Chapter Five
“No, not there. His Grace cannot abide the chair in the window, the draught settles on his neck, and he is too courteous to say so.”
Lady Cassandra Ridgeway had been inside the house four minutes, and she had already moved a chair.
Elinor watched it from the half-landing, as a footman who had served the duke eleven years lifted the chair Mrs Garnett had set in the window that morning and carried it back to the wall without a glance at anyone who might have authorised either position.
The lady directing him never raised her voice.
She had the trick of giving an instruction as though she were only reminding the room of something it had briefly forgotten about itself.
“And the fire,” she went on, drawing off her gloves finger by finger.
“It should be lit, surely, even in June. His Grace runs cold since his illness the winter before last. You remember, Vale. I sat up with the broth. And open the long windows after. It is airless. Tell Mrs Garnett the green room for me, not the blue. The blue faces east, and I cannot sleep past a country dawn.”
All of it went to the hall at large, to no servant in particular, certain of being obeyed. Elinor had spent her whole life in rooms she was not permitted to sit down in, and she knew the sound of a woman taking possession of one. It was never loud. It was only certain.
“I remember the broth, Cassandra.” The duke stood by the cold hearth, neither warm nor unwelcoming, a man receiving weather he had long ago stopped resenting. “You need not have come so far in this heat.”
“I should think rather worse of myself if I had not. Someone must look in on you, since you will not do it yourself. You let the good rooms go cold, you dine alone, and I am told, Vale, that you have lately been seen at breakfast.” A small laugh, light as a glove dropped on purpose.
“At breakfast, with company. I confess I came partly to witness the wonder: the Duke of Rothmere coaxed into eating his egg in society.”
“The company was my son.”
“And his governess, one hears. Quite a little family gathering.” She turned, and the turn brought the whole hall into her orbit; her gaze went up the stairs, found Elinor and Theo and stopped there with the smooth efficiency of a key finding its lock.
“And here is the reason I came. Theodore. Good heavens, how he has grown. Come down and let me look at you, child. You have your mother’s eyes exactly. ”
Theo’s hand tightened in Elinor’s, but he did not move.
“Go down, Lord Theodore,” Elinor said by his ear. “Make your bow. You need not stay longer than the bow requires.”
He went down one stair at a time and made a bow that was correct, brief and bloodless. Lady Cassandra received it with her hands clasped at her breast, and her head tipped to one side, considering him the way a buyer considers a horse already decided upon.
“Have you nothing to say to me, Theodore? When I knew you last you had a great deal to say, and not always when you were asked for it.”
“Good afternoon, Lady Cassandra.” It came out flat and exact, a coin paid because the toll could not be avoided.
“He has grown shy. Or someone has taught him to guard his tongue.” Her glance found Elinor and weighed her again.
“He guards it from strangers, my lady, as a sensible person does,” Elinor said. “He spends it freely enough on those he has decided to trust. They are simply made to earn it first.”
“Honoria to the life,” the lady said then, to the duke, over the boy’s head, as though the child were a portrait and not a person standing within it.
“It must be a comfort and a grief to you at once. Our dear Honoria. There is not a day I do not think of her.” She let it settle into the hall, and then she looked directly, at Elinor, who had come down to the foot of the stairs and stopped at the proper distance. “And this will be the governess.”
“Miss Wrenfield, my lady.”
“Miss Wrenfield.” The name was tried in her mouth and found to weigh very little.
“How fortunate Theodore is, to have someone so very devoted to him. One hears she goes everywhere with him. Quite everywhere.” Her smile warmed the surface of her face and cooled again the instant it had done its work.
“We must have a proper talk, you and I. I take such an interest in the boy’s future.
But not now. Take him up, he looks tired, and tired children are tiresome ones. ”
It was a dismissal wearing the dress of concern, and it was very well made. Elinor curtsied to the exact depth it deserved and no further.
“Vale, walk me through. I mean to hear everything you have neglected to write to me, which I imagine is everything.” Lady Cassandra put her hand through the duke’s arm with the ease of two years’ practice, and he permitted it, and the two of them crossed the hall together as though they had crossed it a thousand times.
“You have made yourself a hermit. I shall not allow it to continue. Honoria would never have allowed it, and I consider it the least I owe her.”
Elinor took Theo up the stairs and did not look back at them.
***
The proper talk came that afternoon in the drawing room, which by then had been arranged into a place Lady Cassandra found agreeable, the chairs grouped for conversation she would lead, the fire lit, the duke’s own habits of an evening quietly amended by a woman who described each amendment as something he had always preferred.
Elinor had been summoned to give an account of Theo’s progress.
She suspected she had been summoned to be looked at while she gave it.
“He reads well above his years,” she said. “His geography is exceptional. His Latin is recovering from a poor beginning, and his temper from the same.”
“His temper.” Lady Cassandra poured tea she had not been asked to pour, and gave the duke his cup like a woman who had long since memorised how he took it.
“Indeed. We have all heard about his temper. Three tutors, Vale, in a season. A boy does not drive off three grown men because his geography is exceptional.”
“He drove off three grown men because three grown men tried to govern grief with a cane,” Elinor said. “He has not driven off anyone since the cane was put away.”
“Since you arrived, you mean.”
“Since the cane was put away, my lady. I happened to arrive in the same week.”
Lady Cassandra’s spoon made one small circuit of her cup and stopped.
“You are very ready, Miss Wrenfield, for a young woman in a dependent position. I shall be plain, because plainness is a kindness in the end. A governess is not a guest in a house like this one. She is not family, and she is not, whatever the boy’s affections may suggest, a member of it.
There is a line, and a wise woman learns where it falls before someone is obliged to show her. ”
“I am aware of the line, my lady. I have kept to the correct side of it in better houses than I can afford to lose this one.”
“Then we understand each other.” She turned to the duke as though Elinor had been settled and filed.
“Which brings me to the boy, Vale, since we are being plain. He is seven. It is long overdue that the question of schooling be confronted in earnest. Eton takes them young, and the sooner a motherless boy is put among other boys and firm masters, the sooner he is made into something. A child kept too long in a nursery, among women, grows soft. He grows attached.” Her eyes went to Elinor and back.
“Attachments of that sort are a cruelty to a boy, however tender they feel to the people forming them. They have to be cut in the end, and the longer they are left to grow the more they bleed when they go.”
“You speak as if the disposing of him were yours to arrange, my lady.”
“I speak as a woman who loved his mother, Miss Wrenfield, which grants me rather more standing in the matter than three weeks of geography. I know what Honoria would have wished for her son.”
“And what did she wish, my lady?”
The smallest pause, there and corrected. “She wished him raised as his rank requires, and she trusted his family to do what was right by him when the time came. I am his family. You are an entry in a household ledger.”
“He is seven, Cassandra.” Nathaniel set down his cup. He saw that the matter had been settled and set aside on her side of the table, the governess included.
“He was a baby when his mother died, and the world did not pause to consult his feelings then. Boys of rank cannot be softened by feminine indulgence and afterwards expected to govern counties. You of all men know what is required. You were sent at eight, and you were benefited from it.”
“I was sent at eight,” the duke said, “and I do not recall gaining anything from what happened to me there.”
It was the first crack Elinor had seen him show in front of another soul, and Lady Cassandra heard it, and chose, with the discipline of a woman two years into a campaign, not to press where it would cost her later.
“Firmness and affection are not enemies, my lady,” Elinor said into the opening. “A boy can be held to his Latin and held while he weeps, by the same hands, in the same hour. I have done both this week. Both have been good for him, and he has not pushed anyone away.”
“That will do, Cassandra.”
He said it without heat, which was worse than heat, and Lady Cassandra heard the worse thing in it and recovered her footing in the time it took to lift her cup.
“How charming.” The lady’s smile arrived, did its brief work, and withdrew, and there was something in the way it left that put Elinor in mind of a blade wiped clean and laid by for another day.
“You speak of him as though he were yours to hold, Miss Wrenfield. He is not. He is a duke’s son and a duchess’s memory, and he will be disposed of as his family see fit, by people who knew his mother and will answer for him to history.
Not by the young woman who happened to arrive the week the cane was put away. ”
***
She found the duke in the gallery at the hour she had begun, without admitting it, to expect to find him there.
“You found me again,” he said to the window.
“You are not difficult to find, Your Grace. You keep to this gallery as her ladyship keeps to the centre of any room she enters. I have lately learned the difference between a man hiding and a man standing guard, and I confess I am no longer certain which I am looking at.”
“Your assessment of the school question was correct, Miss Wrenfield.” He did not turn. “Eight is too young. Seven more so. I will not send him.”
“Thank you, Your Grace. Though I notice you tell the window, and not her ladyship.”
“I told her ladyship he is seven.”
“You told her ladyship a fact. You did not tell her your decision, and she heard the want of one, and she will be back at the question by Thursday with her sleeves turned up, because a fact can be argued and a decision cannot.” Elinor tried to stop there but did not manage it.
“Forgive me. You say my assessment was correct, and I find this evening that correctness is worth a good deal less than I was raised to believe.”
“Why?”
“Because it protects no one. I was correct about the cane and correct about the school, and I sat in your drawing room this afternoon and was told, accurately, that I am a woman who happened to arrive, and that the boy I have held while he wept will be disposed of by people who knew his mother. Every word of it true, Your Grace. Being correct did not move it an inch.”
“You think yourself so easily dismissed?”
“I think myself a governess, which is the same thought in fewer words. I was turned out of a house once at a day’s notice for being right at the wrong table.
A baronet’s widow did not care to be corrected before her guests by the woman she paid to teach her daughters, however softly the correction was made.
” She drew a breath she had not planned to need.
“I learned then that being right is a luxury, like resentment, and I gave it up with the resentment. Or I believed I had, until this afternoon, when I found I still wanted, very much, to be right and safe in the same hour, and discovered the house may only stock the one. Correctness matters very little, Your Grace, when one is so easily dismissed.”
“I did not dismiss you.”
“No.” She looked at him then, full on, because the thing was too large to say to the side of his face, which was where he aimed most of what he said to her. “You merely allowed another person to try.”
He had no answer. She had not expected one from a man who never allowed himself to be pushed onto unfamiliar ground. She watched her words sink in and saw no prepared reply in his eyes. She knew she had done something dangerous, but she could not regret it.
“Good night, Your Grace.”
She left him at the window with the park going blue beyond the glass, and did not look back to learn what his face was doing, because if it was doing nothing she did not wish to know, and if it was doing something she could not afford to.
***
Elinor went to the kitchen, and after a while, as she was going to her bedroom, she heard the duke’s voice low through the half-open door of the steward’s room.
“Miss Wrenfield is not a guest in this house, Mrs Garnett. She is also not a servant to be condescended to by my guests, whatever their connection to my late wife and however gently they manage it over the tea.” A pause, the small sound of a man choosing the next words as carefully as he chose everything.
“While she is under my roof, she is to be treated with courtesy by every soul in it, family or visitor or both. Anyone who forgets, it may be reminded by you. If your reminder does not take, you will send them to me.”
“Yes, Your Grace.” There was silence for some seconds, and then the housekeeper replied. “I shall enjoy the delivering of it.”