Chapter Twenty
The petition had been three months building, and Phelps came down the day before the inspection to walk Cecilia through the shape of it one last time, spreading his papers on the library table with the unhurried gravity of a man laying out instruments before a difficult operation.
“She has narrowed it to one argument,” he said.
“The early ones, the timing of the marriage, the want of a governess, the suddenness of the household, those she has let fall, because they were losing her ground. What remains is the only one with any life left in it, and it is the one we can least answer with a document.” He set a single sheet apart from the rest. “She will argue that the children have attached themselves to a stranger, a paid companion raised by a marriage of convenience, and that the attachment is therefore unsafe, being to a person who may not last. She will say it kindly. She will say it with concern. And she will be hoping, above all, that one of you loses your temper where Mr Sefton can write it down.”
“Then we shall not lose our tempers,” Cecilia said.
“Your Grace, forgive me; the danger is not your temper. It is His Grace’s.
” Phelps did not look up from his papers as he said it, which was his way of saying a delicate thing without making a person meet his eye over it.
“He has spent many years being spoken of unkindly and has trained himself to stillness under it, and I have never once seen that stillness break, save on one subject. You are the subject. If she goes at you in front of the observer, she is not trying to wound you. She is trying to make him answer because an angry duke in a corridor is worth more to her case than any ledger you can show. Hold that in your mind. She wants the rise. Do not let either of you give it to her cheaply.”
“You are telling me to manage my husband.”
“I am telling you that you are the only person in England who can, and that the next two days may turn on whether you do.” He gathered the sheet back into the stack.
“I have done what the law allows. I have your welfare ledger, which is the best-kept document of its kind I have read in forty years, and three sworn statements from the staff, and the plain fact that the children are visibly thriving. The law is on our side. But the law is decided by a man reading Mr Sefton’s notebook, and notebooks remember tempers longer than they remember facts.
That is the whole of my counsel. Be dull.
Be dull, warm and unanswerable, and bore her into the ground. ”
“I spent eight years being dull, warm and unanswerable for a woman who hated me,” Cecilia said. “I find I have a great deal of practice.”
“I know you have.” Phelps almost smiled, which in him was a considerable event. “It is why I am not as frightened of the next two days as I might be. Lady Foskett, whatever her sins, gave you an education Mrs Norwood has not reckoned on.”
***
“You must understand,” Mrs Norwood said, the following evening, “that I have only the girls’ interests at heart.”
She said it at dinner on the first evening of her visit, looking at Gideon while the words went to Cecilia, and everyone at the table understood the angle of it.
“Of course,” Gideon said, with a flatness that granted the claim nothing and helped it no further along.
The court had granted the inspection ten days since, two observed days of it, with Mrs Norwood’s own man present to report on the children’s welfare.
Cecilia had aired the rooms, squared the accounts and had spent eight years with Lady Foskett learning to meet exactly this.
She was not about to be unmade by the same instruments in a finer key.
“And here are my granddaughters,” Mrs Norwood had said in the forecourt that afternoon, warm as a hearth, going down the line of curtseys. “How you have grown. Louisa, do you remember me?”
“I remember it was cold,” Louisa said, and stepped back to Cecilia’s side, and had nothing further to offer on the subject of her grandmother for two days.
Mr Sefton, the observer, a slight man with a leather notebook he carried everywhere, wrote something down, and Cecilia never once looked to see what.
The children had been prepared, in the sense that one prepares children, which is to say imperfectly and at the last moment. Cecilia had gathered them in the nursery the night before and told them the plain truth, because the plain truth was the only thing that had ever worked with these three.
“Your grandmother is coming with a man with a notebook, and they are coming to decide whether you are happy here,” she had said.
“You do not have to pretend to be happy. You only have to be yourselves, which has always been sufficient, and answer what is asked of you truthfully, because the truth is on our side and lies are difficult to keep tidy under questioning.”
“What if I do not want to talk to her?” Tabitha had asked.
“Then you do not have to. You may say good evening and nothing else, and stand by me, and I will field the rest. No one is going to make you sit and be charming. That is a promise, and you know I keep them.”
“I shall talk to her,” Rosalind had said, in a tone that suggested the talking would be a tactical exercise rather than a social one.
“Someone ought to, and Louisa will say something true and dreadful, and Tabby would rather not, so it had better be me. I know how to be polite to people I do not trust. I learned it at her house.”
“You learned it too young,” Cecilia had said, “and I am sorry for that, but I will not pretend it is not a useful skill, because it is, and it is going to be useful this week.”
***
Dinner that first night was a campaign conducted beneath flawless manners. The first shot came between the soup and the fish.
“How remarkable that you have settled so quickly,” Mrs Norwood said, pleasant as anything.
“Such a short time since the marriage. One hears so much of the difficulty of making a household out of children who have known disruption.” She left it there.
The thing assembled itself without a last sentence.
“Children are a great deal more durable than they are credited with,” Cecilia said. “They want consistency more than they want time. I have found it so.”
“And you have a great deal of experience with children, Your Grace?”
“I have managed households for eight years. Children were generally a part of them.” There was no defensive lift in it. It was a statement, and she had nothing to defend.
The second came between the fish and the meat. “How fortunate the girls are to have a companion.” Mrs Norwood set the word down with great care, looking at her plate as she did, which made it worse rather than better. “And who teaches them, with no governess yet? You see to that as well?”
“I teach them. A governess will come in the new year, when the house is fully settled.”
“How impressive that you find the time, with all your other duties.”
“I find it the best of my duties,” Cecilia said, and let it lie on the cloth between them.
“And do you like your lessons, Rosalind?” Mrs Norwood asked then, turning the warmth on the eldest. “Your people in town gave me to understand you would not sit with them at all.”
“I had no people in town,” Rosalind said.
“I had a cold room and my sisters to mind. Her Grace sits with me now while I do them. It goes differently when someone sits with you.” She set down her fork with great composure.
“You asked whether I like my lessons. I like the ones I am good at and resent the ones I am not, which I am told is the universal condition and not a defect of character. Her Grace makes me do the ones I resent anyway, which my last instruction did not, because there was no one to make me. I have decided, on reflection, that being made to do hard things by someone who sits with you while you do them means being cared for. It took me some months to see it, but I see it now.”
The table was quiet for a moment. Mr Sefton’s pen moved and moved again, longer this time. Mrs Norwood let the subject go, and saved the last of it for the end of the meal, the most carefully built of the three.
“The girls speak warmly of Her Grace. It is touching. Of course, children of their history are,” and she paused, finding the word she had certainly found long before, “susceptible. To kindness, in particular. It is only natural that they attach to whoever offers it. One hopes the attachment is to someone established. Someone with the continuity to be here in five years…In ten…”
The table went quiet. Cecilia looked at her plate and did not let her anger reach her face. And under the cloth, Rosalind’s hand found hers, small and deliberate and entirely certain about being there. She closed her own round it once, and then she let it go, and looked up.
Gideon had looked at the two joined hands, at Rosalind’s composed profile, and at Cecilia’s face as it came up. Then he turned to the grandmother.
“The Duchess of Aldenmere,” he said, in the even register that was not calm and was governing itself very precisely, “has been a constant and devoted presence in this house from the day she entered it. The children’s attachment to her is not susceptibility.
It is good judgment.” He set down a glass he had not drunk from.
“The question of continuity is not in any doubt, madam. I would not advise anyone to build a case upon it.”
“Of course,” Mrs Norwood said, with a smile no one had asked for. “One did not mean to suggest otherwise.”
When the children had been sent up, Cecilia found the three of them out of their beds and gathered on Rosalind’s, conducting a council of their own, and stood a moment unseen in the doorway to hear the shape of it.