Chapter Nineteen
The dream returned in the small hours.
Cillian had not had this one in months: the breach, the screaming, the close, dreadful sound of steel entering flesh. A quieter sound than the shouting, and worse for it. Shouting could be lost among other shouting. That sound could not.
He woke with smoke in his throat and his hand already reaching for the knife in the bedside drawer.
The old reflex did not know the fighting was over.
He sat up.
The room at the White Hart was dark and quiet, save for the faint sound of a horse stamping in the yard below. He covered his face with both hands and waited for his breathing to steady.
This was the price.
An army surgeon in Lisbon had once told him that men who shut the war away paid less by day and more by night, while men who let it near paid the opposite. Cillian had thought little of the observation then. He had no quarrel with it now.
He had told Molly all of it.
In a garden, on a bench, with the roses scenting the air and one star showing above the roofs, he had said aloud the things he had kept shut in himself for two years.
He had told her of the emptiness, of James, of the title that had not been meant for him, of the man who had come home from Spain and found himself no longer properly a man at all.
He did not regret it.
But there was a cost. The wall had yielded. Feeling had come through it, and the war, never scrupulous about company, had come through with it. At three in the morning, the bedside drawer was nearer than sense, and his hand remembered violence before his mind remembered Bath.
He rose and went to the window.
The yard below was empty but for a roan with a white blaze, standing half-asleep near the stable door and regarding the lit window of the public room opposite with an air of grave consideration. Cillian watched the horse watch the window for some time.
Neither horse nor yard was anywhere near Spain.
Somewhere in the city, in a boarding house off Westgate, Molly was asleep in a narrow bed. Molly, who had brought the world back to him. Molly, because of whom the war had come nearer again. And Molly, because of whom there was now something stronger than the war to return to.
He did not sleep again.
He said nothing of it to anyone. By morning, when he washed, dressed, and went out to begin the day’s work, his hands were steady, his purpose clear, and the only evidence of the night lay in the slight redness at the rims of his eyes, which the weather might be trusted to explain.
“I appreciate your receiving me at such short notice, Lady Whitfield.”
“Notice is for solicitors and tradesmen, my lord. An earl upon my doorstep at half past ten is the rarest sort of compliment a Bath drawing room may receive, and one I have, you will be relieved to hear, both chairs and tea sufficient to accommodate.”
Lady Whitfield was seventy-three, wealthy, and sharp, with the social authority of a woman who had outlived three husbands and intimidated a fourth into improving his conduct.
Her house on the Royal Crescent was furnished to her own taste, comfortable rather than fashionable, and she received callers with the imperious warmth of a woman who enjoyed company and despised pretence in equal measure.
Cillian sat in her drawing room, accepted her tea, and told her what he required.
Plainly.
That was, he had learned, often the most effective weapon he possessed.
“Miss Molly Granger is under my protection. She is a young woman of good family who has come to Bath to establish herself independently. There are persons who wish to return her to an arrangement she has declined. I should be grateful if the principal households in Bath understood that any attempt to press, coerce, or intimidate Miss Granger would be regarded by me as a personal affront.”
Lady Whitfield set down her cup with the deliberate precision of a woman who had been conducting social warfare since before Cillian was born and recognised a campaign when one was placed before her.
“This arrangement she has declined. It would not, by any chance, involve Lord Vyne?”
“You are well informed.”
“I am seventy-three. Being well informed is one of the few amusements left to me, besides terrifying my grandson and overwatering my roses.” She regarded him with eyes faded to old pewter and missing nothing.
“Lord Vyne has been in Bath two days and has already made himself useful to half the dinner tables in the city. He dined with the Chadwicks last evening and is to take tea with Mrs Aldwell this morning. He presents himself as a patient and injured suitor dealing with a young lady’s natural alarms before marriage. ”
“And what is your judgment?”
“My judgment is that Lord Vyne is a man who smiles too readily and explains too little. I have never trusted a gentleman who travels across the country to retrieve a woman who does not wish to be retrieved, and calls the pursuit affection.”
She lifted her cup again.
“Your Miss Granger came to my notice some weeks ago, when she sat down with Dorothea Finch at the Pump Room and charmed half the room before anyone had quite decided whether she ought to have been allowed to do so. I have watched her with interest since.”
“And your impression?”
“That she is bright, spirited, occasionally exhausting, and not, I think, a young woman given to ordinary alarms. Whatever brought her to Bath, Lord Harrowden, it was no passing fancy. There is a difference between a girl indulging a whim and a woman making a choice. I have lived long enough to respect the distinction, even when the choice arrives in some disorder.”
Cillian left Lady Whitfield’s house with the first stone of his wall in place.
Over the next days, he laid the rest.
He conducted the matter as he had once conducted campaigns in the Peninsula: patiently, precisely, and with the understanding that many battles were decided before any open engagement began.
He made no speeches. He issued no proclamations.
He called, one by one, upon the households whose opinion carried weight, and made his position clear with the quiet economy of a man whose title lent force to restraint.
Colonel and Mrs Whitmore on the Circus had met Molly at a card party and remembered her with the fondness of people who had been thoroughly charmed and saw no reason to be ashamed of it.
The Reverend and Mrs Stanhope at the Abbey had heard of Molly’s earnest enquiry as to whether old buildings ever grew lonely at night, and the Reverend, after some hesitation, had pronounced the question “strangely affecting.” Mr Pemberton at the lending library, with the mild obstinacy of a man who trusted his own opinions, declared that any young woman who could argue so persuasively for the civilising influence of novels was a young woman he intended to support.
At each house, the substance was the same.
Miss Granger was under his protection. Any attempt to injure her reputation or make her position in Bath untenable would be noticed. He offered no elaborate explanation. He did not plead her case as though asking permission for her to exist. He stated a fact.
He was an earl, and his word carried weight.
It was one of the few advantages of rank he had never felt reluctant to spend.
The campaign, however, was not his alone.
Vyne was engaged in one of his own, and Vyne understood the field.
He had taken rooms at the York and established himself at once as a figure of consequence: a wealthy, perfectly mannered visitor of the sort Bath received readily and questioned too little.
He appeared at the Pump Room each morning, dined in company each evening, and was courteous, generous, and unfailingly composed.
Everywhere, he told the same story.
A devoted suitor had come west to reassure himself of a young lady’s welfare and bring her back to the protection of her family.
Miss Granger, he implied with a gentle sorrow that never quite became accusation, had been overcome by the natural apprehensions of approaching marriage.
Her father was anxious. Lord Vyne was patient.
He had no doubt that, with time and kindness, she would be restored to herself.
The story worked because it was comfortable.
It allowed people to believe that no cruelty existed where good manners stood in its place. It asked them to see Molly not as a woman making a choice, but as a girl in a state of feeling. It required no courage from anyone who heard it.
Some believed him.
The Chadwicks believed nearly anyone who brought good wine to dinner.
Mrs Aldwell, who had never met a title without inclining herself before it, went further.
She cut Molly in the Pump Room the following morning, turning her shoulder as Molly approached the water counter, and the gesture arrested conversation at three nearby tables.
Molly did not falter.
She filled her glass, thanked the attendant, and returned to Dorothea with her head high and her mouth composed. She said nothing of it until they were outside, and then only, in a voice steady and a little too light:
“Well. That was plainly done.”
She did not eat much at dinner that evening.
***
For a little while, Lord Vyne’s story did its work.
A few greetings cooled. A few conversations faltered when Molly approached.
One or two doors, once open to her, became less easily entered.
Molly understood then, more clearly than before, the life she had made in Bath would not be kept without resistance.
But not everyone believed Lord Vyne.
Lady Whitfield had buried a husband who smiled too often, and recognised the species.
Colonel Whitmore had spent a career observing men who governed their families as though they were regiments.
The Reverend Stanhope had counselled enough unhappy wives to know that misery often arrived arm in arm with a husband whose public manners were faultless.
Nor were the ordinary people of Bath persuaded.