Chapter 30
That was the fortnight in which they were perfectly happy, and Leonora hated every day of it.
Her mother came on Monday and stayed four hours and did not notice a thing.
That was its own proof. Olivia Belmont could detect an engagement across a ballroom and a quarrel through a wall, and she sat in the drawing room at Thorton for four hours with her granddaughter on her lap and pronounced the marriage a triumph.
“He is devoted,” she said in the hall, tying her bonnet.
“Mama.”
“I have watched him for four hours, my girl, and I know what I am looking at. He fetched your shawl. He fetched it before you were cold. There is not one man in twenty who does that, and your father is not among them.” She kissed Leonora on the cheek.
“I was very frightened for you in May. I do not mind saying it now. I used to lie awake at night.”
“I know you did.”
“Well, I was wrong. Now I am delighted, and I shall tell everybody.” She stopped on the step. “Nora, is there any news?”
“Mama.”
“I am only asking.”
“You are not only asking, but you also underlined it twice in a letter.”
“Every mother in England underlines it twice,” she stated with dignity, before climbing into the carriage. She poked her head out of the window. “There is no hurry, however. It took me the better part of a year, and your father was extremely patient about it.”
“Mother.”
The carriage took off down the drive, and Leonora stood on the step and waved until it disappeared from view. Then she stepped back inside and went up to her room. She sat down on the edge of her bed for a while, without taking her shawl off.
She had been married for three weeks, and she had not once lain with her husband. Her mother had gone home entirely satisfied and would tell her friends, and it would be in a gossip column by Sunday that the Duchess of Thorton was very happy.
She was ashamed of her resentment, which made it worse, because everything was pleasant.
Katherine crawled the length of the gallery and back, and Colin was there for it. He lay full length on the floorboards to be crawled over. Leonora had to leave and stand in the corridor for a moment.
He came down for breakfast four mornings out of six. He read to the child at eleven o’clock from the picture book of animals with letters underneath, mimicked all the animals, and was mortified to be caught at it.
He walked the ditch. He opened the music room. He had a man come from Reading about a cracked window and stood over him for an hour and a half, and when the glass pane went in, he stood underneath it looking up for a good deal longer than was required.
He began to be seen too, which was the part the county could not get over.
He rode into Thorton Green on Tuesday and went into the alehouse, which no Duke of Thorton had done in living memory, and asked Peg’s mother a question about a well.
On Thursday, he was spotted in the churchyard talking to the vicar for a good ten minutes, and the vicar told four people.
On Saturday, two farmers came up to the house without being sent for, stood in the hall turning their hats over, were shown into the study, and came out an hour later looking as though the roof had come off the world.
“They will be talking about that for a year,” Mrs. Pike drawled, watching them go down the drive.
“They will be talking about it for thirty,” Leonora countered.
He never once touched her. Not once, in fourteen days.
He handed her into carriages, took her arm on the terrace, and passed her things at the table, but every time his hand arrived exactly where it was needed and withdrew exactly when it was no longer required, with the courtesy of a man handing a lady down from a coach in the rain.
He is being good. That is what this is. He has decided what he is permitted, and he is being extremely good about it, and it is going to go on for forty years.
On Friday, the whole household went into the ballroom.
It was not planned. Leonora had gone in to look at the shutters, with Katherine on her hip, and the child had taken one look at four hundred square yards of empty floor and made a noise of such naked ambition that there was nothing to be done but set her down.
She got six feet before she noticed the echo. That stopped her entirely.
She sat back on her bum in the middle of the enormous gray room and shouted once experimentally. When the ceiling shouted back, her whole face changed.
“Oh,” Leonora murmured. “Oh, no. We shall be here all afternoon.”
They were there all afternoon.
Bess came to see what the noise was and stayed.
Peg came to find Bess. Mrs. Pike arrived with the mending, sat down on a shrouded chair, and did not do any of it.
At some point, Leonora looked up to find her husband standing in the doorway, with his coat off and a chisel in his hand, listening to his daughter shout at his mother’s ballroom ceiling.
He did not come in. He stood in the doorway for seven minutes, by the clock over the chimney. Then somebody called his name from the corridor about the Reading man, and he went. The room was noticeably worse afterward. Every woman in it knew it, but not one of them said so.
Leonora got up, lit a candle, took the notes out of the escritoire drawer, and read them again, which she had promised herself on Tuesday she would stop doing.
There were thirteen now. Colin had written on Monday about the settlement, three lines, entirely dry, and at the bottom of it: It is arranged.
Twice a year, through Fenwick at Ludlow, and no letter.
You were right about the town. He had also written on Thursday, about a book he had found on the third shelf that he thought she might be interested in.
She had gone down and grabbed it at six in the morning before anybody was up.
She put the notes back in order and shut the drawer.
This is a courtship. That is the joke of it. I am being courted in writing, at a distance of forty feet, by a man I am already married to, and he does not know he is doing it. And if I tell him, he will stop.
On the Wednesday before the auction, she found him in the nursery at seven in the morning.
He did not know she was there. He was sitting on the floor with his back against the cot and Katherine standing up against his knee, both fists in his shirt, doing what she had learned that week, which was to bounce and shout at somebody until they agreed with her.
“That,” Colin was saying, “is a strong opinion for a seven-month-old.”
Katherine bounced.
“I don’t dispute it. I merely observe that you have made it four times this morning and I have agreed with you on every occasion, and there is a case for moving on.”
Katherine pressed her hand flat against the black silk over his eye. She did it the way she always did now, without ceremony, the way one touched the latch of a familiar door. Colin did not even flinch.
“Yes,” he said. “It’s still there.”
The baby patted it twice, before losing interest and going for his collar instead.
“You are the only person alive who is permitted to do that,” Colin told her, “and you have no notion what it is worth. I should like it on the record that I have never once refused you anything, which is exactly how your father was ruined.”
Leonora quietly stepped away from the door. She reached the top of the stairs and had to sit down, which no duchess did in her own house at seven in the morning. She sat there with the heels of both hands pressed against her eyes.
He is a good father. A wonderful father. And he only shows it in an empty room at seven o’clock so that nobody has to be grateful to him. One day, Katherine will be nineteen and will have no idea what it cost him, and he will prefer it that way.
But I shall know. That is what I have. I shall be the one person in the world who knows, and I shall not be allowed to say it to him. I shall sit at the other end of a table for forty years being the only witness.
Mrs. Pike found her there four minutes later and did not say anything about it, which was, Leonora reflected afterward, the greatest tact in the history of English service.
She simply sat down on the stairs beside her, with great difficulty and a good deal of noise from her hip, and stayed there until Leonora stopped crying.
“There,” she soothed. “That’s the worst of it out.”
“It is not the worst of it.”
“No,” Mrs. Pike agreed. “But it’s out.”