Chapter 27
“Icould put something in his wine,” Marina offered.
“Marina.”
“Not enough to kill him, just enough to make him unwell in a public building. Everybody will see it.”
“That would be worse for me than for him, and you know it.”
“That is precisely the trouble with poisoning people,” Marina huffed. “It never lands where you want it.”
They had gotten as far as the end of the corridor, past the crush, into the cold drafty part where the lamps ran out and nobody stood because there was nothing to be seen.
Leonora had her back against the wall and her fan shut in both hands, and had been perfectly composed for nine minutes, which was about eight minutes longer than she had expected to manage.
“He pulled out my chair on Saturday,” she revealed. “And he asked after the fish. When I dropped my glass, he caught it before it could topple over and then pulled his hands back like a man who had touched a hot dish.”
“Nora.”
“And then he wrote me a note about a culvert that was the kindest thing anybody has said to me in a year.” Her voice cracked. “A culvert, Marina.”
“I know.”
“He can put anything on paper. He put four sentences on paper about a ditch his father stopped up before either of us was out of the schoolroom, and he has not looked me in the face since Friday. I have begun to think that I could live like that. That is what frightens me. I have begun to think that a drawer of notes might be enough. But it is not enough.”
Marina put both arms round her and did not speak.
“What would you have me do?” Leonora wiped her face with the back of her wrist, which was not what one did at the opera.
“Go home to Mama? She would have me in the blue bedroom by Friday, and the ton would have the whole of it by Saturday, and then he would be exactly what they have always said he was, and it would all be because of me.”
“You are allowed to be unhappy without arranging everybody else’s evening around it.”
“I am not, though. That is what nobody tells you before you marry a duke.” She snapped her fan open and closed it again.
“Everything I do now is about him. If I laugh in this corridor, it means our marriage is a success. If I cry in it, it means he beats me. I cannot simply feel anymore, Marina, because it will all go straight out into the room and become a fact about my husband.”
“Then feel it all here, with me,” Marina urged. “That’s what I’m here for. I have come twenty miles into town this evening to be the person you are allowed to be wretched with, and I intend to be extremely good at it. And later, I shall put something in his wine.”
Leonora laughed, which was almost worse.
“Your Grace.”
They sprang apart.
There was a woman standing about six feet away in the half dark, in a well-made gray gown, with her hands folded in front of her. She was perhaps five-and-twenty. Leonora had never seen her before.
“Forgive me,” the woman said. “I did not know how else to do it.”
“Do what, ma’am?”
“Thank you.”
Leonora frowned at her. “I am afraid you have the advantage of me. I don’t believe we have been introduced.”
“No.” The woman’s hands curled. “No, we have not.” Then, without warning, she stepped forward and said close to Leonora’s ear, “I could not have chosen a better mother for her.”
The air went still.
Leonora heard the orchestra tuning somewhere behind the wall, the crush of voices at the lit end, and Marina’s voice saying her name, but none of it seemed to be happening in the same building.
“Not even the woman who bore her?” she croaked.
The stranger’s eyes filled but did not spill. That was the part Leonora would not forget afterward: that the woman had had a great deal of practice at not letting her tears spill over.
“Is she well?” the woman asked. “I ask nothing else, only that.”
“She has cut a tooth,” Leonora heard herself say.
“She has learned to get up on her hands and knees this week, but she cannot do anything with it yet, which makes her furious. She will not eat unless somebody sings to her. She is afraid of nobody in that house except the cat, and the cat adores her.” Her throat closed up.
“She laughed for the first time nine days ago. At her father. He was pretending to be a sea captain.”
The woman put her hand over her mouth.
“You could come, ma’am,” Leonora offered. “You could come and see her. I would gladly arrange it. Nobody in the world needs to know—”
“No.”
“There is a house at the edge of the park. We could—”
“No.” It came out fast and final. “Forgive me. No. I have done it once. I stood on that doorstep for an hour before I put her down, and I have not slept a whole night since. If I see her, I would take her back, and I have nothing to take her back to.”
At the lit end of the corridor, a man’s voice called, “Agnes.”
Leonora looked past her.
The man was standing under the last lamp with his hat in his hand. He was sixty if he was a day, and he was not looking at either of them. He had the settled impatience of a man who had been waiting a great while and expected to wait a little longer and would mention it later in the carriage.
The woman in gray looked back at him.
“He has asked me,” she said. “He does not know, but he is not unkind.” She straightened her gloves.
“Nobody knows. My husband was two years dying and I nursed him and saw nobody, and when he was buried I went into the country to grieve, which is what a widow does, and I stayed eleven months, which is a long grief and not a strange one. There was one woman in Shropshire who knew, and she was paid, and she is fond of the child, and she has never written to a soul.”
“And I could not be married to a man who did not know if she were in the house. Don’t you see? She would be in every room. He would look at her one day and count, and then she would pay for it for the rest of her life.”
“You have thought about this a great deal,” Leonora noted.
“I have thought about nothing else since before she was born.” Agnes’s voice did not rise at all.
“I thought about it every day I was in Shropshire waiting for her. I thought about it while I was carrying her and while I had her, and I have thought about it every day since I left her on the Duke’s doorstep.
There is not one scenario I have not considered.
If I keep her, she is a bastard and I am the woman who made her one, and we are both finished.
If I put her at a foundling hospital, she is dead within the year.
You may believe that or not as you like, but I made inquiries.
” She said it exactly as a woman read out a household account.
“If I give her to the man whose brother fathered her, she is a duke’s daughter. ”
“That is a terrible arithmetic.”
“It is the only one there is for women like me. Men do this and go to Italy. We do it and go to Shropshire.” She stepped back.
“Your Grace, if she ever asks, you may tell her whatever you find kindest. I would rather she thought I was dead than believe that I did not want her, but I leave it up to you. I shall never trouble you again.”
“Ma’am—”
“Agnes,” called the man under the lamp.
Agnes went.
Leonora watched her walk to the other end of the corridor and take the arm of a man who was already turning away, and did not move until they were gone.
“Nora,” Marina hissed. “Nora. Breathe.”
“That was Katherine’s mother.”
“I know.”
“She is about to marry a man of sixty who does not know she ever had a child, and she thanked me.” Leonora found that she was shaking.
“Marina, everything has happened exactly as it had to. Every part. William goes to Italy so that Colin claims her. Colin claims her so that he needs a wife. I write one stupid letter at three in the morning so that I am the wife he finds. That woman gives up her daughter so that I may have her. It is all fitted together like a joint. None of us chose any of it, and it has come out right.”
“That’s a good thing, isn’t it?” Marina asked carefully.
Leonora looked down the corridor at the lamp where the woman in gray had stood.
“She said she stood on the doorstep for an hour,” she said.
“Before she put her down. An hour, Marina, in January, in the dark, with a basket. Then she walked up the gravel drive and did not turn round, and she has not slept a whole night since. Tonight, she came to the theater and stood in a cold passage waiting for a stranger to walk past so that she might find out whether her daughter was well.”
“Nora.”
“And I have spent six days being wretched about a man who writes me notes.”
“That is not the same, and you know it.”
“It is exactly the same.” Leonora snapped her fan open.
“No, it is not the same. It is smaller. I am going to go back into that box, and I am going to sit beside my husband for two hours and be extremely pleasant, because that woman gave up everything she had so that Katherine would have a mother and a name, and the very least I can do is be them.”
The bell went for the second act.
“Everything has come out right,” she murmured. “Every single part of it. Except my husband and me.”