Chapter 16
The house was very quiet after Sunday.
That was the bad thing about a good day: it ended. Leonora had been carried through it on four women and a great deal of noise, and had gone up to bed at eleven entirely certain that the worst was behind her.
On Monday, she had woken to an empty gallery with the curtains still open and a black Holland cover at the end of it that nobody had touched, and a husband who had said the nicest thing that he had said to her in a fortnight and then not been seen since.
Four hours of Emily had not shifted it an inch. Neither had the dinner, nor her mother, nor the hour. She had merely put it down for a day and picked it up again, and it weighed exactly what it had weighed on Saturday.
So, on Monday, she did not expect him at breakfast. She was proven right when he did not appear, which was not a comfort.
“He must have slept in the treehouse,” Mrs. Pike said, before she was asked. “There’s a stove there, and blankets. He’s done it since he was a boy. He’ll come in when he’s hungry.”
“And when is he hungry?”
“That I couldn’t say, Your Grace.”
Leonora sat down in front of the hot chocolate she did not want. Katherine, who had been passed to her the moment she came through the door and who had taken a fistful of her collar and declined to give it back, was chewing meditatively on the corner of a napkin.
“Mrs. Pike.”
“Your Grace?”
“Did Mrs. Rowe get my message about Thursday?”
“She did.” Mrs. Pike straightened the breakfast cloth where Katherine had dragged it. “She sat down.”
“Is that bad?”
“She sat down on the flour bin, Your Grace, and remained there for a good while. Then she went out to the yard and came back and said she’d want two days’ notice and a fish from Reading and not to be spoken to on the day.” A small dry pause. “She’s ordered new copper.”
“On my authority?”
“On yours. I’d have stopped her if I’d wanted to, but I didn’t want to.”
Leonora put her chin in her hand. “Six years of the same eleven dishes, and it took one sentence.”
“It took one sentence from somebody who’s allowed to say it. That’s not the same as one sentence.” Mrs. Pike began stacking plates. “There’s a great deal in this house that’s waiting on somebody who’s allowed.”
“Why is there a covered portrait in the gallery?”
The housekeeper’s hands froze over the tray. It lasted less than a second. Leonora, who had spent four Seasons in the corners of rooms watching people’s hands, saw it clearly.
“I don’t recall anything of the kind in that gallery,” Mrs. Pike said.
“It’s eleven feet wide.”
“Is it, indeed?”
“It’s propped against the paneling at the north end under a black Holland cover, and there are no pictures for twenty feet on either side of it, which means something used to hang there and was taken down.”
“You’ve a good eye, Your Grace.”
“I have two, which in this house makes me conspicuous.” It came out before Leonora could stop it, and she put her hand over her mouth, appalled at herself.
Mrs. Pike laughed. She laughed until she had to sit down on the chair by the sideboard, which no housekeeper in England would have done in front of a duchess.
Leonora discovered that she was laughing too.
“Oh, Your Grace.”
“That was unforgivable.”
“That was the first joke made in this house in six years, and I’ll thank you not to apologize for it.” Mrs. Pike wiped her eyes and stood up. “I can’t tell you more about the gallery. That’s not the same as not knowing. Do you understand me?”
“I do.”
“Then we’ll say no more.”
“Did the butler bring in the post?”
The post was brought in a minute later, and Leonora went through it with the baby on her knee.
There were seven invitations and a bill.
Lady Ashwood was hosting a ball on the fourteenth.
The Bellinghams were hosting a ball on the twentieth, and somebody named Cottesloe was hosting what the card described as a small dance on the twenty-second, which in Leonora’s experience meant three hundred people and a supper.
She set those three aside.
He’d hate them. He would stand at the edge of the room with his hands behind his back, and every woman there would look at his face and then look away.
He would let them do it, and he would come home and be unbearable for a week.
And I am not going to be the wife who drags him into rooms to prove a point.
What was left, she kept. The opera next Thursday.
The Thornbury races. A private view and auction of a collector’s paintings at the end of the month, which she looked at for a moment longer than the others and could not have said why.
And, at the bottom of the tray, a letter that had come a long way.
The paper was foreign. The hand was young and fast and sloped hard to the right, and it was addressed to His Grace the Duke of Thorton. Leonora sat with it for some time.
It isn’t mine. I have no business reading it whatsoever.
She put it on top of the pile, tucked the pile under her arm, and handed the baby to Mrs. Pike. “Where is the treehouse?”
“Your Grace—”
“Past the yew walk or through the kitchen garden?”
Mrs. Pike eyed her carefully and then nodded. “Through the kitchen garden. And mind the second rung; it’s been loose since 1809. He’s never once mended it, and I’ve never once worked out why.”
Colin had gotten the leg right at about four in the morning.
He had been at it since the middle of the night, with a candle stuck to the bench in its own wax, and somewhere in the small hours his hands had stopped arguing with him and simply done the thing they had always known how to do.
Now, there was a horse standing square on four legs on the sill, with its head turned as though it had heard a noise behind it.
He had not slept in two days, and he was aware that it was showing.
He had known he was wrong on Saturday, before he reached the end of the gallery.
That was the part he could not get past. Not the walking out.
He had been walking out of rooms since he was fifteen and it had never once cost him a night’s rest. It was that he had gotten ten steps down the corridor, with the click of his boots echoing off the floorboards and his wife standing in the light of a window she had opened, and had understood with total clarity that she had asked the one question she had been invited to ask, that he had told her to ask it, and that she had been holding his niece on her hip while she did it.
Ten steps. He had known at ten steps.
Then he had gone on walking, because a man who turned around at ten steps had to say something when he got back, and Colin had nothing to say.
That is my mother, painted eight months before she died. My father sat in front of it every night for six years with a bottle, and on the last night of his life, he took it down himself, and I have not been able to look at it since.
Try arranging that into a sentence in a gallery in the middle of a Saturday morning.
So he had come out here instead, on Saturday at four o’clock, and again on Sunday, and again this morning, to the one room in England where nobody could follow him.
Which meant he had spent the third morning of his marriage exactly as he had spent the two before it: on a bench, thirty feet up, with a candle and a chisel, while a woman he had promised a week to sat downstairs in front of a place laid for a man who did not come.
I told her I’d give her a week to prepare. I have given her two mornings of an empty chair and a gallery I walked out of, and I came down twice on Sunday only because I could not make myself stay away, and she has given me a daughter who ate her breakfast.
The horse stood on the sill where he had left it, finished at last, and he could not look at it without thinking of who it was for and who had got her to eat.
Colin looked at it for a while and thought about going down.
He did not go down. He picked up the rasp and rubbed the last of the tool marks off the near hind hoof instead, which took the better part of an hour. By the end of it, he had made up four reasons why the morning was better spent up here.
Below him, the yew hedge rustled.
He put down the rasp.
The last time he counted, there were eleven servants in this house, and every one of them knew the rule. The rule had held for fifteen years through two deaths, a roof fire, and an assize summons.
“What,” he said to nobody, “is unclear about the words do not disturb me?”
He ducked out onto the platform and looked down.
His wife was four rungs up on the rope ladder.
She was wearing a dress the color of butter that had no business within forty feet of a tree, and she had a bundle of correspondence clamped in her right hand, which meant she was climbing a rope ladder one-handed, which meant she was climbing it badly.
“That’s dangerous,” Colin cautioned.
“I’ll manage.”
“You have one hand.”
“I’m aware of the number of hands I have, thank you.” She climbed another rung, listing sideways. “Mrs. Pike says the second one is loose.”
“It is loose.”
“You could have mended it.”
“I could have.”
“Why haven’t you?”
Because when he was fifteen, he had gone up that ladder with a knife wound down his face and his brother screaming above him, and the second rung had held, and he had never since been able to put a hand on it without his whole body understanding exactly where he was.
He had a great many answers of that kind. He gave none of them.
“Climb down,” he ordered.
“No.”
“Duchess—”
“Here,” Leonora said, “let me just.” She threw the bundle of his correspondence at his face.
Colin caught it with both hands. Three invitations, a bill, and a letter on foreign paper, snatched out of the air a foot from his nose while thirty feet of nothing waited underneath her.
Leonora climbed up the rest of the rungs and hauled herself over the edge of the platform, pink and out of breath and entirely pleased with herself. She stood in his treehouse in her butter-colored dress, a leaf in her hair.
“See?” she said. “Easy.”
Colin discovered that he had no idea what to do with his face.
“You might have died.”
“I might have, but I didn’t. Is that the horse?” She was already past him, ducking under the beam that caught his shoulder every morning and going straight to the sill where the little ash horse stood with its head turned. “Oh.”
“Don’t touch it.”
“I’m not touching it. I am looking at it very hard, which is different.” She crouched down until her eyes were level with it. “Did you make this?”
“Yes.”
“With what?”
“A gouge, a rasp, three chisels, and eleven weeks.”
“Eleven weeks?”
“I ruined the near hind leg the Monday before the wedding and had to take the whole thing down to the hock and start again.”
She turned her head and looked up at him from where she crouched.
Colin, standing in the doorway of the only room in England he had ever considered his, was suddenly unpleasantly aware that he had just spoken to his wife more honestly than he had to anyone in six years.
“Why did you ruin it?” Leonora asked.
He looked down at the bundle in his hands to avoid answering. The letter on top of the pile was addressed in a fast young hand that sloped hard to the right.
He had been reading that hand since it was learning to make its letters at a nursery table with a sore wrist and a great deal of complaining.
“That’s from William,” he said.