Epilogue
“Nor, the coachman has put the trunks on wrong. The heavy ones go under and not on top, it is in the guidebook, so you are to come and be a duchess at him.”
“I shall come and be a duchess at him directly. Is it the green trunk or the brown that has offended you?”
“Both. He has stacked them the way a man stacks who has never had to find anything in the dark, and we shall be finding things in the dark for two months, and I have told him so, and he laughed, which he will be sorry for at the first leaking inn.”
“And does the coachman know we have changed the order? That it is Rome first now?”
“He does not, because it is not settled, because you have not settled it, which is why you are to come at once.”
She came out onto the gravel into a morning she had been imagining, in one form or another, since she was a girl, and found that no book had got it right, because no book had thought to put the people in.
The forecourt of Rothmere Hall was a controlled riot of departure.
Two travelling carriages stood loaded, with maids carrying out the last of it.
Mrs Garnett stood on the steps with a list she had no intention of consulting, having long since committed the house to memory and the staff to terror.
It was the same gravel Elinor had stood on two springs before, in a wet travelling dress, with a single box and a written character and a duke who had studied her like a delivery made in error. She had not known, that day, that a house could be this loud.
The house had spent the year unlearning its silence a room at a time, as patiently as it had once learned it.
The duchess’s rooms that had been shut for years stood open now, aired and lived in, given over to a duchess who used them and left her books face down in them.
A breakfast room once laid for one was laid for three each morning, argued in, and left in a state Mrs Garnett pretended to deplore.
Upstairs the nursery door stood open on its own account, with no one any longer keeping a key against it.
“You are looking at the gravel again,” Nathaniel said, arriving at her shoulder with his coat half on and the particular ease he wore now, that had taken a year to grow and would, she suspected, never quite stop surprising her.
“You do it whenever we are about to leave the house. You stand on the spot you arrived on, and you go somewhere I cannot follow.”
“I am only thinking that the last time I stood here with luggage, the house was silent, and a man told me he had wanted a tutor of unsentimental character. I read the silence the way I read everything, and decided I had come to the saddest house in England.”
“You had. You have since ruined it. It is now the loudest house in three ridings, and I am told the noise can be heard from the village on a still day. The vicar has remarked upon it, and I have informed him that he may pray for our quiet or come and produce it himself, and he has not taken up the commission.”
“Mrs Garnett, does the house truly fall without us, do you think?”
“It does not, Your Grace.” Mrs Garnett did not look up from the list she was reading.
“It stood seven years on silence. It will stand two months on me. Go and see your foreign places, and bring the boy back with all his limbs and most of his Latin, and do not write to me about the management, for I shall be enjoying not being written to, and I have earned it.”
“You will write to us, though. If anything wants knowing.”
“I shall write if the house burns, Your Grace, and not for less, and it will not burn, because I have told it not to. Now go, before the boy reorganises the second carriage, and we are here until Tuesday.” The plain face did something it had learned to do only in the last year, which was to soften without apologising for it.
“It is a fine thing to watch, if you will pardon my saying. Two springs ago I shut the door on a wet governess and thought, there is trouble, that one looks at a house and sees what is wrong with it. I was right. You were trouble. It is the best thing that has come up that drive since the old duke’s day, and I have decided to forgive you for it. ”
The kitchen, when she went down to make her farewell to it, smelled of a campaign.
Mrs Coombe had been at war with the journey for a week, on the settled principle that no foreign country could be trusted to feed a Vale properly, and the long table was ranked with the spoils, jars and twists of paper and a cold pie built to survive a siege.
“You will take these, and you will not argue with me about the weight of them,” Mrs Coombe said, not turning from the range.
“There is the seed cake the young master will not travel without, and there is a thing in the brown jar that is not to be opened before Dover, and there is enough for the first day so that you are not at the mercy of an inn before you have got your land legs, which a person never has on the first day, whatever they tell you.”
“Mrs Coombe, we are going to Italy. They are said to have food in Italy. There is a rumour of it in all the books.”
“I have heard the rumour. I do not credit it. The young master has told me what they put in their rice, and I have told him I will believe a rice that fights back when I have seen it, and until then he travels with a pie.” She turned at last, and her cross face was doing the thing it did when it was not cross at all.
“You taught him to want things, Your Grace. Two years ago, that child wanted nothing, would ask for nothing, sat at his lessons like a small grey man waiting to be told the worst. Now he wants Italy, an argument about trunks, and a rice that fights back. I do not forget who taught him the wanting. You will have your pie, and you will let me give it to you, because it is the only language I have got for the thing, and I am too old to learn another.”
Elinor took the pie, and did not argue about the weight.
“There is a letter for you,” Nathaniel said, when she came up, holding it out with an expression she could not at once place. “From Bath. I confess I read the direction and very nearly did not give it to you until we were across the Channel and safely unable to turn back and call upon anyone.”
It was from Lady Cassandra, though the seal was a new one, a crest Elinor did not know.
“She has married,” Elinor said, reading.
“A Sir Marcus Holloway, a widower of considerable property and, she is at some pains to tell me, very poor management, which she has undertaken to correct. She runs his house, and his three unmarried sisters, and the better half of the Bath subscription assemblies, and she writes to inform me of it in case I imagined her diminished, which she is plainly determined I shall not.” She lowered the letter.
“It is the most Cassandra thing I have ever read. There is not one warm word in it, and it is, I think, almost kind, in the only dialect she speaks. She found her use. She said she would.”
“She has invited us to call, when we are next in Bath, in the tone of a woman issuing a summons rather than an invitation, and she has underlined the word next, so that I shall know she expects there to be one.” Elinor turned the page.
“She asks after the boy by his proper name and title, very correctly, and does not ask after you at all, which is how I know she has not entirely recovered, and is too proud to pretend she has.”
“Are you sorry for her, still?”
“A little. Not enough to spoil the morning. She wanted a house to run and a room to be the cleverest woman in, and she has got both, in Bath, which is exactly the size of want she always had.” She folded the letter.
“I shall write back from Rome. It will annoy her enormously that I got there first.”
“And there is the other letter,” Nathaniel said, “which you will want before we lose the morning to Cassandra entirely. From Estbury.” He gave it to her.
“Her ladyship has heard that the house is respectable again, that the talk has died, and that the boy is thriving under a duchess no marchioness in England may call unfit. She does not apologise. She is too old and too grand for it, but she withdraws her objection to Theo in the same breath she pretends never to have made it. She asks, very stiffly, whether the boy might write to her of his travels, as she has a fancy to know what Rome is like from someone who will tell her the truth of it.”
“Then he shall write to her,” Elinor said, “at length, with the dates correct and a guide corrected in every letter, and she will learn what the rest of us have learned, which is that there is no arguing with the boy once he has the right of a thing. She lost a grandson she had never met to a correspondent she should not have trusted. She may have him back as a grandson she knows. It is a better bargain than she had any right to, and I shall make certain Theo gives her full measure of it.”
“Speaking of which.” Nathaniel drew the worn blue book from his coat, the travelling journal that had been her wedding gift to herself in everything but name, its first pages already filling with three hands and Theo’s defiant spelling.
“The route. Theo wishes it ratified before we lose the morning. He has drawn it out, and he has a question of order he says only you can settle, because you are the one who made the rule.”
“What rule? I have made him a great many. He keeps them filed and produces them against me at the worst moments, which I taught him to do and now bitterly regret.”
“Greece before Rome. The penance. You decreed it in the map room three weeks before we married, that I should be made to earn Rome by going everywhere else first, because I had spent my one Tour buying it without seeing it. Theo has the route as Greece, then Rome, last, according to your sentence. He wants it confirmed before the coachman is allowed to move.”
She looked at the boy on the gravel, at the loud house, and at the man beside her who had spent years standing at windows and now stood in doorways, in the room, on the day, with every shutter open.
What the rule had been for, and whether the thing it meant to teach had been learned, took her only a moment to weigh.
“Strike it out,” she said. “Rome first. Then Greece.”
“You are lifting the sentence.”
“You have served it. You earned Rome the long way, in this house, every day for a year, in a hundred rooms you made yourself stay inside of. You do not have to earn it twice on a map. We shall go to Rome first.”
Theo took the amendment, and wrote it into the blue book in his own hand, Rome first then Greece, with a flourish under it to show the matter closed.
They got into the carriage, and the staff had come out onto the steps to see them go, the whole transformed household of a house that had once kept its people as quiet as its rooms. Mrs Coombe stood with her arms folded over the certainty of having sent enough pie.
Mrs Garnett stood a step above the rest, where she belonged and a scattering of maids and a footman or two filled in behind.
“Any regrets, Your Grace?” Nathaniel asked, below Elinor, his hand still under her hand. “Last chance to be left safely at home, where nothing leaks, and no rice fights back.”
“None at all. I spent my whole life going to the world in books, one cold room at a time, and wanting it so quietly I forgot I was wanting.” She settled into the carriage beside the boy, and the pie, and her husband came up after her and pulled the door, and the great loud house began, very gently, to move.
The carriage took the avenue at a walk, and the gates came up. They were the same gates a hired chaise had carried her through one wet evening with a single box.
“You have gone quiet,” Nathaniel said. “You do it at thresholds. The hall, the altar, now the carriage step. You go somewhere I am not let to follow, and you come back having decided a thing.”
“I have just decided I was wrong for years about what I wanted in all those cold rooms. I thought it was the places. I had the want, and the object of it muddled, the way one does in the dark.”
“And now I find that going was never the thing I wanted most. I have the thing I wanted most already, here, in a carriage, arguing about trunks.” She put her hand into her husband’s hand on the seat between them, and watched her stepson fog the glass with the breath of a boy about to see the world.
She did not look back again at the house, because everything in it that she could not do without was in the carriage with her.
“The world is only where we are taking it.”
The End
Thank You for Reading “A Duke Worth Reaching”, I hope you loved it!I’m so grateful for your support.