife, whenever she spoke, like a man still privately astonished at his own good fortune.
And the guests had been chosen, Viola understood within a quarter-hour, the way Lady Cordelia did everything: deliberately, and to a purpose.
There was no one present who had whispered about her.
There was no one present who whispered about anyone. Only the people worth feeding.
She wore the cornflower silk, come home from Madame Lefebvre’s at last, and when she had come down the stairs in it Hannah had stopped talking in the middle of a sentence, which from Hannah was eloquence.
Lord Carrington was seated across from her, near enough for conversation and too far for any privacy in it, which was, Viola suspected, also deliberate, and also kind.
It was the first she had seen him since the morning over the walnut box, since she had wept in front of him and he had held her hand in both of his as though it were something entrusted to him.
She had wondered, dressing, whether it would be strange to meet him now, in candlelight and company, with all of that between them.
It was not strange. That was the remarkable thing.
He looked at her once, when she was seated, a look that asked, plainly as speech, how do you fare?
She gave him the smallest nod, well enough, and something in his shoulders eased, and then he turned and made himself agreeable to the elderly lady at his left for two full courses.
He did not ask after papers. He did not once say Lady Warrington’s name.
He was simply there, solid and easy across the table, laughing at Lady Cordelia’s stories in the right places, and Viola found that his presence did more for her appetite than a week of quiet had done.
Once, and only once, the talk at their end bent toward the subject of wills, some tangle of an inheritance in Kent that had half of fashionable society taking sides. Viola felt the table’s careful not-looking settle on her like a draft. Lord Carrington caught her eye across the candles.
“I find,” he said, to the company at large, “that other people’s inheritances are like other people’s dreams — endlessly fascinating to the owner, and a very poor dish to serve at supper.
” He said it lightly, and the laugh that followed carried the conversation clean past the shoals and away, and only Viola saw that he had done it on purpose, and only he saw that she knew.
Not tonight, the look between them said. Tonight we are only two people at a friend’s table. And so they were.
When the ladies rose, Lady Cordelia contrived to pass close by her chair. “You laughed four times at supper,” she murmured, with deep satisfaction. “I counted. Do not thank me — it spoils my aim.”
But it was the stair Viola kept afterward, turning it over as the carriage rolled home through the lamplit streets.
The party breaking up, the hall full of cloaks and calls for carriages, and Lord Carrington beside her at the step offering his hand — the most ordinary courtesy in the world, performed a hundred times a night all over London.
She had put her gloved hand in his and felt his fingers close, careful and sure, and for the space of a breath, before he handed her up, neither of them had moved at all.
He had not spoken. She had not looked back.
It had lasted no time whatever, and she felt it still, halfway to Cavendish Square — no.
To Stoneleigh. Halfway home.
She smiled at the slip, alone in the dark of the carriage with Hannah dozing at her shoulder, and let the word settle into its new meaning, and kept her hand curled closed the whole way, as though holding something in it.
* * *
The warm summer’s day lifted Viola’s heart free of its cares as she walked beside Hannah, the branches above heavy with green that shimmered whenever a breeze caught them.
She adjusted the ribbon at her bonnet and glanced about her, aware of the quickening in her spirits at the thought of Lord Carrington’s company again.
After all they had lately shared, she had felt her heart warm to him all the more.
Over the walnut box his hands had closed about hers — both of them, firm, as though he could press his own steadiness into her — and neither of them had spoken of it since.
It was too near; it did not want words yet.
Even now she marveled that a touch could do so much to her own heart.
“You look happy, Viola.”
She glanced at her sister, then back to the path. “I am a little less aware of society’s scrutiny today,” she said softly. “Perhaps it is that.”
“Perhaps it is the gentleman waiting for you beneath the chestnut tree.” The reply was dry. “There. Do you see him?”
Viola did not answer, for to answer would have told her sister far too much.
The sight of Lord Carrington, his smile lifting, his blue eyes fixed on hers, made her heart leap and her breath quicken, and that from no more than catching sight of him.
She returned the smile, unable to keep her lips from curving. “Lord Carrington.”
“Miss Trent.” He bowed to her, and then to Hannah. “Lady Manion.”
“Good afternoon.” Hannah gave a quiet chuckle Viola did not mean to explain. “I shall keep a few steps behind, Lord Carrington. Pray speak freely with my sister. I have no intention of overhearing.”
Lord Carrington cleared his throat, a touch of heat in his face that Viola felt answering in her own. “Of course, Lady Manion.” With a look to Viola he offered his arm, and gladly she took it, and they fell into step together.
The park was less crowded than usual, the heat keeping many of the ton indoors. She was glad of it, though well aware that her walking with Lord Carrington would be whispered of soon enough.
“How are you this afternoon, Miss Trent?” he asked quietly. “Has Stoneleigh House felt a little more your own?”
That he had not only remembered her words but thought to return to them made her smile. “It is not yet home. But it is no longer as strange as the day I first stepped inside. Comfort will come in time, I suppose.”
“It shall.” There was a fervency in it that surprised her. “You must not hesitate to make it yours, Miss Trent. It should be no shrine to Lady Warrington — I knew her well enough to know that is the last thing she would wish for you.”