Chapter Seven
“The children will eat in the dining room,” said Cecilia. “I know we dined there once when they came, but since then, they have been eating in their nursery, which does not seem quite right.”
She said it pleasantly, in the same tone she kept for the household accounts and the morning post, composed and entirely without aggression, which she had found left a person nothing obvious to push against.
Gideon looked up from his estate correspondence, deciding plainly, in the moment, whether this counted as an intrusion or a conversation. “They have a nursery.”
“They have a nursery, with an adequate table and two adequate chairs, neither of which seats three children, and the whole of which announces very plainly that the children are to stay in the nursery and the adults elsewhere, and that no one is to entertain any expectation of the household ever consolidating into a family.”
He set the paper down evenly, a man who knew that setting things down sharply was a form of speech he was declining to use. “I take my meals in my study.”
“You are welcome to go on doing so. I am not speaking of you. I am speaking of Rosalind, Tabitha, and Louisa, who have lost their parents and have come to a house full of strangers, and who will be a great deal the better for being told, by the plain fact of a laid table, that they are expected to belong here and not merely to be lodged.”
“The dining room is not designed for children.”
“No dining room is designed for children. Children are designed for dining rooms, and the adjustment only ever runs one way.”
He was quiet, and she watched him weigh it; the careful, contained thinking that moved behind his grey eyes like weather behind glass.
He was not a man who gave way to pressure; she had established that much in a week, but he was a man who gave way to a better argument, which she found both inconvenient and, privately, quite respectable.
“They are loud,” he said at last.
“Louisa is loud, but Rosalind and Tabitha are not. Louisa is four, which is the one age at which a great deal of noise is both perfectly natural and, just at present, something of a mercy.”
He was quiet for a moment, and when he spoke again, the evenness of it had thinned.
“They are easier when I am not in the room. I have watched it from the doorway. The eldest unbends a little; the youngest one sings to herself over her toys. A man might be forgiven for concluding that the kindest thing he can offer at their dinner table is his absence from it.”
“He might. He would be entirely wrong, but he might.” She kept her voice level.
“They are easier because they are still waiting to discover what you are, and a man who is never in the room cannot be discovered, only feared in the abstract, which is a great deal worse. You are asking to be excused on the grounds of a kindness, Your Grace, when it is really your own comfort, and I find I am not willing to let you have it at their expense.”
He had no ready answer to that either, and reached, in the end, for the last argument left to him. “It is my house.”
“It is. And those three did not come to it to eat off trays in an empty nursery. They came to be given a family. If you find you cannot manage dinner, Your Grace, that is your limitation, and not theirs to be taught.”
The silence after it was considerable. She had not meant to put it quite so baldly.
The words had come with their own momentum, the way true things sometimes did, stripped of whatever softening she might have given them.
She held his eyes and waited to learn whether she had founded something or wrecked it.
His reaction, though, was not one he expected. He picked up his paper and returned to his columns of figures with the flat finality of a closed subject, and Cecilia left him to it.
***
The day went on in its ordinary shape: lessons in the morning and the gardens afterwards, with Louisa enormous in her enthusiasm, Tabitha warming by slow degrees, and Rosalind at great pains to seem unmoved by any of it.
She refused to let herself think about the morning’s quarrel but thought about it without pause.
She had told a duke, in his own house and in the first week of her marriage, that his difficulty with dinner was a failing of his own and not the children’s. And she did not regret it.
By evening, she had sent word to the kitchen that dinner would be served at seven in the dining room for five people. She dressed in the green wool, which was fast becoming a kind of uniform, and went down.
A quarter before seven found three children in the dining room, one housekeeper making last adjustments to the table, and an empty chair at the head of it that grew, as the minute hand climbed, more particular in its emptiness.
Louisa had extensive and contradictory views on where she ought to sit, which Cecilia negotiated with the patience of long practice.
Tabitha sat where she was put. Rosalind chose the chair furthest from Louisa, which was tactically sound and also, Cecilia suspected, a little further from the adults than strictly required.
At five minutes to seven, the door opened, and Gideon came in, in evening dress, the cravat at its usual exact height, wearing the expression of a man who had reached a decision, knew it to be the right one, and found the rightness of it faintly irritating.
He said nothing, crossed to the chair at the head of the table, and sat.
Cecilia took the far end, six feet off down a table that had been built to seat thirty.
“You came,” Louisa observed, with the frank satisfaction of a person whose expectations had been met.
“I live here.”
“You didn’t come last night.”
“I was working.”
“Cece says when you are not eating your dinner, you are not working; you are hiding.” She reached for a roll with great confidence. “Are you hiding now?”
“I am very plainly not hiding,” said Gideon. “I am sitting at this table in full view of four people.”
“That is what I thought,” Louisa said, satisfied, and broke the roll in two.
Cecilia was looking at her plate. She was not going to smile and was certainly not going to look at him.
She found his jaw set, his eyes on his plate, and the faintest possible suggestion of something at the corner of his mouth that she would never have caught had she not lately fallen into the habit of looking for it.
He had come. No note, no regrets sent up by Mrs Fenn, only the man himself walking in and sitting down to dinner with three children he had no notion yet how to speak to, because it was the right thing and he had decided on it.
She put the observation, uselessly, into the account she kept insisting to herself she was not keeping.
She reached for the bread and found it gone to the other end of the table, an oversight she meant to correct quietly tomorrow.
He had it in his hand before she had finished thinking so, and passed it up without remark, the plain undemonstrative attention of someone who notices what is wanted and sees to it.
“Thank you,” she said, and he nodded once and went back to his dinner.
“The soup is better tonight,” Louisa announced to the table at large. “Someone stirred it. And the beeches were making the paper sound again, I heard them from the window. Do they know they are doing it, Gideon, or does it only happen to them?”
“I have never asked them,” he said. “I expect they do it without knowing, as a great many things do.”
“That is a very sad thought. I should hate to make a sound my whole life and never once hear it.” She brooded over the tragedy of the beeches and her soup together. Tabitha ate with care and said nothing, though she was plainly listening to every word.
Rosalind, who ate in silence and watched as her own manner of taking part, set down her spoon. “Is there a pianoforte in the house?”
“There is. In the music room, on the ground floor.”
She said nothing further, but Cecilia saw her put the fact carefully away, and resolved, then and there, that whatever it cost, the child would have her music.
After the pudding, which Louisa met with the reverence she reserved for serious matters, the maid came to carry the children up.
Cecilia was about to push back her chair when he spoke.
“It was not as bad as...” He stopped and tried again. “The arrangement was satisfactory,” he said, which she understood, from the difficulty it gave him, to be a considerable distance from what he had first meant to say.
“I am glad to hear it.”
He turned his water glass slowly between his hands, the nearest he came to the restlessness other men wore more openly.
“You were right. About the dining room.” He turned his glass another quarter-turn.
“And the soup was better tonight, as it happens. You may tell whoever stirred it that the duke remarked upon it.”
“I shall tell Louisa. She will be insufferable, and entirely justified, which is her favourite of all possible conditions.”
The corner of his mouth had moved, only that, the smallest concession, gone again just as quickly as it had come.
But she had caught it, across the length of the dining table, and she carried it with her up the stairs afterwards and turned it over in the dark of her own room like a coin of uncertain value.