Chapter 8
Leonora gave up at one in the morning and lit the candle again.
There was a drawer in her escritoire that did not open unless she lifted the front of it.
There were eight years of her in that drawer, and not one person alive had read a line of it.
Stories about women who went to sea. Stories about women who told the truth in a ballroom and were not destroyed by it.
A great many pages torn in half and kept anyway.
She took out paper and cut a new pen, telling herself she was writing about a shipwreck.
The lady had been stranded on the island for three days, she wrote, and on the fourth day, the man came up out of the surf.
That was perfectly sensible. She had been meaning to write about a shipwreck for a year.
He was very tall and did not trouble to explain himself. When she asked him a question, he looked at her as though asking were an impertinence and answered it anyway.
Leonora dipped the pen.
He wore a strip of black silk across one eye.
Her hand stopped.
She read the line four times. Then she read the paragraph above it and the one above that, and understood, with the particular horror of a person who had been caught out by nobody but herself, that she had been writing about the Duke since the first sentence.
The height was his. The rudeness was his. The way the man came up the beach without hurrying, because hurrying was for people who were worried about being refused, was so like him that she put the pen down.
It is only a story. It is a shipwreck. It has nothing to do whatsoever with the upcoming wedding.
She wrote for another hour and a half.
At the end, there was a page and a half more, and one line at the bottom that she struck through so hard that the nib pierced through the paper. She did not burn it, which she noticed and thought about very little.
Then she put the pages in the drawer, lifted the front, and shut it, and went to bed and did not sleep for a long while.
The parcel arrived at breakfast.
“For Lady Leonora,” the footman announced, and set it down beside the toast rack.
Leonora looked at it and felt the entire morning tilt. It was long and flat and tied with silk ribbon, and there was a card on top of it. The seal on the card was black wax with no crest at all, which was somehow worse than a crest.
“Well, open it,” her mother prompted.
“Later.”
“Nora.”
“Later, Mama. I haven’t finished my hot chocolate.”
“You have not touched your hot chocolate.”
“Then I should like to touch it,” Leonora said, “before I do anything else.”
She stood up, scooped the parcel under her arm, and walked out of the breakfast room with as much dignity as a woman could manage under her family’s watchful eyes.
She closed the door to her bedchamber and hurried to the bed. She put the parcel on it and stood there for a moment, looking at it.
Then she untied the ribbon.
On top, folded in tissue, was the gauze gown she had stood in at the modiste’s with her hair hanging down her back while the Duke stared at her. Under it was another in ivory. Under that was one the color of claret, which she lifted out, let fall open, and immediately dropped.
There was a fourth. It was black, and it had almost nothing on it above the waist. She had certainly not seen it at the modiste’s, because she would have remembered dying on the spot.
She plopped down on the edge of the bed.
The card had seven words on it, in a hand that was upright and heavy, like that of a man who had been taught to write by somebody strict and had never once enjoyed it.
You should not feel shy in them.
Her first feeling was not the one she had expected.
Her mother had said no to the claret gown.
Leonora had heard her say it across the shop, in the voice she used for negotiating prices.
And the Duke had stood at that counter and overruled her in front of a modiste and two assistants, had demanded the bill be sent to his estate, and had not asked one single person in that room whether it was welcome, least of all the woman it was for.
He does that. He decides, and then he tells you afterward. He is usually right, and that is the worst part of it.
Leonora put her hands over her face and stayed like that for some time.
She would have to be in a church with him on Friday, and then she would have to be in a house with him. He had stood in the modiste’s shop and looked at her through six inches of gauze, then had gone home and thought about it long enough to have a black one made.
He is doing it on purpose. He is doing it entirely on purpose, and he knows I know it, and that is the whole of the—
The door banged open.
“Nora, Mama says that you are ill. Are you? Because if you’re ill, I’m to fetch—”
Leonora threw the counterpane over the bed in one movement that she would have thought impossible.
Augusta stopped in the doorway with her hand still on the knob and looked at the bed, which now had a great deal of counterpane on it, arranged with the artistry of a woman throwing a coat over a fire.
“What’s that?”
“Nothing.”
“It’s something.”
“It is a wedding matter,” Leonora said, with enormous dignity. “And you are twelve.”
“I am nearly thirteen. Plus, everybody keeps saying that in this house. Nobody will tell me anything. I have been very good, and I have not listened at a single door since Thursday.” Augusta advanced two steps. “Is it a nightgown?”
“Augusta Belmont.”
“Ellen says brides get nightgowns.”
“Come here,” Leonora said.
“Why?”
“Come here.”
Augusta, who was not a stupid child, took one look at her sister’s face and ran. She reached the washstand before Leonora caught her around the ribs. Her shrieks could be heard on the stairs and probably in the mews.
She was released after a while, red and gasping and entirely satisfied, and bolted out of the room to tell their mother that Nora was not ill in the slightest.
Leonora shut the door and leaned back against it. Then she lifted the counterpane and looked at the black gown for a while longer.
Colin ruined the hind leg on Monday morning.
He had been working on it for the better part of an hour, and it had been very nearly right. Then his hand slipped past where it should have stopped and took out too much at the hock. Now the horse had one leg thinner than the other three, and it would not stand square on the nursery floor.
He sat looking at it.
He had cut that shape correctly perhaps a hundred times in his life. He had made a cane for a woman with a bad hip and got the spiral of the grip right by eye. He had built the ladder he climbed up every morning and the bench he was sitting on, and he was not a man whose hands erred.
Bruton Street…
Colin put down the gouge and pressed the heels of both palms into his eyes, and then remembered, as he always did about half a second too late, that he had only one eye to press.
He climbed down the ladder, had a horse saddled, and rode out over the park at a speed no reasonable man would at that hour. He jumped a hedge he had no business jumping. He came back forty minutes later with his horse blowing and himself no better.
Mrs. Pike was on the lawn. She had a rug laid out on the grass in the sun, where the baby sat propped against a cushion.
She was holding a wooden ball above the baby’s head and drawing it away over and over.
As he watched, Katherine caught the ball and immediately put it in her mouth.
Mrs. Pike laughed out loud, and the sound drifted all the way to where he had pulled up under the trees.
Colin watched them.
That is the reason. There is a child in this house who cannot be here without a mother, and I have found her one. It is a piece of arithmetic. On Friday, there will be a woman at my table, and it will change nothing at all.
The baby dropped the ball, and Mrs. Pike gave it back.
Nothing at all.
Colin did not move. He was aware that he had been sitting in the shade of the beech tree for four minutes without once thinking about the child.
Mrs. Pike caught him in the hall before he had taken off his gloves.
She had a slate in her hand. She had been carrying a slate around the house for three days now, and every time he came within reach, there was another line chalked on it.
He had begun to think of it the way other men thought of a summons.
“The east rooms,” she said.
“What about them?”
“They’ve been shut since your father’s death. If Her Grace is to have the chamber over the drive, then the two beside it need airing, and the flue needs sweeping. I’ll need four girls from the village to have it done.”
“All right, you can send for them.”
“And the little green door between the chambers is painted shut.”
Colin stopped with one glove half off. “Since when?”
“Nine years or so, when the damp got into that wall and Ferris painted the whole of it.” Mrs. Pike did not look up from her slate. “Shall I have it eased, Your Grace, or shall I leave it?”
There was a pause that lasted too long for a question about a door.
“Have it eased,” Colin instructed.
“Very good.”
They went through the house together, which they had not done in six years, and it was worse than he had expected.
Dust sheets over everything in the blue drawing room.
A stopped clock. A window in the music room that had been cracked since before William started going to school and had never once been mentioned to him by anybody, because nobody came into the music room.
“Open all of it,” Colin said.
“All of it?”
“Curtains, shutters, the lot. Get the light in before Friday. If Lady Leonora walks through this house while it looks like a tomb, she will spend the rest of her life in three rooms, and I will have done that to her.”
Mrs. Pike wrote on her slate for far longer than that required.
“You might tell her so yourself,” she suggested.
“Tell her what?”
“That you thought of it. Women like to be told, Your Grace, and you’ve never told anybody anything in your life.”
“I’d rather she walked in and found the house open,” Colin said.
“So that you needn’t say it?”
“So that it’s done.”
“Mm,” Mrs. Pike murmured.
They came to the gallery last. It ran the whole north side, and the curtains were drawn. At the far end of it, propped against the wall where it had been since the funeral, was a canvas eleven feet wide under a black Holland cover.
Colin stopped in the doorway.
“That room as well?” Mrs. Pike asked.
“Curtains open. Floors polished.” He turned away. “Leave the cover where it is.”
“Your Grace.”
“Leave it.”
She let him get four steps down the corridor. “And if Her Grace asks what’s beneath it?”
Colin did not turn round.
“Then she’ll be the first person in six years to ask,” he said. “But it doesn’t mean she’ll receive an answer.”