Chapter 23
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
“You may stay here until the child comes. If that would make you easier.”
Diana turned her head.
Her father stood a few feet off with his hands behind his back, looking out across the lawn where Arabella lay on her stomach in the grass conducting a war between the puppy and the wooden horse. The puppy was winning by improper means.
He cleared his throat. “You need not see anybody you do not wish to see. Including me. I only thought — if you would be more comfortable here, until it is over, then here you shall be, and there is an end to it.”
Diana nodded.
She did not say anything. It was a decent offer, decently made. A month ago it would have undone her. Now, she barely cared.
They stood there and watched Arabella lose the wooden horse to the enemy.
“She is a good child,” her father said.
The puppy went past at a dead run with the horse in its mouth and Arabella after it, shrieking.
“I never thanked you,” her father said. “In eight years. I never once said it to you.”
Diana watched her sister go.
“Your thanks are coming rather late, Papa,” she said.
He did not argue. That was the worst of it. He simply stood there and took it, and after a moment he nodded, as at a fair valuation, and looked back out at the lawn.
A week, Diana thought. I have been in this house seven days and he has said more to me in it than in the eight years before.
And I cannot find anything to do with any of it.
A door opened behind them, and Octavia came out onto the terrace.
She had done as she was told. The gray silk, the hair dressed but the effect was not what it had been, because there was no performance running underneath it. She simply looked like a well-dressed woman who had not slept.
“My lord.” Her voice was perfectly steady and perfectly quiet. “I am going down to the market with the maids. Is there anything you would like brought back? The Spanish wine you had at Michaelmas — I could send for a case, if you—”
Levi Fernside set down his hat.
He walked past his wife, down the two steps onto the grass, and out toward the child.
“Bella! Bella, mind — you shall have that horse in pieces—”
Octavia stood where she was.
She blinked. Nothing else in her face moved at all.
Diana got up off the bench.
“I shall come with you,” she said.
“You will do no such thing.” Octavia’s eyes came round. “You should be resting, you should be lying down with your feet up like a sensible—”
“If I stay here he will try to speak to me.” Diana pulled on her gloves. “He has been trying all week. He is working himself up to it and this afternoon he will manage it, and I would rather be almost anywhere else in England.”
Octavia considered this.
“Whereas I,” she said, “would give my right hand to have him try to speak to me.”
“Yes.” Diana looked at her. “Is that not a very funny arrangement?”
Neither of them laughed. They both, at the same moment, let out precisely the same breath and then had to look away from each other, because it was too absurd to be borne.
The carriage went down the hill toward the village.
They sat opposite one another and did not speak for the first mile.
“I owe you a great deal,” Octavia said at last. “I am aware of it. I shall find some way to make it up to you.”
“I shall be waiting.”
“You do not believe me.”
“I did not say that.” Diana looked out of the window. “I said I should be waiting.”
Octavia turned her rings.
“If he has not forgiven me in a month,” she said, “I shall ask him for a divorce and go.”
Diana’s head came round.
“A divorce.”
“Or a separation, or an annulment, or whatever it is that men of his sort can be got to arrange. I do not much care what it is called.”
“You stole four hundred and sixty pounds from him; you can hardly complain of—”
“I am not complaining.” Octavia looked up. “I took it. Every penny, exactly as they say. I took it because I have never in my life been more than a fortnight from having nothing at all, and I do not know how to stop. That is the honest answer. It is not a good one.”
The carriage went over a rut and they both put a hand out.
Diana said, “And the two before him. Did you truly leave them without a penny?”
Octavia smiled. It was very tired.
“How readily,” she said, “did the whole of London believe what I told them about you?”
Diana said nothing.
“I told four ladies at my own tea table that you seduced a duke and forced his hand. It was not true in any particular. It was not even possible — you had never met the man. And inside a fortnight it was a settled fact in every drawing room in town, and two women I had never met were saying it aloud on a terrace.” Octavia shrugged one shoulder.
“Anything at all can be the truth, if it is interesting enough. I have made a living out of that and other people have made a living out of me. Two husbands, three, six; a brothel or a drinking house; penniless or merely disappointed. It hardly matters which of it happened. It is a better story the way they tell it.”
Diana looked at her a long moment.
“That is not an answer,” she said.
“No,” Octavia agreed. “It is not.”
The market was full, it was a Thursday, and the good weather had brought everybody out. The square in front of the church was solid with stalls and country people from six villages round.
They bought ribbon, a quantity of pears that Diana had wanted with an urgency that alarmed her, and had eaten one of before they were paid for. Octavia haggled with a woman over blue thread with an efficiency that suggested a great deal of practice.
“You are enjoying this,” Diana observed.
“I have not been let out of that house in eleven days.”
Diana turned to the next stall and put her hand out for the linen and the whole square changed its noise.
It came from the top of the hill, and it came fast: the flat hard clatter of a horse at full gallop on cobbles. Behind it a man’s voice shouting something with no words in it, and then the scream of a woman by the churchyard wall.
The animal came round the corner of the inn with its head up and its eyes white. It had no rider on it at all, dragging a broken trace and half a shaft, and the shaft was slewing, bouncing behind it and driving it faster.
And there in the middle of the road stood a child. She could not have been three years old. She had a wooden top in one fist, and she had stopped where she turned toward the noise, and she was not moving at all.
Diana did not decide anything.
She heard Octavia behind her — “Diana—” and then her name again, torn out much louder, “Diana, no—” and she was already off the curb and running with her skirts in both hands. The horse was very close. She could hear the breath in it.
She got both hands under the child’s arms and swung her and she felt the small weight leave her fingers. She heard the child hit somebody and heard somebody catch her.
Then the shoulder of the horse struck Diana across the back.
There was no pain in it at all, which she had not expected.
There was only an enormous shove, as though the world had turned over on its side.
The sky went past, the cobbles came up, and she landed on her hip and her elbow. The noise of the square went far away.
She was looking at the wheel of a cart. It was very close to her face and there was a nail in the rim of it with the head worn flat. Somebody was screaming.
Then there were hands on her, and a face over hers, and the face was Octavia’s. Her hair coming down, her mouth working, and she had Diana’s cheek in one hand and was patting it, hard, too hard.
“Diana. Diana. Open your eyes. Open your eyes and look at me—”
I am looking at you, Diana thought. My eyes are open. Can you not see that they are open?
“—somebody fetch the surgeon, fetch him now, run — Diana. Diana, my dear, stay with me. Look at me. Do not close them. Do not you dare, do not you dare, stay with me—”
The light thinned at the edges, and drew in, and went out.