Chapter Nineteen
“And is it true, Your Grace, that you were the boy’s governess? Before? One hears the most extraordinary things, and I never know which of them to believe, and I find it is always best to ask the person directly.”
“It is perfectly true, Lady Marsden. I taught Lord Theodore his letters, his rivers and the order of the forks, and I am told I did it tolerably well, though the forks remain a battle to this hour.”
“How very modern.” Lady Marsden said it the way one says how very contagious. “And does it not feel strange, to sit at the table you once stood beside?”
“It felt strange for the first week. Now it only feels like dinner. One acclimatises to almost anything, I find, given a good chair and a poor enough conversation to practise on.”
Lady Wexcombe’s drawing room received that with the small frozen pause of a room deciding whether it had been insulted, and then Lord Wexcombe laughed, because he always laughed a half-second before he understood why, and the moment passed.
Across the room she found Lady Cassandra watching her with an expression of warm and patient interest that had nothing whatever warm in it.
It was Elinor’s first gathering as a duchess.
She had dressed for it plainly and exactly, as she dressed for everything now, and had come into the Wexcombe drawing room on her husband’s arm to find a county that did not in the least know what to do with her.
A governess they could have placed in an instant.
A duchess, just as readily. What undid the county was a governess who was a duchess, sitting in a gap it kept no chair for, and so it did the English thing, which was to be exquisitely polite to her face and count the silver after she had gone.
“Your Grace.” Lady Cassandra was beside her without warning, all warmth and lavender water.
“How brave of you to come out so soon. I said to Lady Wexcombe only this morning, I do hope the new duchess will not feel overwhelmed. It is so very much to take on at once, is it not? The dinners and the calls and the precedence, when one has spent one’s whole life on the other side of the bell? ”
“It is a great deal,” Elinor agreed. “But I find precedence rather simpler than the order of the forks, my lady, and I taught the forks for my bread, so I expect I shall contrive.”
“You are pleased to make light of it. I do admire that. I should be terrified, in your place, of putting a foot wrong before people who knew me when… But then I have never had your gift for being comfortable below my station, which I suppose is the very thing that fits a woman to rise so far above it.”
“Was that a compliment, my lady? I lose the thread of them so easily, they are wound so very tight.”
“Everything I say to you is a compliment, Your Grace. You must only learn to hear them.”
“Is Lady Cassandra teaching you to be a duchess?” asked the clergyman’s wife, arriving at Elinor’s elbow with the bright cruelty of the genuinely foolish.
“How generous of her. And had you no instruction at all before? In the management of a great house, I mean. One imagines it must be quite bewildering, all at once.”
“I managed a schoolroom for my bread, and a nursery, a sickroom, and a small boy with a great grief in him. I find a drawing room asks rather less of me than any of those. No one in a drawing room has ever once been sick down my front, and so I count the evening very nearly a holiday.”
“You will sit there, Your Grace, beside dear Mr Hartopp, who is a little deaf but very sound on drainage, and I am sure you will find a great deal to say to one another.”
Lady Cassandra had appointed herself the hostess’s deputy in the matter of the seating, as she appointed herself deputy in all matters where harm might be done in the gloves of helpfulness.
The place she indicated was halfway down the table, below two baronets’ wives and a clergyman, in the chair kept for poor relations and persons of education without the means to be anything by it.
Elinor knew the seat. She had sat in it like at the Rothmere table not two months ago, on the night of the Duomo, and she recognised the hand that had set her there now as the same hand that had set her there then.
“How thoughtful,” Elinor said. “Mr Hartopp and I shall settle the drainage of the entire county between the soup and the fish.”
She had decided, in the half-second available to her, to take the seat.
A scene at Lady Wexcombe’s table would be told for a year, and told against her; the grasping governess who could not bear to sit below her betters, and she had spent a lifetime declining to be the thing she would be told she was.
She would sit by Mr Hartopp, and she would be charming about drainage.
She would win the long way, as she had always won.
“You are very gracious, Your Grace,” murmured the clergyman’s wife, who plainly expected a scene and was disappointed not to be getting one.
“I am very practised,” Elinor said. “It comes to the same thing from a distance.”
She had got as far as the chair when her husband’s voice came down the length of the table, unhurried, carrying the way his voice carried when he had decided a thing.
“Her Grace will sit where she chooses,” Nathaniel said. “And I think she will choose the head, beside our hostess, where a duchess sits. Unless the table has been reorganised on some principle I have not been told of?”
The silence this time was not frozen. It was the held breath of two dozen people who had just understood that something is going to happen and that it is going to be worth watching.
“I only thought,” Lady Cassandra said, “that Her Grace might be more comfortable among people nearer her own, that is to say, that she might prefer the ease of a quieter part of the table, being accustomed to a quieter station and not yet quite at home in the glare of the better seats. I meant it as a kindness.”
“Did you arrange the seating, Cassandra, or did Lady Wexcombe?”
“I offered to assist. Our hostess has so much to think of.”
“And of all the help you might have offered, you arrived at seating a duchess below two baronets’ wives. That is a remarkable accident.”
“It is no accident at all,” said Lord Wexcombe, who had counted the chairs and was pleased with himself for it, and then went scarlet at having said the truth aloud in company.
“My husband counts chairs,” Lady Wexcombe said. “It is his one accomplishment, and he will not be parted from it. But he is right, Cassandra, for once in his life. You have put a duchess below the drainage. Whatever were you thinking of?”
“I was thinking of her comfort.”
“How like you. You are forever thinking of other people’s comfort, and they are forever ending up below the salt while you think of it.”
“You are all very good to debate my comfort,” Elinor said. “It is the most comfortable I have been made all evening, being debated like the drainage.”
“Were you truly thinking of her comfort?” Nathaniel asked again.
“Of course. One would not wish to put her on display before she is ready. She sits very prettily, our new duchess, but one would not wish to set her at the head merely to be looked at, like a fine vase carried out for company and put away after.”
“Her Grace is not a vase,” Nathaniel said.
He had not raised his voice. He did not need to. The whole table had gone over to him the moment he began, the way a field of corn goes over to a wind.
“She is not a thing to be carried out where she appears to her best advantage and set down again when the company has gone. She is not on display, and she is not on approval, and she is not, whatever the seating implies. She is the Duchess of Rothmere. She will sit at the head of any table I am at, beside any hostess gracious enough to keep her there, and she will sit there not because she is decorative but because she is my wife, and a man’s wife sits beside him.
I had thought that principle uncontroversial even in this county. ”
“But she was a governess, Vale.” It was Lady Marsden, unable to help herself, saying the thing the whole room was thinking.
“A month ago, she was teaching the child his forks. One hardly knows how a person is to be treated, when they have been so very thoroughly one thing and are now so very much another. It is most confusing. What has she become?”
“She has become married, Lady Marsden. That is the whole of the transformation, and it is not a rare one. It happens to women of every rank, and is survived, daily, by houses a great deal grander than this. She has not turned into a swan, nor a duchess by enchantment, nor a curiosity to be puzzled over between courses. She married me. You may treat her precisely as you would treat any duchess, which is to say with respect. You will find, I think, that she carries it a great deal better than most, having earned every other thing she has ever held.”
“Well said, Your Grace,” announced Lady Wexcombe, who had been waiting the whole evening for somebody to tell her how she ought to feel and was visibly relieved to be told firmly.
“She shall sit by me, and we shall talk of our husbands, who are each of them impossible in their own particular way, and I shall like her enormously. I can feel it coming on already, the way one feels rain in a knee.”
“Merely married,” Lady Cassandra repeated, very softly, into her glass, as though the word were a small wound she meant to keep.
“Merely married,” Nathaniel agreed. “It is a small word for it. I have not yet found the larger one. When I find it, I shall use it, and you will be the first to hear, but until then the seating will reflect the small one, which puts my wife at the head.”