Chapter Ten
“Smile, Duchess. They are hoping you cannot.”
Royce said it low against her ear as they were announced, his hand light and proper at the small of her back, and the whole of Amabel’s gold drawing room turned towards the doorway the way a field of long grass turns towards a wind, all at once and with no single blade willing to be seen moving first.
“They are staring,” Giselle said, without moving her mouth.
“They are appraising, which is a thing you will learn to use. A stared-at woman hurries, but an appraised woman lets them finish and finds them wanting.” His thumb moved once at her spine. “Remember your hands. You have packed them to leave again.”
“And if my nerve fails at the door?”
“It will not. You have stood in a wall with a bleeding man and a knife in the corridor. This is only a room, and the worst it holds is opinion, and opinion has never yet killed a woman who declined to agree with it.” His hand pressed once and lifted.
“Walk in. I am directly behind you, which they will all notice, and none of them will understand.”
She freed her hands deliberately and let them fall loose and open as he had shown her on the carpet three days past. She walked into the room ahead of him, unhurried, taking the door rather than apologising for it.
The appraisal shifted a half degree towards uncertainty, which Beatrice had promised was the whole of the war.
Lady Amabel was already at work as they entered, bent over a thin, anxious woman in too many feathers, her voice pitched to carry.
“Mrs Renwick, how well you wear it, the new gown and the new carriage both. You must tell me your secret for looking so entirely at ease among us.” The thin woman coloured and stammered, and Amabel left her there bleeding and turned the whole of her warmth towards the door, where fresh prey had arrived.
She went to them gowned in something the colour of a fresh bruise, both hands extended, all delight.
“The new duchess. And looking so well. One does worry when a young woman is elevated so suddenly that the height will disagree with her. So many of them go pale at the top of the stairs and have to be helped down again.”
“How kind of you to worry, my lady.” Giselle gave her the fan-angle and the amused look over it, exactly as drilled. “I find the height suits me. I have an excellent head, and I was never in much danger of being elevated gradually, which I am told is the more tiring way.”
A small silence opened where Amabel had expected a stammer. Across it, Beatrice, arriving at Giselle’s flank, said pleasantly: “She climbs very well, Amabel. You will recall you found the stairs difficult yourself, the year you married up. None of us forgets our first ascent.”
Amabel’s smile thinned by a hair. “Beatrice. Always so loyal to a novelty.” Amabel turned the warmth back on Giselle. “You must find us all very strange, Duchess, after the hush of a library. Do say if the noise grows too much. We should not wish to overtax a delicate constitution.”
“You are the second person this evening to wonder at my constitution, my lady. I begin to think it is the most robust thing in the room, since everyone is so very anxious to catch it failing.”
***
They had been seated interestingly. Giselle understood the whole architecture of the evening the moment she saw the place cards, the long table arranged so that she sat among the people most likely to draw blood, with an empty chair at her right hand that bore no card at all, which meant the man who would fill it considered himself above being labelled, and that was surely Veyr.
A young man with a careless mouth slid into the chair across from her before the soup, all easy charm and a glance that travelled.
“Davenant. We have not been introduced, which I intend to remedy at once, since no one warned me that Calder had married someone worth talking to. The town said a scholar, but the town is a fool.”
“The town is occasionally right by accident, Mr Davenant. I am a scholar. You may talk to me about indexes, or not at all, and I shall enjoy either.”
“He is provoking you to provoke your husband,” Royce said, from her other side, without heat, lifting his glass.
“It is a small sport and he is not very good at it. Davenant, you are flirting with my wife to see what I do. I am going to do nothing, because she is going to do it for me, and you are going to enjoy that a great deal less.”
“I find I would enjoy it enormously,” Davenant said, undaunted.
“You are very direct, Mr Davenant.”
“I am very bored, Duchess, which in this room amounts to the same vice. You are the first new thing in a twelvemonth, and a man tires of admiring the old furniture.”
“You would not.” Giselle turned the fan-look on him, bored and kind at once.
“You are charming, Mr Davenant, in the way of a man who has never once been refused and so has never had to become interesting. I have been refused a great deal, and it made me excellent company. You may sit with me and learn the trick of it, or go and flirt with someone who has not noticed yet. I shall think no less of you for choosing the easier room.”
“You are merciless. I begin to see why Calder wears the face he does.”
“And what face is that, Mr Davenant?”
“The face of a man thoroughly disarmed who has discovered, to his horror, that he prefers it. I shall have to warn the card-room. It will quite ruin the evening’s wagering, half of which was laid against you lasting the soup.”
Beatrice laughed outright. Davenant put a hand to his heart, delighted to be wounded, and the table that had leaned in to watch a duchess flounder leaned back, having watched her do something else entirely.
Royce, beside her, set his hand briefly over hers under the table, a husband’s touch, proper and entirely improper in what it did to her pulse.
Then the chair at her right hand filled, and the temperature of the evening dropped.
“Duchess.” Veyr settled into the unlabelled seat with the ease of a man who had chosen it. “Married life agrees with you. You have lost the hunted look you wore in Calder’s library. It suited you because it ran in your family.”
“Did it, my lord?”
“Your mother had it to the last.” He said it gently, conversationally, reaching for his wine.
“I knew her a little, in the years before she was lost to us. A clever woman, your mother, and clever women alone in the world are such fragile instruments. She saw plots in the wallpaper by the end. She wrote letters to people who could not have existed. It was a great sadness. Unstable, the physicians said, which is a kinder word than the ones the servants used. I do hope the affliction is not one that descends.”
The dining room receded to a fine grey ring at the edges of her sight; her hand on the stem of her glass went very still, and she heard Royce’s voice begin, low and dangerous, to answer for her.
She did not let him. She set two fingers on his sleeve under the table, the signal they had not agreed on but that he read at once, and he went quiet.
He left her the field, which cost him visibly and which she would thank him for later.
“How interesting that you knew her,” she said.
“You are the first person I have met who admits to it. Most people who were near my mother at the end have found it convenient to have been elsewhere.” She lifted her own glass and did not let it shake.
“She wrote letters to people who could not exist. You would know their names, then, the impossible people. A man remembers the delusions of a woman he merely knew a little. Tell me one. I should like to know which of my mother’s correspondents the physicians decided were ghosts. ”
Veyr’s pleasant face held, but something behind it adjusted, a man finding his footing on ground he had thought firmer. “You misunderstand me.”
“I understand you perfectly, my lord. You have told me my mother was mad so that when I repeat what she wrote, I shall be repeating a madwoman, and no one need trouble to check whether the wallpaper had plots in it after all.” She set the glass down.
“It is a good method. I have catalogued enough asylum records to know how often the inconvenient are diagnosed into silence. You will forgive me if I decline to inherit the diagnosis along with the eyes.”
“You are very sure of yourself, Duchess, for a woman whose whole claim rests on a dead woman’s word.”
“I am sure of myself precisely because that has been the whole of my estate since birth, and I have built on a great deal less than most men inherit and never once thank anyone for. You mistake my having had little for my being little. It is the common error of men given a great deal who have confused the gift with the merit.”
“Your mother made the same error. She believed cleverness would serve in the place of protection. It did not serve her at all.”
“No. The men around her saw to that, which is rather my point.”
“Stay where the wall is at your back, and let no one steer you into a corner,” Royce said under his breath, for her alone.
“Veyr will use the next set to reach you, because the rules of the room will pull me away and he has counted on it. Let him reach you. Hear the whole of it, and give me every word in the carriage, and do not answer the last thing he says, whatever it is. The last thing is always the hook.”
“And if I cannot help answering?”
“Then answer with your face, which is by now unreadable, and save the words for me.” He rose.
“Dance with me,” Royce said, holding out his hand to her before Veyr could find his feet again.
“They are getting up the sets in the long room. I find I would like the whole company to watch me dance with my wife, and I find I would like to take her out of this chair before she says something I shall have to duel a man over.”
She took his hand and let him lead her out, and behind them, Veyr’s gaze rode the length of her spine the whole way to the door.
The long room had been cleared for informal sets, and the watching followed them into it.
Royce drew her into the figure with a hand at her waist that was perfectly correct and a closeness that was not.
The music began, and under cover of it he spoke against her temple in the voice he had used to coach her, low and steady and only for her.
“You were magnificent, and you are shaking, and both of those are allowed.” The figure turned them, and his hand found the small of her back again on the turn.
“Breathe with the music. They cannot see your heart from the floor. They can only see your feet, and your feet are doing beautifully, because I taught them and I am an excellent teacher.”
“You are enjoying this.”
“I am enjoying that you did not need me. I crossed half a table to defend you and arrived to find the defence already conducted, and conducted a great deal better than I would have managed, since my method would have involved my fist and his nose and a very long morning for our seconds.”
“He frightened me.”
“He meant to. Tell me you frightened him back, for I watched his footing go from across the room, and I have not seen Veyr lose his footing in seventeen years.”
“He called my mother mad.”
“He called your mother mad because he is afraid of what your mother wrote, which means your mother wrote something worth being afraid of, and that is the first good news we have had from that man.” The turn brought her close against him, chest to chest for the length of a bar, and the want she had no business feeling on a battlefield rose in her anyway.
“Do not weep in this room. Weep tonight, in the carriage, where the only witness is a man who is on your side. Here, you dance, and you smile, and you let them wonder why the scarred duke is looking at his wife as though the room were empty.”
“And if I cannot stop the shaking?”
“Then shake, and let them lay it to the dancing. A woman may tremble in a man’s arms on a floor like this and be thought in love, which is the single weakness this whole room forgives, because it is the one they came hoping to witness. Give them that.”
“You have an answer for every room.”
“I have an answer for every room and no peace in any of them, which is the price of the skill, and not a price I would wish on you. You have your own answers now. You found them yourself, tonight, before the worst audience in London. I merely taught you where to look.”
“Is the room empty?” she asked before she had decided to.
“The room has never been less empty in my life, which is the inconvenience I keep complaining of.” His hand pressed once at her spine, and the music turned them again.
“Smile, Duchess. We are winning, and they have only just understood it. There is nothing that a room like this hates more than a woman it cannot make small.”
She smiled and let the whole gold room see her smile up at her scarred husband.
Then the figure returned her, as the figures do, to the edge of the floor, and Veyr was there.
He waited at the margin with a fresh glass and the patience of a man who had all the time in the world.
As Royce was claimed for the next set by the rules of the room, Veyr stepped near, bowed over her hand, and spoke so low that no one but she could hear it.
“You asked for a name, Duchess, and I admired you for it. So, I shall give you the only one that matters.” His mouth barely moved around the words.
“Your mother’s story ended as it did because she asked questions no one wished answered, in rooms exactly like this one, of men exactly like me.
She was clever, but she was alone, and she would not be told to stop.
I should hate, truly, to watch the affliction descend after all. ”