Chapter Thirteen
“The Wexcombes to your right, Vale, the rector and his wife below them, and Lady Marsden where she can hear herself talked about, which is the only place she is ever comfortable. There. A table arranges itself, once one knows the people in it.”
Lady Cassandra moved down the length of the dining room placing cards with the absorption of a general siting guns, and she had been at it an hour, and the table she was building was a portrait of herself.
“And Miss Wrenfield?” Elinor asked, from the doorway where she had been summoned and then forgotten.
“Ah.” The lady did not look up from the cards.
“Yes. There is the small difficulty of Miss Wrenfield. One cannot seat a governess at a dinner, it is not done, and one cannot leave the boy’s teacher above stairs when the boy is to be presented to the company, it looks like meanness, and His Grace has been particular.
” A card went down, and was moved an inch, and was satisfied with.
“So. Here, below the rector’s wife and above no one, in the place we keep for poor relations and clergymen’s daughters and persons of education without the means to be anything by it.
Neither one thing nor the other. I am sure you are accustomed to the middle of the table, Miss Wrenfield.
It is where your whole life has seated you. ”
“It is, my lady. I find one hears more from the middle. The ends of a table are very deaf with their own importance.”
Lady Cassandra’s hand paused over the last card, and then went on.
“You take a great deal of trouble over one dinner,” Elinor continued.
“One dinner is never one dinner, Miss Wrenfield. It is a demonstration. Every soul at this table tonight will go home and tell every soul they know how the Duke of Rothmere’s house was kept, and by whom, and how naturally she did it, as though she had always done it, as though the place had merely been waiting these seven years for the right hand to take it up.
” She moved a fork a quarter-inch and approved of it.
“That is what a dinner is. It is a rehearsal performed before witnesses who do not know they are an audience. I have given two years to this house. Tonight it begins, in the eyes of the county, to look like mine. You may watch from the middle and learn how the thing is done by a woman who was not born to it either, and who has never once permitted that to show.”
“Theodore will be brought down for the soup and removed before the fish, so that the company may admire him without enduring him. You will see to it that he is admirable and brief. That is the whole of your office this evening, and you will forgive me for being plain, but I have built a great many dinners, and I have learned that the ones that fail, fail because someone forgot what their office was.” She set the last card.
“Mine is to show this house what it could be, if it were properly kept. Yours is to produce a clean, quiet child and then become furniture. I am confident we shall both excel.”
***
Theo was admirable. He was also, the instant the soup came, desperate.
“Where is Miss Wrenfield going?” His voice carried down the table from his temporary perch beside his father, pitched with the particular clarity of a child who had not yet learned that some questions were furniture too.
“Why is she at the wrong end? She should be near. She always sits near, she helps me with the forks.”
“Miss Wrenfield is exactly where she wishes to be,” Lady Cassandra said, smooth as poured cream. “Eat your soup, Theodore, and do not trouble the company with the seating.”
“She does not wish to be there. Nobody wishes to be there. It is the end with all the least important people.” Theo had clearly absorbed more of the afternoon’s arrangements than anyone had intended. “Papa, why is she put down at the deaf end with the least important people?”
“She helps me with the forks,” Theo informed Lady Marsden directly, since the adults nearest him had proved useless. “There are too many, and they go in an order, and Miss Wrenfield knows the order. Nobody knows the order. They are only pretending.”
“Theodore,” said Lady Cassandra.
“Lord Theodore.” Elinor caught his eye from her place below the rector’s wife and gave him the small steadying look that had calmed a hundred lessons.
“You are presented to the company. A presented person attends to his soup and his manners and saves his questions for the schoolroom, where I shall answer each one of them. Show Lady Marsden how a future duke takes his soup. She has come a long way to be impressed.”
Theo, mollified by having an audience and a duty, took his soup like a future duke, and Lady Marsden was impressed, and said so at length, and the dangerous moment passed.
“A devoted boy,” observed the rector, comfortably. “Devoted to his governess. It speaks well of the governess.”
“It speaks of a boy who has been encouraged to be devoted,” Lady Cassandra said, lightly, to her plate, “which is a different thing, and not always the kindness it appears. But the soup is excellent, Vale, is it not? I had the cook do it the French way.”
The duke said the soup was excellent. But Elinor had watched his face while his son asked, twice, why the one person he trusted had been set so far away, and the duke’s face had not been furniture, whatever his voice had managed.
He had said nothing, because a man does not rearrange his own dinner table in front of fourteen guests without handing the county a week of talk.
He had governed it. But she had seen what the governing cost him, and understood, with a small cold drop, that a governed thing in that man was a thing only waiting for its moment.
The ladies withdrew, and the drawing room received them, and Elinor took up the needlework she had brought down precisely so that she would have somewhere to put her hands and her eyes that was not the conversation she was not invited to join.
She stitched, and stitched too tightly, the thread dragging the linen into small unhappy puckers, the needle going in harder than the work required.
She could not stop. The alternative was to sit with her hands empty in a room where Lady Cassandra was holding court on the subject of Italy as though she had built it herself.
“Of course, one cannot truly understand the Italian temperament without having wintered in Florence,” the lady was saying, to the rector’s wife, who had never wintered anywhere.
“Dear Vale and I have so often spoken of it. The light, the music, the language, which is simply made for the throat, so much more natural than our own harsh consonants.”
“You have been to Florence, Lady Cassandra?” asked the rector’s wife, with the dangerous innocence of the genuinely impressed.
“I have been everywhere of consequence in spirit, which I find is the part that signifies. One absorbs Italy. One need not have one’s boxes carried over the Alps to have the soul of the place.
” She smiled. “I always say there is no civilised drawing room in England that does not owe its whole tone to Italy, and I include this one, which I have taken some pains over.”
“You must play for us later, Lady Cassandra,” said Lady Marsden. “You always do, and so prettily.”
“If His Grace should wish it. I never play unless the master of the house wishes it. A woman ought to be an ornament to a house and never an imposition upon it, a distinction which a great many women have unaccountably failed to master.” Her glance grazed the middle of the room, where the governess sat over her too-tight stitching, and moved on contented.
“But we shall have music. A house wants music in it. This one has wanted a great many things a long time, and is only now, I think, beginning to be given them.”
The gentlemen rejoined them, and the conversation, encouraged by its hostess, settled comfortably onto Italy, where Lady Cassandra could preside, and the duke could be displayed as the cultivated centrepiece of the table she had built him.
“You must settle a dispute for us, Rothmere,” said Lord Wexcombe, comfortable and red. “My wife insists the great church in Florence is the Duomo, and I say Doom-oh. Lady Cassandra says it does not signify.”
“It signifies a great deal to the man who likes to be right,” the duke said.
“It is neither. It is Duomo, with the stress thrown forward, the way an Italian throws everything forward, including his opinions.” He turned his head, unhurried, and the whole warm room turned with it, and he looked down the length of it to the middle rank where Elinor sat with her too-tight stitching.
“But I am a poor authority. I have only stood in the thing. Miss Wrenfield has read every account of it ever set in English and three set in Italian, and she will know not only how it is said but why. Miss Wrenfield. How is it said, and what does it mean?”
The room turned to look at the governess.
Elinor set down her needle, because her hands had gone still of their own accord, and she did the only thing left to a woman placed in the middle of a table and then summoned to its head. She answered.
“Duomo, Your Grace, as you say, with the weight on the first syllable, the ‘o’ open, the way one says it when one is not afraid of the word.” She let the Italian sit in her mouth as the visiting master had taught her, unhurried, unashamed.
“It comes from the Latin domus, a house, the house of the divine, which is why a city has only one duomo, however many churches it keeps. The English call it the cathedral and lose the meaning. The Italians call it the house and keep it. They are a people who would rather be at home with the divine than impressed by it, which is, I have always thought, the whole of the difference between the two countries, said in a single word that Lord Wexcombe was very nearly right about.”