Chapter 31
“You will wear the ivory and green,” Susan said on Thursday.
“I wore the ivory and green to the opera.”
“You did, Your Grace, and I have been thinking about it ever since. If you will forgive me, it is the only gown that made him pause on the stairs.”
Leonora turned round. “Susan.”
“I’ve said too much.”
“You have said exactly enough, and I should like you to go on saying it for the next thirty years.” She looked at the gown, then at the mirror, then at the gown again. “No. Not the ivory. The claret.”
“Your Grace, the claret is—”
“The claret is the one my mother made me wear to the dinner that started all of this, and it shows a great deal more than a duchess ought to show at an auction of pictures,” Leonora cut in. “I am going to wear it, and I will not explain why to anybody in this house, including myself.”
She spent the two hours before they left on an exercise she had avoided for a fortnight, which was working out what she actually wanted.
It was harder than she had expected. She had gotten very good at wanting things on other people’s behalf.
She wanted Katherine to have a father who came into rooms. She wanted Mrs. Pike to see it before she died.
She wanted Beddoes to have a dry field and Mrs. Rowe to be asked for a turbot twice a year and Peg to stop dusting the hall table at half past ten.
And beneath all of that, small and mortifying and entirely her own, she wanted to be looked at by her husband in a public room, wanted everybody in it to see him do it, and wanted him to know that she saw.
She was aware that this was vanity. She had been raised by a woman who would have called it vanity and then done exactly the same.
Very well then, I shall be vain for one afternoon, and afterward I shall be sensible for the rest of my life, and nobody but me need ever know.
She was ready an hour too early, which was what came of choosing a gown out of spite, and spent that hour at the nursery window with Katherine on her knee, looking down the long field at a ditch that had been running clear since Tuesday.
“That is your father’s,” she murmured. “He dug it because I wrote him a note. That is very nearly a romance, sweetling, and you must not tell anybody I said so.”
Katherine put a fist in her mouth.
“No. Quite right. It is not a romance at all. It is a ditch.” Leonora rested her chin on her small soft head.
“But I shall tell you something, since you cannot repeat it. When I was your age, nobody had ever dug me anything. Now I am one-and-twenty, and it turns out that it is the only present I have ever wanted.”
She went down at eleven.
Colin was standing in the hall with his hat in his hand, exactly as he had been on the night of the opera. He looked up, and this time, his face did not close. It stayed open for a good deal longer than two seconds.
Leonora came down the last four steps watching a man forget to compose himself, and thought with a savagery that surprised her:
Good. Look at it. Look at what you have decided to be good about.
“Ready?” she asked.
Colin cleared his throat. “Yes,” he said, and did not utter another word all the way to the carriage.
Sir Hugo Ferrand’s pictures had been forty years in the collecting and were being sold because Sir Hugo had died in March owing a great deal of money to a great many people, which nobody said out loud at any point in the afternoon.
The house was in Berkeley Square, and it was full.
Leonora had been in crowded rooms all her adult life and had spent every one of them working out where the potted palms were.
She got out of the carriage on her husband’s arm, walked up a flight of stairs in her claret gown, and understood at the top of them that she would not be able to find a corner in this house, because the room turned around.
Not all of it. A quarter of it, perhaps. In a ripple, the way a field turned when a hare skipped across it.
“Steady,” Colin murmured.
“I am perfectly—”
“Your fingers are digging into bones, Duchess. Now, I have no objection whatsoever, but I am telling you so that you know I have noticed.”
She loosened her grip by a fraction.
“They are looking at me.”
“They have been looking at you since the opera. This is the first time you have been in a room where they are permitted to come up and say so.” He steered her to the left, off the main sweep, and along the wall.
“Breathe. I shall stand here and be extremely forbidding, and nobody will come within ten feet of you.”
“That is not what I want.”
“No?”
“No.” Leonora lifted her chin and released his sleeve. “I have hidden behind furniture for four Seasons, Your Grace, and I have just discovered that I am tired of it. I should like to make the rounds. Will you come?”
Colin looked at her. “Yes.”
And so they walked the length of the crowded room together.
Nine people spoke to them, and old Lady Cottesloe said that she had always maintained the Duke was much misunderstood, to which Leonora responded, “Have you indeed, ma’am?” in a voice of such perfect sweetness that Colin had to look at a picture.
“That was unkind,” he chided softly, when the old woman had gone.
“It was extremely unkind. I have been saving it since May.”
“She wrote to your mother about you.”
“She wrote to my mother in May to say that she could not receive me. My mother cried in the stillroom where she thought nobody could hear her, and she has never cried about anything in her life except her wedding and a dog.” Leonora plucked a glass off a passing tray with great composure.
“So yes, that was unkind. I intend to be unkind to nine more people this afternoon, and then I shall be finished forever, and you may hold my glass.”
“I shall hold your glass,” Colin said, “and I should like it noted that I have never enjoyed anything so much in my life.”
They went around the rooms.
It was, Leonora had to admit, a remarkable collection for a man who had died owing money.
There were Dutch things, brown and small and full of weather.
There was a great deal of Italy. There was an entire wall of portraits of the Ferrand family, four generations of them, hung so close that they touched.
She stood in front of it for a while, not saying a word. Beside her, her husband did the same.
“Sir Hugo’s grandchildren are selling those,” Colin said at last.
“I know.”
“Somebody will buy the lot for the frames.”
“I know that too,” Leonora sighed, and moved on.
The private gallery was upstairs and was shown in parties of eight. They went up at two with a Mr. Gedge of the auction house, who had the manner of a man conducting a funeral he had arranged himself.
It was a long room at the back of the house with northern light, and it held the pictures Sir Hugo had not hung. It was better than everything downstairs put together.
“He kept these for himself,” Colin noted.
“How can you tell?”
“Because there is nothing here a visitor would recognize and nothing at all he could have boasted of.” He had stopped in front of a small dark study of a hare.
“That is a superb thing, and no man alive has heard of the painter. He put it in a back room where only he could see it. He liked pictures. It is remarkable how few collectors do.”
Behind them, a man in the doorway said, “Thorton? Good God. Is that Thorton?” and Colin’s whole back changed, and Mr. Gedge, who had plainly spent thirty years watching people want to leave rooms, said smoothly that the drainage of the Berkshire clays was a subject his lordship had strong opinions about, and had them out on the landing inside a minute.
Leonora was left alone at the top of a long room with north light.
She crossed the length of it slowly.
At the far end, over a shrouded table, hung four feet of a garden in June.
There was nothing clever about it. There were no gods in it, no ruins, nobody’s ancestors.
Only a walled garden with the light coming in low, fruit trees, and a gate standing open at the end of a path.
It was so full of green that it seemed to be making noise.
Somebody had set a straw hat down on the grass and gone away, and was plainly coming back.
Leonora stood in front of it, unable to move.
“Your Grace,” Mr. Gedge said at her elbow. “Lot one hundred and four. It goes up at half past three.”
“Does it?”
“There has been some interest. Not a great deal, if I am being honest. It is not a name.” He coughed. “It would go for a quite reasonable price.”
Leonora looked at four feet of open gate.
“Mr. Gedge,” she said. “Where does a woman stand if she wishes to bid on something without her husband knowing what it is?”