Chapter 25
They did not speak for six days.
That was not strictly true, and Leonora was precise with herself about it, because the untrue version was easier to be wretched over.
They spoke. They said good morning. They said that the weather had turned and that Katherine had cut a tooth and that Mrs. Rowe’s turbot had been a triumph, which it had, and which neither of them had tasted.
What they did not do was say anything meaningful.
The turbot came up on Saturday, on the new copper, with a sauce that Mrs. Pike reported had taken four hours and reduced the kitchen to a state of religious silence.
Leonora had it laid in the small dining room instead of the big one, put candles in the middle, and had Katherine’s chair brought in because she had discovered that a baby at the table made it impossible for two people to ignore one another for very long.
Colin came down at seven, in a coat that he had not worn at the table since the wedding.
“Duchess.”
“Your Grace.”
He held her chair. She sat. And for one hour and twenty minutes, the Duke and Duchess of Thorton were so exquisitely polite to one another that Bess developed a nervous cough and had to be sent out.
“The fish is remarkable.”
“Mrs. Rowe will be pleased.”
“You should tell her so.”
“I will.”
“She trained in Bath, I understand.”
“Under a Frenchman,” Leonora said, “for six years.” And then she could not think of one further word about the Frenchman, or Bath, or fish, or anything else in the world.
Katherine threw a piece of bread at the candles. They both reached for it. Their hands brushed, and Leonora pulled hers back so fast that she knocked her own glass. Colin caught that too and set it upright.
The silence that followed was unlike anything she had experienced before.
“I have a note for you,” she said. “About the north field.”
“A note?”
“It is not urgent. I shall leave it on the hall table.”
“You might simply tell me.”
“I might.” Leonora nodded. “But I have decided that I would rather write it down, because when I write things down, I do not convey everything I am thinking, and at present that is a considerable advantage to both of us.”
Colin looked at her above the candles.
“As you like,” he said.
They conducted a marriage by correspondence across forty feet of hallway for six days.
Your Grace, Mr. Beddoes reports that the north field has flooded in each of the last three years and expects it will do so again.
He has not brought it up because he does not come up to the house.
He believes the fault lies with a culvert on the Hartley side.
I said you would look at it. I hope I have not exceeded myself. L.W.
The reply came back within two hours, on the same sheet, underneath.
You have not exceeded yourself. Tell Beddoes I will walk the field with him on Monday at seven.
The culvert is mine, not Hartley’s. My father stopped up the ditch twenty years ago to enlarge a covert for shooting, and nobody has had the nerve to mention it since he died.
Beddoes has had that field for three years, and it has cost him a crop in each of them. C.W.
Leonora read that four times.
Then you must tell him it was your father, she wrote back. Not simply that it is yours. He has spent three years believing he is a poor farmer. L.W.
I had reached the same conclusion at about six o’clock this morning, though it took me longer than it took you. C.W.
It always does. L.W.
She had sent the last one back within the hour.
There were other notes, and not all of them were about ditches.
Your Grace, Mrs. Rowe wishes to know whether you have any objection to a raised pie. I have said that you have no opinions about food whatsoever, which she received as a challenge. I am sorry. L.W.
I have an opinion about mutton. C.W.
Everyone in this house has an opinion about mutton. It is the only subject on which the household is united. L.W.
Then take it off. C.W.
I have already taken it off. I took it off on Tuesday. I was being polite. L.W.
You were being nothing of the kind. You were finding out whether I would notice. C.W.
Leonora had sat with that one in her hand for a while.
And did you? L.W.
Yes. C.W.
She kept every one of them. She was not proud of it.
They went into the drawer of the escritoire in the blue room, on top of eight hundred pages of shipwreck.
By Wednesday, there were nine of them, and she read them in bed like a woman reading letters from a man at sea, which she supposed was close enough to the truth to be humiliating.
On Sunday, the household discovered that its master and mistress were not speaking and reacted by becoming extremely helpful.
Bess laid the small dining room without being asked.
Peg took to dusting the hall table at the precise moments when notes were most likely to arrive on it.
Tom started loitering by the side door with an expression of tremendous nonchalance.
And on Monday morning, Leonora stepped into the breakfast room to find that somebody had put the two places together at one end of the table instead of at opposite ends, which nobody would confess to and which she moved back, and which was moved again on Tuesday.
“Mrs. Pike.”
“Your Grace.”
“Whoever is doing it may stop.”
“I couldn’t say who’s doing it, Your Grace.”
“You could narrow it down to one person.”
“I could narrow it down to eleven,” Mrs. Pike countered. “And I’ll thank you to consider what that means, since every one of them has been in this house for years and never once taken a side in anything, and they have all taken one now.”
Colin walked the field on Monday and came back four hours later with mud to the knee. On Tuesday, a gang of six men began opening the ditch. On Wednesday, Mrs. Hartley sent up a second cake unprompted, with no message at all, which Leonora understood perfectly.
And every single day the house got a little brighter, and every single day the two of them moved through it like people carrying something breakable in opposite directions.
Colin watched her from the gallery, which he was aware was contemptible.
It had the best window in the house. He had come up on Wednesday afternoon to see whether the men had reached the second hedge and had not gone down again, because his wife and the baby were sitting on a rug on the lawn below.
Katherine had learned to get on her hands and knees that week.
She could not do anything with it yet. She would get on all fours, rock, look immensely pleased with herself, and then topple onto her face and cry.
Each time she toppled over, Leonora picked her up and set her back on her hands and knees.
She said something Colin was too far away to hear, and the baby stopped crying at once and began again.
Nine times, he counted.
She will be able to cross the lawn within a fortnight, and I will not be with her.
Below him, Leonora sat back on her heels and tilted her face up to the sun. Colin looked at the column of her throat and thought about a green door and a candle he had put out on purpose.
“You should be down there,” Mrs. Pike said from behind him.
“I have letters.”
“You have a pocketful of them, and they’re all from her, and you have not put one of them down since Monday.”
Colin did not turn round.
“You are extraordinarily insolent,” he noted.
“I am fifty, I have a bad hip, and there is nothing you can do to me.” Mrs. Pike came and stood at the other side of the window. “That’s a fine field you’ve dug this week.”
“It needed digging.”
“It’s needed digging since your father stopped up the ditch twenty years ago, and you’ve done it in four days because your wife wrote you a note about it.” She looked down at the lawn. “You’ll say that’s a coincidence.”
“I shall say nothing whatsoever.”
“That’s what I thought,” Mrs. Pike said, and went away.
Colin stayed at the window.
The baby got up on all fours once again, rocked, and stayed up.
She did not fall. She hung there over her hands with her head up, astonished at herself, and then she looked around for the one person in the world who would be pleased about it, found her, and made a sound that carried across the lawn.
Leonora lifted both hands in the air and laughed out loud.
Colin heard it through a closed window from forty yards away and thought that he had done a great many sums in his life and had never once been this wrong.
He went down.
He reached the door to the terrace, pressed his hand flat against it, and stopped, because from there he could hear Leonora talking to the baby in the voice she used when nobody was near, and he understood that the voice would change the moment he stepped out onto the lawn.
She will be perfectly pleasant to me. That is what I have made. She will be pleasant, and the child will look at us both, and I will have spoiled the best hour of her week.
He stood there long enough for his hand to go cold against the glass.
Then he went back up and wrote her a note about a culvert.