Chapter Twenty #3
Mrs Fenn looked at him for a long moment.
“I will tell you a thing, sir, and then I will get on, because the seed cake will not see to itself. I have watched a great many marriages from the kitchen end of them, which is the honest end, because a person cannot keep up a pretence in front of the people who empty the grates. I have seen love matches go to ice by the second winter. I have seen arrangements warm into something a poet would not be ashamed of. The making of a marriage tells you nothing. The keeping of it tells you everything.” She picked up her cloth.
“This one is kept daily, by both of them, in the small ways that do not get into the registers. I have served in this house for many years, and I have never seen a better marriage than this. You may put that in your book, and you may put it at the front, where the magistrate will read it before he tires.”
He wrote it down, and afterwards bent over the welfare ledger a good while, the one she had kept since October, making several notes he had not looked to be making.
***
It happened on the second afternoon, in the corridor outside the east wing.
Cecilia was coming from the children’s sitting room toward the stairs, and Mrs Norwood stood ahead of her with Mr Sefton, bound in theory for the library, and turned at the sound of footsteps with the small pleasant smile that had not altered in two days.
“Your Grace. Might I have a moment with you?”
Cecilia stopped.
“I have been thinking about the girls, and about your position here. You have been kind, and I mean that. But I think we must be honest with one another, as two women who both want what is best for them.” She let it settle.
“You are a companion. It is not an unkind word. You have done very well in a situation that asked for a particular sort of adaptability. The girls deserve a grandmother who has known them since birth, though. Not a paid companion raised by a convenient marriage.”
She said paid companion quietly and precisely, and Mr Sefton’s pen hung over the page.
Cecilia drew one breath. The old reflex rose in her, the trained smallness, the impulse to shrink and be grateful, but she set it aside and opened her mouth to answer for herself.
“I think you will want to choose your next words with some care, Mrs Norwood.”
Gideon’s voice came from the far end of the corridor. He had not been there a moment before, and now he crossed to them unhurried, the matter already settled behind his eyes, and stopped at Cecilia’s side, nearer than he usually stood, near enough that the standing there was plainly no accident.
“You will address my wife as the Duchess of Aldenmere,” he said.
“You will do it because it is her title, and because I am asking you to.” Nothing angry in it, nothing that would turn a correction into a quarrel; the stillness Phelps had warned of holding, just, by a margin Cecilia could see but Mrs Norwood could not.
“And you will understand that what my wife has made in this house in three months is a great deal more than those children had in your keeping in two years. I do not require you to admire her. I require you to respect her.” A pause, one second long. “That is all I am asking. For now.”
The corridor was entirely still. Mr Sefton’s pen had stopped. Mrs Norwood’s composure held, but something reset itself about her eyes.
“Of course, Your Grace,” she said pleasantly and walked on toward the library.
When she had gone, Cecilia let out a slow breath, and Gideon looked at her, and the stillness loosened by the smallest degree.
“Phelps told me not to do that,” he said.
“Phelps told me to stop you from doing that.”
“Then we have both failed our solicitor in the same quarter-hour, which he will find a great deal less surprising than we do.” The corner of his mouth moved.
“I could not stand in a room and hear her call you paid and write nothing on my own account. I have a notebook too. Mine is only longer, and kept in a harder hand, and she has just had a line of it read to her.”
***
They left at four. The carriage came round, and the farewells were made with the same flawless form that had carried the whole visit. Mrs Norwood embraced Rosalind, who permitted it.
“Goodbye, Grandmother,” the girl said, level as a clerk. “Thank you for coming so far to see that we are well looked after.”
It was the most elegant dismissal Cecilia had ever heard from a person of twelve. Louisa, who applied for a farewell of her own, gave the matter the whole of her attention.
“Goodbye, and mind the step,” she said. “It is loose.”
The step was not loose. Then the wheels were turning on the gravel, and the gates closed, and Aldenmere let its breath out.
Cecilia stood at the drawing room window. Gideon came and stood beside her, and they watched until the beeches took the carriage and the park was empty.
“You did not have to do that,” she said. “In the corridor. I had an answer ready for her.”
“I have heard your answers. They are very good.” He went on looking at the empty drive. “I preferred that she have mine.”
“She won’t get them back,” Cecilia said. It was not quite a question.
“No. She will not.” He said it with the flat certainty he had used to tell Tabitha that this was her home, and then, after a moment, still without turning from the glass: “Thank you. For what you have made of them. I did not know how, and you did it without my asking.”
It was the nearest thing to a confession she had heard from him by daylight, and she could not trust her voice to meet it. So, she watched the empty drive beside him and let the saying of it stand.