Chapter Nineteen #2
“A moment, Your Grace.” Elinor had not spoken through the whole of it, and the room came round to her now the way a room comes round to a portrait that has cleared its throat.
“You have all been very good, to take such trouble over where I am to sit. I should like to settle it myself, since I am the one who must occupy the chair through three courses and the drainage. I will sit at the head, beside Lady Wexcombe, who I think will bear me. Not because my husband has placed me there, though I am grateful that he would pull down a wall to do it. I will sit there because I have decided that I should like to. A woman who sits where she is placed is furniture, however fine the placing. A woman who sits where she chooses is a guest. I have been the furniture in better houses than this one, and I find, on the whole, that I prefer the other thing. Shall we go in?”
They went in. Elinor sat at the head beside Lady Wexcombe, who turned out, once it was settled, to be perfectly glad of her, the county having only wanted someone braver to decide the question first. The dinner was long, and the talk recovered, and the drainage was discussed at the proper end of the table by the people qualified to discuss it.
Elinor was a great success, in the particular way a person is a success when a room had been forbidden to be unkind and discovered, to its own surprise, that it would rather like her anyway.
It was Lady Wexcombe herself who raised the question about the boy, gently, over the fish.
“And dear Lord Theodore? We were all so sorry to hear there was talk of sending him away to school, so young. His grandmother is most insistent, one hears. Is it settled? Is the child to go?”
“His grandmother is most insistent,” Elinor agreed.
“And Theodore will go to school, when he is ready for it and not a day before, and he will go because he wishes to and not because anyone wishes him gone. He is nearly eight. He has only just got a father who stays in the room. We are not going to undo that to satisfy a calendar or a grandmother. When the day comes that he is eager for Latin and a great deal more mud than we can supply at home, he will go, gladly, and come home in the holidays to be insufferable about rowing. That is the whole of the plan. It is not very dramatic, but I find the good plans rarely are.”
“That,” said Lady Wexcombe, “is the most sensible thing I have heard said about a child in twenty years, and I have raised four of them and buried my opinions on most of it. You will do, Your Grace. I did not look to say so when you came through my door, and at my age I have learned to enjoy being wrong, since it happens so seldom now.”
The school thread, which had begun in a cold letter carried by a private rider before light, closed quietly over the fish at a neighbour’s table, on the new duchess’s own terms.
Lady Cassandra found her at the end of the evening, by the cloaks, when the carriages were being called and there were no witnesses worth performing for, and her voice when it came had nothing left in it to spend on charm.
“You won the table, Your Grace. Enjoy it. They are weathervanes, the whole county, they will adore you by Sunday and have forgotten they ever hesitated by Michaelmas.”
“You are gracious in defeat, my lady.”
“I am nothing of the kind. I am only too tired tonight to be otherwise. He did it very prettily, the defending. Did you remark it? He never once defended me, in two years, from a single slight, and I bore a great many on his account, at tables not half so kind as that one. For you, he routs a county within a month of the wedding. Do you know why?”
“Because I am his wife, my lady, and you are not.”
“Because he chose you.” The last of the polish went off the words, and what lay underneath was very near to grief.
“Over me. With both his eyes open. I offered him every sensible thing a man in his position could want, and he chose the governess with the one box and the dead father. I have spent a month trying to understand it, and I cannot, and I do not believe for a moment that you understand it any better. I can see on you that you do not. You have got the man, Your Grace, and you have not the first idea why he took you, and that, I confess, is the only morsel of this whole business that has given me the smallest pleasure. We are not so unalike, you and I. We are both standing in that man’s house, wondering what on earth we are for. ”
She went out to her carriage and left the thing standing in the cloakroom where she had dropped it.
It should have been a comfort. A defeated rival had told her, to her face, that he had chosen her over Cassandra with both his eyes open, the very sentence Elinor had been starving for since a cracked door three weeks before.
And it landed wrong, as the half-heard thing through that door had landed wrong, because the word in Cassandra’s mouth had meant only selected, the more serviceable of two applicants.
Elinor’s ear had gone so crooked on the subject that she could no longer hear the word said straight.
It should have been the happiest night of her short reign, and it was very nearly that, and the very nearly was the trouble.
She found the flaw in it in the carriage home, in the dark, with her husband opposite.
He had defended her magnificently. He had made a whole county seat her at its head, called her his wife in a voice that brooked no argument, routed Cassandra before the very people Cassandra most wished to impress.
Her rank, her seat, her dignity, every outer wall of her, held with the whole of his formidable self.
And then he had ended it by telling a room of strangers that he had not yet found the larger word.
He would hold her position to his last breath and still could not say whether he had chosen her or filled a vacancy with the likeliest applicant.
A woman could be defended like a fortress and loved not at all, and Elinor rode home a triumphant duchess in her plain grey silk but did not yet know which she was.
“You were magnificent tonight,” he said, across the dark. “You took the whole room from me, and I did not even mind. I should like to have watched it from the back of the hall, as a stranger, and fallen a little in love with the duchess at the head of the table, the way every other man there did.”
“Did they?”
“Wexcombe will be insufferable about you for a month.”
“You are quiet yourself, for a man who has won an evening,” she said, turning it back, because she could not say the true thing and would not say a false one to a question that gentle.
“You are quieter. You won, and you ought to gloat, and I should like to watch you gloat, for I have surely earned the spectacle.”
“I am only tired,” she said, which was the first lie she had told him since the wedding, and she knew he understood that it was one, but neither of them said anything more the whole way home.