Chapter Eleven The Wrong Table
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Wrong Table
The first insult arrived before Mary Beth had taken off her gloves.
The house stood six miles east of Blackthorn, a square gray place with too many windows and a carriage sweep newly rutted by three days of rain.
Mary Beth had come for the county hospital committee at four.
Ambrose had come because the owner of the estate, after hearing about the collapse at Blackthorn, had sent a note asking whether Mr. Tavener might spare half an hour to examine a bridge abutment that had begun shedding stone into the beck.
By half past six, both of them had been asked to stay for dinner.
That was where the arrangement became less generous.
Mary Beth entered the hall from the ladies’ withdrawing room just as a footman stepped in front of Ambrose and said, with the careful impatience reserved for people who ought to know their place, “The tradesmen are being given supper through the west passage, sir. Someone will show you.”
Ambrose had changed for dinner. His black coat was well cut, his white shirt immaculate, his waistcoat plain. Nothing about him suggested a mason who had wandered in carrying a trowel.
Nothing except, apparently, the absence of a title.
He glanced at the footman. “I am here at your master’s invitation.”
“Of course, sir. The estate gentlemen are through the west passage.”
Mary Beth crossed the hall.
“Mr. Tavener is dining with me.”
The footman turned. His face changed so quickly that she almost admired the training that restored it.
“Mrs. Blackthorn. I beg your pardon. I understood—”
“You understood incorrectly.”
Ambrose’s mouth tightened.
The footman bowed. “Yes, ma’am.”
Mary Beth removed one glove finger by finger. “Where is the drawing room?”
He indicated the double doors.
“Thank you.”
She walked toward them. Ambrose followed after a pause that told her he was already displeased.
“You did not need to do that,” he murmured.
“Apparently I did.”
“I could have corrected him.”
“He would have corrected his route, not his opinion.”
“And now he has corrected both?”
“No. But he knows I noticed. That is often the beginning of improved manners.”
Ambrose gave her a sideways glance. “You enjoy this.”
“Only when I am right.”
“So constantly.”
“Almost.”
His amusement appeared despite himself, then vanished when the drawing-room doors opened.
There were perhaps twenty people inside.
Mary Beth recognized most of them from the Sablehurst dinner or from the hospital meeting that afternoon.
Three women who had once found the far side of a ballroom urgently fascinating when Mary Beth approached now smiled with a warmth that would have been touching if it had not arrived within days of Lady Sablehurst’s approval.
Benedict stood near the fireplace.
His gaze moved first to Mary Beth, then to Ambrose beside her.
He did not frown. Benedict rarely wasted expression where stillness could do more.
“Mary Beth,” he said when they reached him. “I had not realized Mr. Tavener was joining us.”
“Neither had he until an hour ago.”
Ambrose inclined his head. “Sablehurst.”
Benedict’s eyes rested on him for one beat too long.
“Tavener. I hear Blackthorn’s wall has become the most discussed engineering work in Yorkshire.”
“That says more about Yorkshire conversation than my wall.”
Mary Beth hid a smile.
Benedict did not.
“You are nearly finished?”
“The rebuilt section reached the old sycamore yesterday. The drainage work will take longer.”
“An expensive lesson for the estate.”
“Less expensive than letting cottages slide into a field.”
“Naturally.”
The word was polished enough to reflect light.
Mary Beth had begun to understand that Benedict’s most effective condescension rarely sounded insulting until several seconds after he had spoken.
A gentleman near the window joined them and immediately began asking Ambrose about the failed wall.
Another wanted to know whether a culvert on his own land might be responsible for a flooded tenant road.
Within minutes, Ambrose was surrounded by men who would not have invited him to marry their sisters but were perfectly willing to entrust him with bridges, drainage, roads, and several thousand pounds of property.
Mary Beth drifted away before her temper became visible.
At the hospital committee, she had been asked for her opinion twice, a novelty she refused to examine too closely.
The first question concerned the cost of replacing linen.
The second concerned whether Blackthorn’s carriage might collect two women from the western villages on meeting days.
Neither request was important. The importance lay in the ease with which they were made, as though Mary Beth had always belonged among women who only a month earlier had treated her donation as a contamination risk.
She had said yes to the carriage and nothing about the hypocrisy. Ambrose had told her that if the work mattered, she should take the open door, so for once she had resisted the pleasure of slamming it on someone’s fingers.
Dinner was announced at eight.
The dining room was long and candle-bright, its table crowded with silver, flowers, cut glass, and enough forks to alarm a person of uncertain convictions. Mary Beth found her place card halfway down the table, with Benedict on her right and an elderly widow on her left.
Ambrose’s name was not beside any chair.
She read the table again.
Benedict noticed.
“There is a separate supper in the library for the estate men,” he said quietly.
Mary Beth turned to him.
“Estate men.”
“Agents, surveyors, the architect who is advising on the south wing. It is not meant as an insult.”
“How fortunate.”
Benedict lowered his voice. “Mary Beth.”
Across the room, Ambrose had stopped beside the doorway. A servant was explaining something to him.
He did not appear embarrassed. He appeared unsurprised, which was worse. Mary Beth could have answered embarrassment; she had no ready answer for a man who had expected precisely this and was irritated only with himself for briefly forgetting it.
The gentleman who had spent twenty minutes asking him about a flooded road passed Ambrose on his way to the table.
“Send me that sketch tomorrow, Tavener,” he said. “My man will know where to find you.”
Then he took his place between two titled men without waiting for an answer.
Mary Beth set her gloves beside her plate.
“Excuse me.”
Benedict caught her meaning at once.
“Do not.”
She turned back.
His voice remained pleasant. “You will embarrass your hosts.”
“They have survived the afternoon.”
“This is not Blackthorn.”
“I had noticed.”
“There are conventions in a house like this.”
“There are conventions in my house too. One of them is that a guest does not ask a man for professional advice and then feed him somewhere else because his father quarried stone.”
Benedict’s expression hardened by a degree.
“You are making a point no one requires.”
“I require it.”
Mary Beth walked to Ambrose.
He saw her coming and closed his eyes briefly.
“Please don’t,” he said under his breath.
“That seems to be the phrase of the evening.”
“Mary Beth.”
“You were invited to dinner.”
“I was invited to advise on a bridge and then offered food. There is a distinction.”
“Only if you accept it.”
“I do accept it.”
“I don’t.”
A few conversations nearby had grown quieter. Mary Beth felt the room notice and refused to lower her voice. She took Ambrose by the sleeve and led him toward the table.
“There is no place,” he said.
“There is now.”
The chair on Mary Beth’s left belonged to the elderly widow, who had not yet entered.
Beside it, a young gentleman’s card marked a place two seats farther down.
Mary Beth picked up her own card and moved it one chair to the left.
Then she took the blank space created beside her and placed Ambrose there.
A servant froze with a wine bottle in his hand.
Mary Beth handed him the displaced place card.
“Would you be kind enough to add a setting for Mr. Tavener?”
The servant glanced toward the head of the table.
“Ma’am, I—”
“A plate will do. I promise not to count the forks.”
Someone coughed.
Ambrose’s face had gone completely still.
Benedict remained standing at Mary Beth’s other side.
“You cannot rearrange another person’s dinner table,” he said quietly.
Mary Beth met his eyes.
“Watch me.”
The elderly widow arrived at that moment and surveyed the moved cards with frank curiosity.
“Have I been demoted?”
Mary Beth smiled. “Promoted. You are now closer to the claret.”
The widow considered the bottle.
“Then I support the revolution.”
A laugh escaped from somewhere down the table.
It broke the tension enough for the servants to move again.
A setting appeared.
Ambrose sat beside Mary Beth.
For the first ten minutes, he barely spoke to her.
That, more than any public objection, told her how angry he was.
Dinner continued because dinners always did. Soup arrived. Fish followed. Men discussed rain, rents, the harvest, and a parliamentary speech none of them had heard but all disliked. The women spoke about the hospital, a musicale in York, and a marriage Mary Beth only half remembered.
Ambrose was included whenever engineering arose and ignored whenever it did not.
The distinction became almost comic in its precision.
One gentleman asked him whether the repaired Blackthorn wall could survive another winter.
“If the drain is maintained,” Ambrose said.
“And if it is not?”
“Then stone will eventually lose an argument with water. Stone usually does.”
The gentleman laughed.
A moment later he turned across Ambrose to ask Benedict whether he intended to hunt in November, as though the man between them had become part of the furniture again.
Mary Beth drank her wine.
Ambrose caught her glance.
Do not, his expression said.
She had no intention of starting another war before the roast.
Benedict, maddeningly, behaved beautifully.