Chapter Twenty-Two #2
“You wrote to engineer a vacancy. You manufactured a scandal on a wet road, and you manufactured a grandmother’s outrage by the weekly post. You did both for the same reason, which was that you intended to be the next Duchess of Rothmere and had decided the only thing standing in the way was a governess who had to be made to look like a schemer before anyone noticed that the schemer was you.
It was patient and clever. It was two years of genuine work, and I will not insult it by calling it small.
But it is finished, and it is finished in the one room where finishing it costs you everything, and I think you knew, when we were announced, that it might. ”
“Her Grace did not rise by marrying me.” He turned, not to Cassandra now, but to the room, to the three ridings’ worth of names who had come to watch a governess be put in her place and were getting something they had not bargained for.
“I have heard that sentence in this county for a year, in forty mouths, that the governess rose. It is the wrong sentence. It has the direction backwards. I was a man who had locked every door in his house, including the one a small boy stood outside with his hands behind his back, and I was managing my grief by inflicting it. I was admired for it, in this county, by most of you, because a cold duke is a comfortable thing and asks nothing of the people around him. She did not rise by marrying me. I rose by deserving her, and it was the hardest climb of my life. I very nearly did not make it, and I would not have, without a governess who refused my first proposal to my face because it was a rescue and not a choice. The lowest I have ever stood in my life was the year before she came. Whatever I am worth tonight, I am worth because a parson’s daughter walked into my house in a wet travelling dress and declined to be frightened of me.
You may write that down, Lady Marsden, since you are clearly going to. ”
Lady Marsden, who had in fact been composing the letter in her head, had the grace to colour.
“Well.” Lady Wexcombe said it into the room from the place by the fire she had occupied all evening, in the unhurried voice of a woman who had decided a thing and meant the county to fall in behind her.
The county, which had been waiting a year for someone senior enough to tell it how to feel, turned to her gratefully.
“I have sat at Her Grace’s table, and I have sat at Lady Cassandra’s, and I will tell you which of the two I would sooner trust with a grandson, and it is not the one who has spent two years writing to other people’s grandmothers.
I said a month ago I like the new duchess enormously.
I find I was right, which is a sensation I enjoy and intend to repeat as often as the world permits.
Your Grace, you will dine with us on Thursday, and bring the boy, and we shall hear no more about wet roads, which bore me, and which I am now told never happened in the way we were all so generously offered them. ”
Cassandra stood very straight in her finer grey, in the centre of the knot that had been hers when the evening began and was now, by the slow magnetism of rooms, drifting by inches toward the door where the duchess stood.
She was not weeping. Nathaniel gave her that, watching her, and was almost sorry.
Whatever else she was, she had never once been the kind of woman who wept in a public room to soften a verdict, and she did not become one now.
“You were always going to choose the impossible one,” she said to him, quietly, under the rising noise, in a voice meant for the two of them and not for the county.
“I knew it the first week. I knew it watching you correct her Italian at your own table and having forgotten I was present. I told myself I could outlast it. It was the most foolish thing I have ever permitted myself, and it has cost me the most, which I expect is the moral, if you care for morals.” The gloves came up off the chair-back into her hand.
“I shall go to Bath. There is always a use in Bath for a woman who knows how a room is run.”
She went, and the county let her go, and the small distance she had to cross to the door was the longest walk Nathaniel had ever watched a person take.
The knot that had been hers thinned ahead of her as she came, not unkindly, but by the time she reached the door there was no one left who wished to be seen standing with her.
He found, to his own surprise, that he hoped Bath would be kind to her, and that the hope cost him nothing he wanted to keep.
“You waited,” Elinor said, when the room had remembered how to make noise, and the noise had risen enough to cover them. “You wanted to flatten her in the first sentence, and you waited because I asked you to. I felt you decide it.”
“I am learning to wait. It is recent, and it does not come naturally, but I expect to be congratulated each time until the novelty wears off, which at my rate of improvement will be somewhere in my sixtieth year.”
“You said I taught you that the wanting is not a sin.” She was not quite looking at him, looking instead at the door Cassandra had gone through, with something in her face that was not triumph and was kinder than triumph.
“You were listening. In the schoolroom that day. I thought you were only passing the door.”
“I have been listening at that door for a year, Nor.” He had heard the boy’s word for her by now, and had asked leave to borrow it for great occasions, and this he had decided was one.
“It is the best-attended door in the house. Shall we dance, before three ridings recover their tongues and come to apologise to you one at a time for the whole of the last year? I should like to be on the floor and unavailable when the queue forms.”