Chapter Twenty-Five
“You are doing it again,” said Rosalind.
Gideon looked up from the report. She stood in the study doorway with the straight-backed composure she brought to confrontations she had decided were necessary, which were, he had found, the only kind she undertook.
“I beg your pardon?”
“The thing you did before, when you went away. Except this time, you have not gone to your study. You are in the room and absent from it, which is worse, on the whole. When you hid, at least a person knew where to find you.”
“That is a perceptive observation.”
“I know. What did you do?”
“I am not aware that I did anything.”
“That is what people say when they have done a thing and would rather not look at it directly. You taught me that, over the chessboard. A man who insists he has made no mistake is usually about two moves from losing his queen and the better part of his temper.”
He set the pen down. “You have been paying a great deal of attention.”
“It is the only way to win against someone who keeps the rules better than you do.” She came in and took the chair across the desk, deliberately, a person choosing a position rather than dropping onto the nearest surface.
“She has been careful. She still reads to us in the evenings, but less, and she stops sooner, and it is the carefulness she had at the very beginning, before she decided to stay.” She paused while she found the rest of it.
“It is not the sadness from before. Before, she was sad because she did not know if it would all come right. This is the sadness of a person who has decided something she does not want to have decided.”
“And you have concluded that I am the cause.”
“I have concluded that the day she went careful was a day you spent an hour shut in here with Mr Phelps, and that you have been moving pieces ever since without telling anyone the game had changed.” Rosalind folded her hands.
“When my mother died, everyone waited for me to be all right, and nobody asked me what I needed, because waiting is easier than asking. Cece asked me. The first week. When no one had asked me in a year.” She looked at him steadily.
“Somebody ought to ask her. You are the one to do it. It is not a difficult piece of strategy, so I should think that even you could manage it.”
“You think a great deal of my abilities.”
“I think a great deal of her abilities. You are merely the instrument nearest the problem.”
“That is a humbling way to be spoken of by a girl of twelve.”
“You are five-and-thirty and a duke, and you have been staring at the same report for a quarter of an hour without turning the page,” said Rosalind, who had evidently been counting. “I do not think this is an afternoon for either of us to stand much on our dignity.”
He had no answer to that, which she allowed to stand for a moment, letting the silence do the work a sentence would only weaken.
“She thinks she is a convenience,” Rosalind said then, more quietly, and the composure thinned at the edge of it.
“I have watched her think it. She came here to be useful, because being useful was the only way anyone had ever let her stay anywhere, and she has decided the use is nearly over, and that when a thing has finished being useful, it is put away. I know how she thinks because it is how I thought, the first month, before she made me stop.” She stopped and steadied.
“I do not want her put away. And I do not want her deciding to put herself away first so that nobody can do it to her, because that is the worst one, that is the one you cannot come back from easily.”
“You have seen a great deal, for twelve.”
“I have seen everyone I loved leave, one way or another, and I have grown very good at telling when the next one is folding her bags. I would rather not grow any better at it.” The last word came out plainer than the rest, and she looked at her hands for a moment, and then back up at him, the armour back where it belonged.
“So. You will go and find out what you did, and undo it, because you are the only one who can, and because I have decided you are worth the trouble, which I do not decide about many people, and you ought to be flattered.”
“I find I am,” he said, and meant it more than the lightness let on.
She rose and straightened her dress briskly, which meant the matter was concluded to her satisfaction. “She is in the garden in the afternoons now. The east beds. I would not wait for the weather to improve. It will not, and neither, in my observation, will you, left to yourself.”
“You are very hard on me, for a person who beat me at chess only on Tuesday.”
“I am hard on the things I have decided are worth the trouble.” At the door, she paused. “I check,” she added, in a tone that left no doubt where she had got the habit, and left.
He stayed away from the garden that afternoon and told himself it was not cowardice, as thinly as he had told himself the like before and to the same effect.
He could not go to her without knowing what he meant to say, and he could not know that without knowing what had happened, and what had happened was still, infuriatingly, beyond him.
So, he sat and went back over the preceding days as a man goes back over his correspondence for an error he is certain of and cannot place.
Somewhere in the going-back, he arrived at the study door, the one with the latch that did not catch, the one he had been meaning to have seen to for two months.
He sat very still while several things arranged themselves into a sequence that was both obvious and, in its consequences, very bad.
Phelps had given the legal summary, the formulae solicitors keep for the end of an arrangement, purposes fulfilled and obligations discharged.
He had answered, he was nearly certain, that the marriage was not a matter for discussion and that nothing had changed, and he had been wholly sure, saying it, that his meaning was plain to the room.
The door had not caught. The accounts ledger had appeared on the corner of his desk that same evening without his marking it, which meant she had come to return it and had heard the part before his answer, and not the answer.
He sent for Phelps before he had finished thinking it through, which was unlike him, and Phelps came, unhurried and grave.
“The conversation we had,” Gideon said, “on Tuesday. The summary of the position, once the petition was withdrawn. Tell me again precisely how you put it.”
Phelps considered, which he did properly, without performance.
“I said the purpose for which the marriage was contracted had been fulfilled, and that Your Grace’s obligations under the original understanding were thereby discharged.
It is the form of words one uses. I meant by it that you were free, in the sense that the law cares about, and nothing beyond it. ”
“It might be understood to mean that the arrangement could now be ended.”
“It might,” Phelps agreed, slowly, watching him.
“By a person who did not hear what Your Grace said afterwards, and who came to the words already half persuaded she was a temporary measure.” He set his papers down.
“I have drawn a great many settlements in my time, Your Grace, and I will tell you the one thing the documents never manage to say, which is that a woman who has been valued for her usefulness her whole life will hear the word discharged and understand dismissed, however carefully a man means it otherwise. The law speaks in endings. It has no grammar for the other thing.”
“No,” Gideon said. “It does not.”
“If I may.” Phelps gathered his papers with the care of a man closing a subject he did not intend to reopen.
“The remedy is not a legal one, and is therefore outside my competence, which is a relief to me, because I am too old to be of use in it. I would only observe that the document she requires has not got a clause in it anywhere, and that Your Grace has spent many years making himself unmatched at the kind of speaking that has clauses, and will have to do without the skill now, and at some disadvantage.” He rose.
“I have every confidence. I have watched you learn harder things this autumn than this one.”
When he had gone, Gideon drew a clean sheet toward him, because the writing of a thing had always been how he came to know his own mind, and he had a great deal of mind to come to and very little practice at this particular country.
He wrote a line and read it and saw it for what it was, the careful, hedged speech of a man protecting himself in the very act of declaring himself, and he struck it through.
He wrote another. He struck that through as well.
The trouble, he came to understand somewhere in the ruined third attempt, was not that he did not know what he felt.
It was that everything he knew how to write was built to survive being overheard by an enemy, and what he had to say now could only be said by a man willing to be heard with no defence left to him at all, which was the one posture his whole life had trained him out of.
He stopped trying to write it well. He wrote it plainly, the way she said things, and found when he had finished that it was short, true, and entirely without protection, and that his hand was not quite steady, setting the pen down.
He folded it but did not seal it, because a thing like that ought to be given open, in the hand, by a man standing where she could see his face while she read it.
Louisa found him there an hour later. She climbed into her chair, arranged herself, and gave him the whole of her attention, the kind she kept for matters of importance.
“Cece has a box on her bed,” she said. “A big one. It has been there for days, and I do not like it.”
He went very still. “What sort of box?”
“The sort you put things in to take them away. The one she came with. Tabitha says it is the one she came with.” Louisa frowned at the paperweight.
“I asked her if she was going somewhere, and she said no one was going anywhere tonight, which is not at all the same as no, and I noticed that it was not.”
“No, it is not the same,” he said.
“You said you would know what to do. You always pretend you do not, and then you do. So, you had best get on with it.” She climbed down and paused at the door in the same way she had clearly observed in her sister. “Move the pen,” she said and left.
He stood outside her door at eleven o’clock.
The house was asleep, the corridor dark but for the narrow band of candlelight under her door, which told him she was not sleeping either.
The folded sheet was in his hand, and he had rehearsed nothing, because the one thing he had finally understood was that a rehearsed speech was only another door that did not catch.
He raised his hand to knock, but did not.
He stood there a while longer with his knuckles an inch from the wood and the whole of his life on the wrong side of it, and the candlelight under the door did not move, and for the length of several slow breaths neither did he.