Chapter Nine #2
Selina closed the book upon her finger, then slowly withdrew it.
“That is what they said.”
“Yes.”
“I did not ask what they said.”
He did not answer. He remained at the window with his back towards her, the glass motionless in his hand. The silence continued until she counted its length and then went beyond counting. He was not gathering an answer. He had chosen not to give one.
“Nathaniel.”
His shoulders shifted.
“She asked me for money,” he said. “That August. She came to my rooms, which she had never done before, and asked me for money and a carriage. She intended to go abroad with him. She wanted my help in arranging it quietly, so that her departure would resemble a rest cure rather than a flight. She sat in my chair and asked her son to pay her fare.”
He placed the glass upon the sill with great care, as though it were the glass which might break.
“I refused. I stood in the doorway and explained why with perfect clarity, because I was two-and-twenty and believed clarity the only virtue required of me. She looked at me for a long while. Then she said, ‘Very well, Wexford.’ She had never called me Wexford before. It was my father’s title, and he was not yet dead. ”
“Nathaniel.”
“She never spoke a complete sentence to me again. Eight weeks. Not one. She remained perfectly civil at table.” He continued facing the window.
“Then she was dead, and they called it grief. I have had twelve years in which to decide whether they were right. I have not decided, and I do not intend to, because no answer would allow me to sleep more easily.” He drew a breath.
“There. You have it. That is more than I have ever said aloud, and I should be obliged if you did not require me to say any of it twice.”
Selina sat with the book upon her knee and one hand resting flat upon its cover. For once, she found that she had nothing to say.
The fire shifted behind the grate. Nathaniel did not turn.
“I am sorry,” she said at last. “I asked to see the shape of it. I did not understand what it would cost you to show me.”
“You did not force it from me.”
“No. But I will not pretend it was lightly given.”
“It was not.” He left the window and stopped a few feet from her chair. “But it is outside me now. That is a peculiar thing. It weighs less in the room than it did in my chest.”
“Is that why Georgiana’s secrecy frightened you so much? You feared the same ending?”
“I did. And I mistook that fear for proof that the stories were the same.”
“You were standing too near the memory to see the difference clearly,” Selina said. “I arrived without it. I saw only a lonely girl in the wrong gloves.”
“And saw her more clearly in one afternoon than I had managed in a year.”
“You saw her through the fear of losing her. Fear is not an impartial observer.”
“You describe me to myself more accurately than I have ever managed. I am uncertain whether to thank you or ask you to stop.”
“Neither. Only hear it. You have carried the judgement alone for twelve years; you need not also be the only one to answer it.”
He looked at her then. “You make that sound remarkably simple.”
“No. Only possible.”
She turned the glass between her hands, choosing her next words with care.
“There are other ways of allowing an old loss to govern what one does,” she said. “You are not the only person in this room who has kept part of the past hidden because speaking of it cost too much.”
His attention sharpened, but he did not press her.
Selina drew a slow breath.
“I sold my mother’s jewels.”
He did not move.
“Four winters ago, when the last of my money was gone and there was no prospect of more, I had kept them through the trial, the sale of the house and years of cheap rooms. They were the only possessions which were wholly mine, the one thing my father’s ruin had never been entitled to reach and which had never been his to lose.
When I became hungry enough, truly hungry, I took them to a dealer in Ludgate and received less than half their worth.
I did not weep. Grieving over the last remnant of one’s mother is a luxury, and I had rent to find.
” She looked down at the wine in her glass.
“I retained what I required to live. The rest went elsewhere. I cannot tell you where… Not yet.”
“Then keep that part,” he said. “I shall not ask for what you are not ready to give.”
“I took a situation after that, as companion to an elderly woman in Suffolk. I remained with her for three years under the name Gray, reading aloud, answering the few letters she received and winding a remarkable number of clocks. Every quarter, I was paid, and every quarter I set aside a portion of my wages for the same purpose as the money from the jewels. She died during the winter, and her family had no further need of a companion. I returned to London with a character and four pounds. Six months later, you found me at a placement assembly with enough money for another fortnight’s lodging.
” She turned the glass between her hands.
“I tell you because you have entrusted me with something you had never spoken aloud, and it seemed unjust to accept that confidence while offering none in return. And because I know what it is to make the only choice necessity appears to permit, then carry the cost of it long afterwards.”
Nathaniel looked at her and allowed the silence to remain for some time before attempting to fill it.
“What were they?” he asked. “Not their value. What were they?”
“A garnet necklace, old-fashioned even when she owned it. The earrings which matched. A small brooch which she pinned upon me on the morning of my first ball.” Selina’s voice did not alter.
“She wore the set to every occasion which mattered in her life, and to a great many which did not. She left them to me by name, in a codicil written in her own hand and initialled twice in the margin because the lawyer had required her to do it again.” Her fingers tightened slightly around the glass.
“I kept them through the trial and the sale of the house, wrapped in a stocking at the bottom of a box. Then I became hungry in the manner which ceases to be dramatic and becomes merely arithmetic. I took them to Ludgate. I have not spoken of them to another living soul until tonight.”
“I wish you had never been forced to choose between them and hunger,” Nathaniel said.
“I do not require pity.”
“It is not pity. It is anger that such a choice was required of you; and admiration for the woman who survived it.”
“Then let it remain admiration,” Selina said. “Do not turn it into a debt which must be repaid.”
“I shall not.”
She rose, because the moment had grown too large to remain seated within it.
“We are becoming friends, Your Grace, beneath all the strategy, and I placed no provision for that in our agreement. I am beginning to discover how much of the important business I neglected to put into writing.”
“You omitted all of it,” Nathaniel said. “Every term which matters has been made since the wedding; in libraries, passages and parks, without a solicitor in sight.”
She wished him good night and went upstairs. Upon the landing, she remained for a while with one hand resting upon the rail, listening to the silence of the room below.
***
The note arrived the following morning. It was written upon plain, unscented paper and addressed in a hand she had not seen for years but recognised at once. Selina stood in the hall for some time before opening it.
The four lines within were courteous and cold.
With the false humility of a man convinced that he held the stronger hand, her cousin enquired whether the new Duchess of Wexford would receive the Earl of Merrow upon a matter of family business which it would distress them both to conduct through solicitors.
Selina had not seen Giles since the year her father was hanged. He had come to the house then to determine what might be salvaged and had departed with two paintings and no offer of assistance.
Selina read the note again.
Giles had never approached anyone unless he believed himself to possess an advantage. She did not know what he wanted from her now, but the courtesy of his language made her trust him less, not more.
She folded the note and placed it in her pocket, then immediately withdrew it and read the four lines once more. A housemaid entered carrying a coal scuttle, saw her standing motionless beside the hall table and quietly retreated through another door.
Selina had faced every consequence of her father’s fall alone. She need not face Giles in the same manner.
She rang for a footman. They had promised one another companionship and no lies, and the truth was that her cousin’s letter had alarmed her.
When the servant appeared, she placed the note upon his tray. “Take this to His Grace and ask him to join me in the drawing room when he has read it.”