Chapter 26
The gown was ivory shot with green, and it had cost a lot of money. Leonora had chosen it in about ninety seconds, on Wednesday, out of pure spite.
“You look,” Susan commented, standing back, “if you’ll pardon me, Your Grace, like something in a shop window.”
“That is precisely the effect I was after.”
“Only I meant it kindly.”
“So did I,” Leonora said, and went down.
Colin was at the foot of the stairs, with his hat in his hand. He had been standing there for a while. She watched him look up and freeze.
It lasted perhaps two seconds. Then his face closed the way a door closed on a lit room, and he asked, “Ready?”
“Yes.”
“Then we should go. It is forty miles to town and the roads are bad past Hounslow.”
He handed her in; that was the first problem. Handing a woman into a carriage required a hand. His was bare, and hers was gloved, and the whole transaction lasted perhaps two seconds and neither of them recovered from it.
The ride lasted two and a half hours, and they said eleven words during it.
Leonora counted them, because counting things was what she did in rooms she could not get out of, and she had four Seasons of practice. Four words about the road at Hounslow. Three about the weather. Two about whether she was warm enough, and two more when she said that she was.
She looked out the window at the dark and thought about the notes in her escritoire, every one of them warmer than any sentence he had said to her face in six days, and understood that her husband could say anything at all to her provided that he did not have to watch her hear it.
Somewhere past the turnpike, she gave in and looked at him.
He was asleep.
Not properly. His head had lolled back against the squabs, and his hat was on the seat beside him. He had the particular gray look of a man who had not slept in a bed for four nights.
Leonora sat in the dark of the moving carriage and looked at his face for the first time in six days without him knowing she was doing it.
The scar ran up from beneath the black silk into his hairline. The other end of it ran down to his cheekbone and stopped. She had never once been permitted to look at it for longer than a glance, but she did now, and felt nothing whatsoever except an enormous, useless tenderness.
Fifteen years. You were fifteen. Somebody should have held you, and nobody did, and you have arranged your entire life since so that nobody ever will.
He woke at Kensington and caught her at it. She did not look away in time, and neither of them said one word about it.
The Regent Theater had four tiers, and every one of them turned round.
Colin had expected it. He had been expecting it for nine days, since his wife had put the invitation in his hand in the treehouse and told him it would be two hours and they could leave.
What he had not expected was the sound, the way a house of two thousand people dropped half a tone when something worth looking at came into a box.
“They are all staring,” Leonora said pleasantly, sitting down.
“Yes.”
“At you or at me?”
“At you.” He took the chair beside hers. “They have been told for six years that I have a face like a butcher’s block. You are the novelty. They cannot work out why you look pleased about it.”
“I look pleased about it because my mother is in the third tier with her opera glasses trained on me, and if I don’t, she will come down here.”
Colin glanced up. Lady Huntington, caught in the act at sixty feet, waved her hand vigorously.
“God help us,” he muttered.
“She has been waiting four Seasons for one of us to be looked at in this building,” Leonora said. “You have made her the happiest woman in London, and you have not spoken to her since Tuesday last week.”
That was the last easy thing that was said between them.
The opera was Italian and long, and Colin, who had not sat still in a public building since he was twenty-four, discovered that two hours was a great deal longer than his wife had implied.
He watched the stage. He watched the boxes watching him. Twice he turned his head to say a word to her about the tenor, and twice he remembered that they were not saying things to each other this week.
At the interval, her brothers joined them.
They arrived in a body, the way Belmonts did everything. Alexander had a bottle. Evan had the expression of a man discharging a duty. Within four minutes, the box was full and loud, and Leonora had gone out into the corridor with Marina on her arm.
Colin watched her go and made himself stop watching.
“That,” Alexander said, sitting down uninvited, “is the third tier’s entire evening. Two Belmont women walking off arm in arm. There’ll be nothing else discussed at supper.”
“They have been at it since we came in.”
“They have been at it since Wednesday, Your Grace. You have no notion what you have done to this town.” Alexander was counting boxes on his fingers.
“Lady Ashwood has told four people that she always knew there was nothing to the story about the baby. Four. She wrote to my mother in May to say that she could not receive Nora. Old Cottesloe has informed the smoking room that he was at Westminster the day my father knelt and that he has always considered him a very sound man, and my father has never met him.”
“And that is a good thing?”
“It is a rout.” Alexander drank. “Do you know what they cannot forgive? Being wrong in public. So they have decided, all at once, at about half past nine this evening, that they were never wrong at all, and by Sunday there will be forty people in this town who will tell you they have always said the Duke of Thorton was much misunderstood, and half of them will believe it.”
“Are they always so idle?”
“Always. It’s their profession.” Alexander poured. “Now, my brother has something to say to you, and he has been rehearsing it since Hounslow. I have promised to make it less dreadful, which I shan’t, because I want to watch.”
“Alexander.”
“Go on. You’ll only do it worse later.”
Evan put down his glass.
“Your Grace,” he began. “Is my sister happy?”
The box went quiet.
“That is not a question a man asks another man about his wife,” Colin said.
“No, it isn’t.” Evan held his eye, which Colin noted, because most men could not manage it for more than a moment.
“I am asking it regardless. My mother has received four letters from her so far, and every one of them is about the cook. I know my sister. She writes about cooks when there is nothing else she is willing to put on paper.”
“Evan,” Alexander said, without any laughter in it.
“I want an answer.”
Colin turned his glass by the stem. He thought about a note in a small upright hand and a candle put out on purpose, and a woman on a lawn setting a baby back on her hands and knees a dozen times, and about the fact that he could see from where he sat the exact place in the corridor where his wife was standing with her back to him.
He released a breath. “You should understand what this was.”
“I understand what it was. There was a column.”
“Before the column. There was a joke, a basket, and a lady who happened to be in my house on the wrong evening.” He set the glass down.
“Your sister and I came together by accident. There was no courtship. There was no choice made by either of us that a reasonable person would call a choice. It is an arrangement that the newspapers arranged, and it will hold because I will see that it holds, and she will want for nothing in her life.”
“That is not what I asked you.”
“It is all I am going to tell you. None of the rest matters.”
There was a pause.
“Right,” Evan uttered.
“Right,” Alexander agreed, in a completely different tone.
They stayed for another ten minutes and talked about horses, and neither of them looked at him properly again. As they made to leave, Alexander stopped in the doorway with his hand on the curtain.
“Your Grace.”
“Yes?”
“You’re a bad liar, which is the only reason I haven’t hit you.”
“Say what you mean.”
“Very well.” Alexander came back one step into the box.
He was not remotely amused now, which Colin found considerably more difficult.
“I have watched you for two hours. You have looked at the stage twice and at my sister about forty times, and you did it in a building where two thousand people were watching you, which suggests to me that you could not help it. And then my brother asked you a simple question, and you told him it was an arrangement.” He tugged his gloves on.
“I have a great many faults, Your Grace. I am idle, and I am frivolous, and I have never in my life done a day’s work my father would recognize as one.
But I have never once let someone I love go on believing they were a transaction because I was too much of a coward to say the other thing out loud. ”
“You know nothing about it.”
“No,” Alexander agreed. “But she does. And you have let her think it for a fortnight.” He stepped out and let the curtain fall.
Colin sat alone in the box.
Below him, the orchestra came back in twos and threes and tune.
Above him, two thousand people were gossiping about him.
And out in the corridor, thirty feet away and in plain view of his chair if he turned his head, his wife was standing with her sister, and had been standing there for a very long time.