Chapter 17 #2
“By your wife, my lord.” The second woman’s voice cracked in the middle of it. “At her own tea table, approximately a fortnight since. She wept telling it. She begged us to keep it to ourselves — and I have wondered, since, why she told it to us at all, if that was truly her wish.”
Levi turned.
He looked at his wife. “Octavia.”
“It is not what it sounds,” she said quickly. “My lord, I was worried for her — only worried, I never meant it to travel, I never meant—”
“Then you did say it?”
“I—” Her chin trembled, beautifully, exactly. “I do not recall the particulars. I have so many calls upon me, so many parties, one cannot possibly account for every word said over tea—”
“You recalled it well enough a moment past,” said Henrietta, “to call it worry rather than a lie.”
Octavia’s eyes filled.
Diana watched them fill and thought, with a coldness that surprised her by how little it cost: I know exactly how long that takes you now. I have watched you do it enough times to count the seconds.
“Papa.” She said it quietly, and it was the first word she had spoken since they came into the room, and every eye in it came to her at once.
“I do not ask you to punish her. I do not even ask you to believe me over her, though I notice you have not yet troubled to try either way. I ask only this. Look at me, and tell me plainly whether you believe I seduced a man I had never once laid eyes upon before the morning of my own wedding — a wedding you yourself announced to me, in a ballroom, without my knowledge or my consent, not six weeks past. You know precisely how it happened.”
Levi opened his mouth.
He looked at his daughter. He looked, for a long moment, genuinely at war with himself in a way Diana had not seen on his face since before her mother died.
“Of course I do not believe it,” he said, low. “Diana—”
“Then say so.”
“I—” He glanced, helplessly, at his wife. “Octavia has been under a great strain, with the house, and the accounts, and I am sure she never intended—”
“Say it to me, Papa. Not to her. Look at me and say it.”
He could not manage it. Diana watched him try, and fail, and his eyes went sideways to Octavia’s wet, stricken face, and something in Diana’s chest that had been holding on by main strength for eight years simply let go.
It did not hurt nearly as much as she had always feared it would.
“I understand,” she said quietly. “I believe I have understood for some while, if I am honest, and only now find I have stopped hoping otherwise. You need not trouble yourself to choose between us any longer, Papa. I shall not make you do it again.”
“Diana—”
“I do not say it in anger.” And she found, saying it, that this was entirely true.
“I have not the energy left for anger tonight. I say it because it is kinder to us both to stop pretending there is a decision still to be made. There is not. You made it a long while ago, and you have gone on making it every day since, and I am only now catching up to the fact of it.”
Nobody in the room spoke.
“Come, my lord.” Octavia’s hand tightened on her husband’s arm; her voice had gone brisk and practical with the swiftness of a woman who knows when a scene has run its course. “I think we had best go home. It has been a very trying evening for everyone.”
Levi looked once more at his daughter and Diana watched him decide not to fight for the harder thing. He allowed himself to be led toward the door.
“Your Grace.” He paused before Valentine, and made a stiff bow. “I am sorry for the trouble this evening has caused you.”
“It has caused me none whatsoever,” said Valentine. “It is not my trouble.”
Levi had nothing to answer that with. He went out, and his wife went with him, and the door shut softly behind the pair of them, and that.
Diana thought, watching it close — was very likely the whole of the scandal London would ever know of. A viscount and his lady, called away early from a ball. Nothing more remarkable than that.
“As for you two,” said Phillip, turning to the women still huddled by the window, “I believe you were on your way out already. Allow me to hasten it.”
“Your Grace—” the elder began.
“Go,” said Diana, not unkindly. “And carry no more tales that are not yours to carry.”
They went, with considerable speed, and did not look back.
The ballroom, when they returned to it, had noticed nothing at all.
The orchestra played on. People went on eating, and dancing, and repeating whatever they had been repeating to one another before.
Not one of them so much as glanced up to mark that a viscount and his wife had gone home early, or that a duke and duchess had stepped out and back in again within the half hour.
Henrietta squeezed Diana’s hand once, hard, and said nothing at all, which was somehow the kindest thing she could have done.
“Come along, Miss Fernside,” said Phillip. “Let us leave the pair of them to it.”
And then there was nobody there but him.
The music had begun something slow. Diana found she did not quite know what to do with her hands.
“I ought to thank you,” she said.
“Duchess.” Valentine took a step nearer. “I have told you how I am to be thanked.”
“Your Grace—” She went scarlet and put one hand against his chest. “People are watching.”
He tapped the end of her nose with one finger.
“Madam,” he said, “I am asking you to dance.”
He stepped back and held out his hand. Diana looked at it, and then put her own into it. He raised it and turned it over and kissed the inside of her wrist above the glove, in front of anyone who cared to see it.
“He is a very devoted sort of husband,” someone murmured, nearby, to someone else. “One does not see it so very often.”
He drew her in. His hand settled at her waist, and they turned into the music. Diana laid her palm against her husband’s shoulder and understood, for the first time in the whole of that evening, that she had not once needed to be brave.
He came back from Lancashire for me. He mended my uncle’s fortunes and never once told me of it. He took my father and my stepmother into a quiet room instead of a public one, because he knew — before I did — that I would not have wanted the whole of London to watch it happen.
Could he love me?
She looked up at that hard, once-terrifying face, and let herself wonder it for the first time.