Chapter Eight
“You are going to eat that,” said Mrs Fenn from the doorway.
“I am going to eat it,” Gideon said, without looking up from the letter he was annotating.
“You said as much yesterday.”
“I mean it rather more today.”
“You always mean it rather more.” She let a pause do a little of her work, the pause she kept for deciding whether to press a point or leave it lie. “There is a great deal of noise coming up from the garden, Your Grace.”
“I had noticed.”
“I had begun to wonder whether you had not. You have been on the same page for some while.” And she withdrew, leaving him the last word only because she had judged it not worth the taking.
He had noticed. He had, if he was honest with himself, been noticing for the better part of an hour, which was not a problem but a fact, and he was a man who collected facts and put them to use.
The fact was that his garden held three children and a woman, and that the house, for the first morning in ten years, was not silent.
He had meant not to look, but he did.
She was at the far end of the south lawn with all three girls and a set of garden tools he had not known the house still owned.
Tabitha had hold of Cecilia’s hand, not the grip of a frightened child but the easy unthinking clasp of one who had decided that being near a particular person was better than not being near her, and who had not, two days since, been able to hear his step in the corridor without flinching.
Rosalind walked three paces back, performing a thorough indifference, her eyes kept giving the lie to, but when Cecilia crouched to show her something turned up out of the bed, the girl studied it for a long, careful moment and then asked a question he could not hear.
Cecilia answered it at far greater length than the question could have wanted, as though it were the most interesting thing she had been asked all week, but Rosalind’s face gave nothing back, and the girl stayed exactly where she was.
Louisa had abandoned the path as beneath her purposes and struck out across the lawn after an agenda only she could read.
She presently turned up a stick, and weighed it with the gravity she gave to serious matters, and bore it back to Cecilia at a dead run to have it admired.
Cecilia stopped and admired it properly, replied something, and Louisa flung both arms wide in the unmistakable attitude of a small person whose judgment haδ just been confirmed by an authority she respected.
Something cracked in Gideon’s chest, quietly, and he let it crack and did not stop to look at what it was.
The knock at the study door, when it came, was Phelps, his hat still in his hand and the flatness on him that meant the news was poor.
“It is filed, then,” Gideon said.
“This morning, Your Grace. I have read it through twice.” Phelps laid a copy on the desk.
“Mrs Norwood’s counsel is thorough. The marriage is considered too recent and the household too new to count as settled, which we expected.
There is a good deal more in it, and much of that touches Her Grace’s standing as nearly as it touches yours. ”
“Then I will hear the whole of it tomorrow, in the drawing room, and Her Grace with me.” Gideon left the copy where it lay. “She is to have it from you, plainly and entire, and not in pieces from me afterwardσ. I will not have a thing concerning her decided over her head in this house.”
“Tomorrow, then.” Phelps inclined his head, and there was something in it close to approval. “I will bring the records to begin on as well, the accounts and the children’s welfare, for the answer to all of it is the same. Evidence, a good deal of it, and no temper.”
“When does the court mean to look at us?”
“They have not fixed the day. Before the new year, I should think, and they may send a man to sit in the house a week or more ahead of the hearing, to see what there is to see. You would do well to be found at your own dinner table when he comes, Your Grace, and not behind a study door with a tray.”
“I may inform you that I am at my dinner table now.”
“So I hear. From the kitchen, from Mrs Fenn, and from a very small person who told the bootboy this morning that the duke has given up hiding. Word travels in a house, Your Grace, faster than it ever travels in a court.”
When he had gone, Gideon sat among the sketches on his walls, and he thought about a woman who had come to him with a single trunk and within one week opened every curtain she could reach and set something growing in a garden he had long ago given up on.
He told himself the satisfaction of it was a practical thing, that a house which looked like a family would carry the petition and keep three children safe, and that this was the whole of the point and the only part of it that signified.
He told himself so with the conviction he kept for things he needed to be true, and found, this evening, that not a word of it would hold.
At seven, he went down. He had made no commitment, had said as much in plain words, but went down regardless, some decisions requiring no account of a man even to himself.
The dining room was lit and warm, Louisa already deep in a dispute over her chair that Rosalind had resolved to ignore on principle. Tabitha looked up when he came in and did not startle, which was new, and which he counted.
“Good evening,” he said to the table at large.
“Good evening, Your Grace,” said Tabitha, very low, and went back to her dinner, and the saying of it had cost her something whose price he understood to the penny, because it cost him the same coin every day of his life.
“You came again,” Louisa announced, vindicated. “I told Tabby you would. I said he is not hiding tonight; he only hides on the nights he has forgotten we are a great deal nicer than the study.”
“Louisa, that is quite enough about hiding,” said Rosalind, on principle.
“I am not hiding,” Gideon said, and reached for the bread, which sat at his own end of the table again tonight. “I am, as the whole table may observe, entirely in the open.”
“That is what I thought,” said Louisa, and considered the matter closed.
“You will spoil her, Your Grace, agreeing with her so readily.” Cecilia did not look up from cutting Tabitha’s meat into more manageable pieces. “She is four. She does not require allies in this household; she requires obstacles, or she will be running the whole estate by Michaelmas.”
“She will be running the whole estate by Michaelmas regardless,” Gideon said. “I am merely securing favourable terms in advance of the inevitable.”
And Rosalind, at the far end, made a small sound that in a less guarded person might have been the start of a laugh, and converted it, with some skill, into a cough, and gave her plate her entire attention.
“Will you come down tomorrow as well?” Tabitha asked, so quietly the table nearly missed it, and then looked faintly alarmed to have asked it aloud, as though the question had got out before she had cleared it for leaving.
“I expect I shall,” Gideon said in the even voice he kept for matters best left small, and reached for the bread. He tore it with rather more care than bread required.
He finished his dinner, but he stayed at the table until the children were done, which was the second night running, and which no one remarked upon, because it was the surest way to keep a thing happening.