Chapter Thirteen #2
There was a silence of a particular texture, the silence of fourteen people discovering that the furniture has a mind. Then Lord Wexcombe laughed with delight at being very nearly right.
“Well,” said Lady Marsden, who liked to be the one impressed and disliked being beaten to it. “Well. That is a great deal more than I learned of Italy from a winter in Florence, and I had the boxes carried over the Alps and everything.”
The rector’s wife looked at the governess as though a teapot had recited Virgil. “Where did you learn such a thing, Miss Wrenfield? You have not been to Italy, have you?”
“I have never been out of England. I learned it the way the poor learn everything, by reading it a great many times in a cold room and wanting it very much. Wanting is an excellent tutor. It does not let you forget the lesson.”
“There,” said the duke, into the silence, with great satisfaction.
“I told you she would know why. I keep the cleverest woman in three counties in my schoolroom and pay her to spend it on a boy of seven, which is either the best bargain I have ever made or the most extravagant, and I have not yet decided which.”
Elinor took up her needle again, because the alternative was to look at him, and she did not dare. But the room was recalibrating around her, the small adjustments of fourteen people deciding she was a person after all.
Lady Cassandra was smiling. She smiled all the rest of the evening.
But the smile had changed its nature somewhere between the soup and the Duomo.
It had lost its polish entirely, and had become something private and patient.
The smile of a woman who had watched the man she was trying to court for two years prefer a governess’s mind, before the very audience she had spent the evening trying to buy.
At the door, while the carriages were called and the guests gathered their wraps, Lady Cassandra found Elinor alone for a moment, and her voice, when it came, was warm and low and stripped of every ornament, the public face set down like a fan she had no further use for that night.
“You were magnificent, Miss Wrenfield. Truly. I shall not forget it.” The smile did not move at all.
“I take such a tender interest in your education. I find tonight that I shall begin to take an interest in your history as well. Where you have studied and whom you have served. What was said of you when you left each place, and whether it was said kindly. A clever woman has a long road behind her, and a road may be walked in both directions by anyone with the leisure for it. I have a great deal of leisure, and a great many correspondents in a great many counties, and, as of this evening, nothing left to lose by setting them to work. Sleep soundly. You have given me my occupation for the season.”
She was gone before Elinor could answer, into the warm noise of departing guests, leaving the threat standing in the hall as neatly as she left everything.
***
“You should not have done that, Your Grace.”
She found him in the gallery, because the gallery had become the one room in the house where the truth was permitted to walk about with its shoes off.
“I settled a point of pronunciation. It is a thing dukes do. It is nearly the whole of what we are for.”
“You did not settle a point of pronunciation. You stood up in a room your guests had been assembled to admire Lady Cassandra in, and you turned the entire table to look at me. You called me the cleverest woman in three counties in front of the woman who has spent two years arranging to be exactly that in your eyes. You should not have drawn their attention to me. You do not know what it costs, and I do, and I have been counting the cost.”
“I did not draw attention,” the duke said. “I corrected blindness, which is another matter entirely, and you of all people should know the one from the other, having spent your life being looked through by people too important to see what was in the middle of their own table.”
“And tomorrow the county will tell everyone the governess speaks Italian. And the day after that her ladyship will tell them something quieter about the governess, and you will not be in the room to settle the pronunciation of it. Which story do you suppose a county keeps, Your Grace? The flattering one about a clever woman, or the interesting one about a clever woman who has got above her station in a widower’s house? ”
“Then I will contradict the second story wherever I hear it.”
“You cannot contradict a story you are the subject of. That is the whole trap of it. The more loudly you defend me, the more certainly you prove her point, which is only ever going to be that you defend me. A duke does not stand up for the help, Your Grace, unless the help has become something other than help to him, and every soul at that table did the arithmetic the instant you turned your head. I did it in the carriage. She did it on the steps. You are the only person in the county who has not yet finished the sum, and you are the one who set it.”
“Then what would you have me do?” There was no anger in it, which was worse than anger.
“Seat you among the deaf for the rest of your life and look through you with the others, to keep you safe. I have done that to a person, Miss Wrenfield. I did it to my wife. I stood at a window and kept her safe from my attention until she died of the safety. I find I have wholly lost the taste for it.”
“I would have you see me in private, where it costs only the two of us, and look through me in public, where it costs only me. That is all I am asking, and it is not a romance. It is an account. I have done the sum a great many times in a great many houses, and it comes out the same every time. You keep refusing the answer because the answer is ugly and you have lately become a man who would rather be kind. But kind in public is not kindness to me. It is only kindness to your own conscience, paid for out of my character, and I cannot afford the rate.”
It was the truest thing either of them had said all evening, and the cruellest, and she watched it land on him as the cost of things had always landed on her, fully, and with no appeal.
“It was kind,” she said, more gently, because she had drawn blood and had not meant to draw quite so much.
“What you did. I shall keep it. A man called me the cleverest woman in three counties at a duke’s table, once, and I shall take it out and look at it when I am old and teaching some other woman’s child in some other cold room.
But you have made her hate me, Your Grace.
Not distrust me, not warn me, not manage me.
Hate me. A woman who fears you will take her place is one thing, but a woman who has watched you give it away in public is quite another, and the second one does not write careful letters.
She writes the other kind. And I am the one without a family to write back. ”