Chapter 22
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“My lord, please. Please do not ignore me any longer. I am begging you, I am begging you—”
Levi came out through the garden door without turning his head. His wife came after him, it was the first time in a twelvemonth that Diana had seen the two of them in that order.
“Levi. Levi. Only speak to me. Say one word to me and I shall—”
He walked straight across the sand to the bench where his daughter sat with a book she was not reading.
“Diana.”
She did not look up.
“I go into the City tomorrow and shall be back by evening. I would ask that you do not leave before then.” He turned his hat over in his hands. “I must speak with His Grace before you go. There are things I—” He stopped, and began again. “I must speak with him.”
Diana turned a page.
Her father stood there a moment longer.
“Take care of yourself,” he said, and went.
Behind him, by the door, Octavia stood quite still with her hands pressed against her skirts, and did not follow him any further.
Diana let out a long breath and closed the book upon her finger.
I ought never to have come.
It had been the last resort and she had known it at the time. She had stood in her own bedchamber that morning with the small trunks open on the floor and gone through every door in England that might open to her, and there had been so very few.
Henrietta first, of course. Hen would have taken her in before the carriage stopped, and Uncle Edmund would have given her the best rooms in the house and never asked her why.
That was precisely the trouble. Hen would not have asked, and would have wanted to, and would have looked at her across the breakfast table every morning with the question in her whole face until Diana said it aloud.
My marriage was merely an agreement, a contractual dealing.
She could not have said that. She could not have got the words out of her mouth to the one person in the world who would have understood exactly what they meant and once said, they could never be unsaid.
Hen would never look at Valentine again the same way as long as she lived.
So she had come here instead. To the house she had walked out of.
There was a kind of grim justice in it. Half of this house had been her mother’s, Cassandra Fernside had been born a Beaumont, and gently, and her portion had bought two-thirds of the land it stood upon.
Diana had never once used that fact in her life and used it now without the smallest scruple.
She had come in through the front door with Arabella by one hand and Betsy behind her and had said, before her father could speak: I am with child, I am tired, and I mean to rest from my duties for a few days. My mother’s rooms will do.
And the truth beneath it was that she would rather sit across a table from Octavia Fernside and her useless father than stand one hour longer in a house where her husband’s face had gone back to what it was.
She had told him she was with child and she had watched him become, in the space of a breath, the man she had walked up an aisle toward.
The man with the cold sea-colored eyes and nothing whatever behind them.
She had spent eleven weeks unlearning that face.
She had begun to think she had imagined it.
And it had come back at her, and she had run from it, and she was not proud of that.
The thing was that she had come home to a house at war.
Betsy had it inside a day, out of the kitchen, and brought it up to her over the pressing of a gown with the door shut.
“It come from his lordship’s own friends, Your Grace.
That Mr. Halloway and the merchant gentleman who dines here.
They had it from a fellow in the City who knew her when she was in Bath.
” Betsy set the iron down. “She wasn’t ever any widow.
Nor any lady, neither. She was in a house — well.
In a drinking house, they say, though what’s got about is a good deal worse than that, and you know how a thing grows in the telling.
They say she’s had two husbands before his lordship and left the pair of them without a penny between them. ”
Diana said nothing.
“He went off like a powder magazine, miss. Beg pardon — Your Grace.” Betsy’s mouth went thin with satisfaction.
“Roaring the house down. Then he sent for every book in the place, the household and the estate both, and sat up with them two nights running with the candles going. Sally says he never once went to bed. And what he found—” She lowered her voice.
“Four hundred and sixty pounds, Your Grace. Gone off out of the household accounts across the twelvemonth, in bits, and every bit of it into her own hand. And the clothes and the plate she’d sold off besides. ”
“Oh?” Diana said
“Since he has not said one word to her.” Betsy picked the iron back up. “Not one, in eleven days. She has tried everything a woman can try. He walks past her like she’s a chair.”
Diana had spoken to her father perhaps twelve times in two days.
She had told him she was with child, because it would have been absurd not to. She had not told him anything else, and had answered his questions in as few words as would serve, and had been so scrupulously civil that it must have been worse for him than shouting.
She could see he was eaten with guilt. She could see he wanted to talk. He had begun three separate times, in doorways, and each time she had risen and found something to do at the other end of the room.
And he had begun on Arabella.
That was the part Diana could not look at directly.
He had got her a toy horse from the shop in the village.
He had sat on the floor of the nursery and rolled a ball back and forth with a child he had not addressed more than a dozen times in eight years.
He asked her what she liked to eat. He listened to the answer.
You are eight years late, Diana thought, watching from the doorway. And she will take it. She will take it gladly, because she is eight, and because she has never had it. I have not got it in me to be glad for you. Perhaps I shall have, one day. Not this week.
She was still in the garden when she heard a door, quick footsteps across the hall, and then the sound of a woman sobbing. Diana sighed and shut the book and went up to the nursery.
Arabella was on her stomach on the rug with the wooden horse, galloping it over the hills and valleys of a rumpled counterpane, while the puppy chewed the fringe of it with enormous seriousness. Betsy sat in the window with her mending.
“Diana.” Arabella rolled over. “When are we going back? To see the Duke. I miss him.”
When he comes for me, Diana thought. When I am certain that he wants me.
“Soon, dearest.”
Arabella accepted this with the placid faith of a child, sat up, and went to her little chest. She came back with a boiled sweet in a twist of paper.
“That is Octavia crying,” she said. “I can hear her. May I give her this? To cheer her up.”
Diana looked at her sister. She reached out and pinched Arabella’s cheek gently between her fingers.
“You are a great deal better than the rest of us,” she said. “Yes, you may.”
“Good.”
“Though I am very sad myself, you know.” Diana held her hand out, palm up. “Am I not to have one?”
Arabella shook her head with perfect gravity.
“You get a hug,” she said. “You do not like candy, Diana.”
And she came and put both arms round her sister’s neck and held on.
Diana shut her eyes hard.
I do, in fact, not like candy.
She held on to her sister for rather longer than she had intended, and had to turn to the window afterward for a moment before she could speak.
She left Arabella asleep with the horse under her arm and went down.
The kitchen was empty at that hour but for one figure.
Octavia sat on the flagstones with her back against the leg of the great table, her skirts spread anyhow, her hair half down and one comb hanging in it.
Her eyes were swollen almost shut with weeping.
Diana stopped in the doorway and looked at her.
“He is gone for the afternoon,” she said. “You may stop performing.”
Octavia laughed. It came out ragged and wet.
“Go on and mock me, then. Only I would ask that you do not do it to my face.” She wiped her cheek with the back of her wrist. “Leave me the last of my dignity, if there is any of it left to leave.”
“You did not spare mine.”
“No.” Octavia’s chin came up, and her voice did not shake. “No, I did not. I deserve every word of it. So go on, if that is what will content you. Laugh.”
Diana did not laugh.
She stood there in the doorway and looked at the woman on the floor and found that she had not the smallest appetite for it. She was not, at present, in any condition to laugh at anybody’s ruin.
She came in, and gathered her skirts, and sat down on the flags beside her.
“I am as downcast as you are,” she said. “I cannot laugh yet.”
Octavia turned her head and stared at her.
“You,” she said at last, “were born a lady.”
“That is hardly—”
“No, let me say it. You were born to it, and you cannot even see it.” Her voice had lost every scrap of its music.
“Elegant to your fingernails, and none of it put on, because it is simply what you are — so much so that you won a duke you had never laid eyes upon.” She gave a small broken laugh.
“And I plotted, and I lied. I schemed for a year and a half for that man. I made myself into somebody’s dream of a wife, and the instant he learns what I am, he walks past me as though I were furniture. ”
“You were dishonest with him. Every day of it.”
“Do you know what I did to keep it from him?” Octavia’s hands had closed in her lap.
“Do you know what it cost me? I gave your sister to your husband. That is what I did. He came here and he stood in my drawing room and he told me my old name to my face and what house I had it in, and he said give me the child, and I gave her — that same hour, on the spot, without a word to my husband — because it was the only coin I had left and I paid it.”