Chapter Two
“Three days on the coach from Hampshire, and not so much as a maid with you. You will forgive me for saying it, miss, but that is a great deal of road for a young lady to put behind her alone.”
Mr Hodge, who had kept the Greyhound at Ravensmere for twenty-two years and had formed in that time a settled body of opinion about which travellers would give him trouble and which would give him none, set her trunk inside the door and considered her with the frank, unhurried attention of a man entitled by long service to his own conclusions.
“It is a great deal of road,” Cordelia agreed, “and I have come to the end of it with very little to show for the journey beyond a firm conviction that I never wish to see the inside of a mail coach again as long as I live.”
That earned her a smile, which she had angled for, because a landlord who smiles at you on the first evening is a landlord who will be slower to put you out on the last.
“There is a fire in the parlour and a room above it, two shillings the night, and supper at seven if you will have it, though I will warn you the supper is whatever Mrs Hodge decides it is to be, and you will get no vote in the matter.”
“I have not had a vote in anything for some weeks, Mr Hodge. I find I have very nearly stopped missing it.”
He laughed at that, a short, surprised bark of a thing.
“Then you will do well enough up here, miss, for the north settles a great many things for a body before ever they are awake to argue them, the weather the worst of the lot.” He picked the trunk up again, and she understood that she had been, in some small way she could not yet make use of, accepted.
“And how long will we have the pleasure, miss?”
“That depends upon a gentleman, which I am aware is a mortifying thing to confess to one’s innkeeper within a quarter hour of arriving, and I will thank you not to require me to explain it any further than that.”
“I will not require anything of the sort.” He set the trunk on the bottom stair, and a slower, more careful note came into his voice.
“Though if your gentleman is up at the Hall, miss, I would counsel you against pinning your hopes to a swift reply. It is a full house this autumn, what with the Dowager in residence, and Lady Helena Stanford and the whole of her people besides, and that door is slow to open even for them as are looked for.”
“I am not, as it happens, looked for.”
“No, I didn’t suppose you were,” said Mr Hodge, with the gentleness of a man who had just understood a good deal more than he had been told.
***
She had set out from Marchmont with three pounds and a handful of shillings and arrived at Ravensmere with appreciably less, the road having taken its tolls in the ordinary way, in turnpikes and indifferent suppers and a bed at Doncaster she had paid for and scarcely used.
Somewhere north of there, she had given away one of her three handkerchiefs to a clergyman’s wife who wept through an entire stage over a son in the navy and could not say why she wept, and Cordelia, who could not have said why either, had not asked for it back, though it had been her best, with her mother’s initials worked into the corner.
She was learning that grief travelled. It got onto coaches and sat down beside strangers, and the only courtesy a person could offer it was a clean handkerchief and the tact not to ask after its business.
She slept that night with the abrupt totality of a body that has stopped negotiating, and woke to a thin bright morning, and put on the grey wool that had been her best gown for three years and would have to go on being her best gown for a good many more.
The bonnet she settled over her hair was older still, made over twice with her own hands from one that had been her mother’s, and she understood precisely what it was and precisely what it told the world about her circumstances, and she tied its ribbons beneath her chin with a steady hand, because there was nothing else to wear and no one else to wear it.
The chain lay where it always lay, beneath the high collar, the ring warm from the night against her breastbone. Cordelia pressed her palm flat over it once, as if to steady herself by the small hard shape of it, and went below.
The woman at the inn was setting out a tray of cups.
“Ravensmere Hall?” she repeated, looking up. “You’ll be wanting the north road, miss.”
“How far?”
“Two miles, if you do not mind the climb.”
“I have come from Hampshire,” said Cordelia. “I shall try to survive two miles of Yorkshire.”
The woman’s mouth twitched. “Then keep to the road past the church, and do not take the first lane, whatever anyone tells you. It looks shorter and is not. You will see the house before you reach it.”
“That sounds difficult to miss.”
“It is meant to be.”
Cordelia thanked her, adjusted her gloves, and went out into the morning.
***
The road climbed the whole of the two miles, up out of the snug grey village and onto a shoulder of open country where the wind had opinions. By the time Ravensmere came into view at the head of its long approach, it was a great deal larger than anything she had thought to prepare herself for.
She had grown up in a house one could comfortably shout across.
Ravensmere had been built to be looked at from a distance, and to make the person looking aware of the distance.
It succeeded with her entirely. By the time she had walked the length of the drive, she was conscious of the full smallness of herself: her bonnet, her card, and her three-years’-best gown.
Still, she climbed the three shallow steps to the door, because she had not come the length of England to be daunted by an arrangement of stone.
The footman who opened the door was young and very correct.
“Your business, miss?”
Cordelia offered her card. “I wish to see the Duke of Ravensmere.”
He took it from her gloved hand and read it without expression.
Then his eyes flicked to her bonnet. It was a small thing, that glance, over and done in under a second.
Cordelia had spent the walk up the drive bracing herself against a great many possibilities, and had somehow not thought to brace against this particular one.
The footman’s eyes went down to the made-over bonnet and came back up again. In the space of that one downward flick, he arrived, without malice and without the smallest hurry, at a complete and settled opinion of her. She watched him arrive at it, and could do nothing in the world to prevent him.
“His Grace is not receiving this morning, miss.”
“I have not asked to be received.” She kept her voice level, because level was the one coin she had left, and she meant to spend it with care.
“I have come a very long way on a matter that touches His Grace’s own family, and the name written on that card will mean something to him.
I ask only that you carry it up and let him decide for himself whether he is at home to it. ”
The footman looked again at the card. He looked again at the bonnet. The second glance finished whatever the first had begun.
“His Grace is not receiving,” he said, in precisely the tone he had used before.
“Will you at least carry up my name and let him refuse it himself?”
“His Grace is not receiving, miss.”
The door had already begun to move, without violence, without so much as discourtesy: the slow, even swing of a heavy thing closed by a man who had decided she was not a person to whom anything further was owed.
The warm wedge of the hall narrowed in front of her and went out like a pinched candle, and then the cold painted wood stood an inch from her face, and a bolt settled home on the other side of it with a small, final, well-oiled sound.
Cordelia stood on the top step for the length of three slow breaths.
Then she turned and went down the steps and walked back along the half mile of drive with her head up and her bonnet level, on the chance that someone was watching from a window, because if she was to be turned from this door like a pedlar, she would at the very least be turned from it like a pedlar with a straight back.
Somewhere inside that house was the boy of twelve from the rose garden. She put one hand briefly to the chain beneath her collar and kept walking.
***
Two floors above the door that had just closed, in a morning room that took the southern light, the Dowager Duchess of Ravensmere was not aware that anyone had called, and would not have thought it worth being made aware of.
Some weeks earlier, she had given instructions that callers of a certain description were to be turned away without reference to her.
The instructions were being followed, which was the entire purpose of instructions, and the Dowager had a great respect for purpose.
She had a clearer recollection of the letter.
It had arrived a fortnight since, in an unfamiliar hand, and she had opened it as she had lately taken to opening a good many things meant for her son.
A man who had come home from the war with patches gone dark all across his memory, and one whole part of his past put out entirely, could not reasonably be expected to judge which letters deserved his attention and which were only the world trying its luck against a wounded duke.
She had not cared for the opening lines.
There was in the thing a quiet certainty of being owed something that she had met before in people who wanted money, or position, or a foothold in a family higher than their own.
She read far enough to place it among the three without troubling to learn which, then crossed the room and gave the letter to the fire.
It had taken very little time to burn, being only paper. She watched it with the perfect calm of a woman who believed she was sparing her son from precisely the species of person who composed such letters, then returned to her own correspondence and thought no more about it.
A signature she had not recognised had gone into the grate, and ash, in the Dowager’s long experience, asked nothing further of anyone.
***
Cordelia walked the two miles back to the Greyhound and did not cry, partly because crying wanted either privacy or company and she had neither, and partly because despair, like grief, was something she could not afford just now.
She sat in the parlour through the short grey afternoon and made herself think instead, which was harder work than weeping and a good deal more to the purpose.
Mrs Hodge brought tea without being asked for it and set it down beside her.
“Thank you,” Cordelia said.
Mrs Hodge looked at her for a moment too long. “The Hall did not receive you, then.”
“No.”
“I am sorry for it.”
“So am I.” Cordelia wrapped her hands round the cup, though the tea was too hot to drink. “Tell me, Mrs Hodge, does the Duke ever leave the Hall?”
The woman’s brows rose. “Leave it?”
“I begin to suspect the front door has no intention of admitting me.”
“The front door has no intentions of its own, miss. The people behind it have a great many.”
“That was very much my conclusion.”
Mrs Hodge gave the smallest approving nod, as though Cordelia had passed some local examination. “His Grace is seen at church, now and then.”
“Church.” Cordelia lifted her head.
“When he is well enough for it. The Dowager likes him seen there. A duke ought to be seen in his pew, she says, and I daresay a duchess would know.”
“And the vicar?”
“That would be the Reverend Mr Lyndon. A kind enough old soul, and lonely with it, which to my mind is the most useful thing a clergyman can be to a person newly come to a place. He has buried the half of this parish and christened the other half, and he sups up at the Hall of a Tuesday whether the Hall has the appetite for him or no.”
“And has the Hall the appetite?”
“The Hall has little appetite for anything it has not invited a fortnight beforehand, miss. But the Dowager holds that a duke must be seen to keep his vicar, and so up Mr Lyndon goes of a Tuesday, and is fed, and is thanked, and is sent home again. He bears the whole of it a deal better than I should in his shoes.”
Cordelia looked down at the tea, and the answer, once spoken near enough, became plain.
A letter could be burnt. A caller could be turned from the step.
But a duke did not live only behind his own front door.
He went to church. He had a vicar. And a vicar held one privilege granted to very few people alive: the right to put a thing into a great man’s hand of a Sunday and call it the plain business of his soul.
“Does Mr Lyndon receive callers?” she asked.
“He receives anybody at all, miss. That is his whole trouble in life, and the saving of a good many besides who had nowhere else to carry their troubles. Were you wanting the church, then?”
“I was wanting the church,” Cordelia said, and discovered, a little to her own surprise, that saying the words had put something back into her that the closing of the door had taken out.
“In the morning. I have a letter to write tonight, and a far better notion than I had this morning of where to put it.”