Chapter Twelve
Elowen did not go back into the conservatory.
She told herself it was the press of work, with the ball only days away and Mrs Pike still keeping her bed, and it was true that the work pressed.
But the truer thing, which she did not let herself look at directly, was that she had sat in a glass house in the rain and let a man see too much of her.
She had said his name into the dark like a girl, and she did not know how to walk back into a room where that had happened.
So she did not. She arranged her days so that her path and his did not cross outside the estate office, where there were books between them, and the books kept her safe.
She was very busy being safe when Amabel found her in the linen room, counting tablecloths for the supper, perched on the press, and said the name that was going to be the trouble.
“Lady Cressida Loxley is coming to the ball. Did you know? Aunt has had the acceptance. The Loxleys never come into the country before February as a rule, but they are coming for ours.” Amabel said it with the relish of seventeen, which has not yet learned that some news is heavy.
“She is the most elegant creature in three counties, everyone says so, and she reads Greek, and she did not take in her first season or her second, which Aunt says is because she is particular and the gossips say is because she is proud, and she is exactly the sort of person Lucian ought to marry, which is why everyone is in such a taking that she is coming. There. Now you know as much as I do.”
“Count the damask napkins,” said Elowen, “and spare me the rest.”
But Amabel told her the rest, because she could not help it, and Elowen counted napkins and let the words pass over her like cold water. She did not allow her face to alter, which was a skill she had, and had never before resented possessing.
Lady Cressida came to call three days later, with her mother, in the proper way, to make the country acquaintance before the crush of the ball.
Elowen had no business in the drawing room and every business in it; with Mrs Pike ill, the ordering of the tea fell to her.
She carried in the tray herself rather than trust the new girl with the good Worcester, and was in the room perhaps four minutes.
Four minutes was enough.
Lady Cressida Loxley was everything Amabel had said and nothing Elowen had been prepared against. She was tall and quiet and very plainly dressed for a great heiress, in a grey that Elowen’s practised eye priced at more than her year’s allowance. She had a clever, unhurried face.
When Amabel, scarlet with the importance of company, knocked her cup and slopped tea into the saucer, Lady Cressida neither pretended not to see, which would have been kind, nor laughed, which would have been cruel.
“I do that whenever anyone is watching me,” she said. “At a first call, that is everyone. It is why I have learned to take my tea nearly empty.”
She tipped a little of her own into the slop bowl so that her cup matched Amabel’s, and went on talking. The colour came down in Amabel’s face, and the moment vanished as though it had never been.
It was so deftly done, and so kindly, and so exactly the thing a duchess ought to do, that Elowen, setting down the pot, felt something in her chest go quietly out, like a candle pinched between two fingers.
She had been telling herself a story, and it ended there, in the four minutes it took to pour out. She had let a man offer her his given name in the rain and had carried the sound of it about with her like a pressed flower, nursing the small, soft possibility that it might mean something.
And here, in a grey gown, was the end of the story.
This was the sort of woman a duke married.
Not merely elegant, but clever and kind, perfectly at ease in the place prepared for her.
That was the unbearable part. Lady Cressida was not cruel, or foolish, or vain.
Lucian Wycliffe would not be sacrificing himself to marry her.
He would be making precisely the choice the world expected of him, and no one could call it anything but wise.
“Thank you, Miss Vane,” said Lady Seraphina.
The dismissal was kindly given. Elowen took up the tray and went out without letting the door make a sound. She went down the cold stairs to the stillroom and stood a moment in its green quiet, longer than anything required, because it was the only quiet she would be given that day.
Lady Seraphina sent for her that evening on the pretext of the ball flowers, and kept her after the flowers were settled.
“Sit down, Miss Vane. No, not the upright chair. You have been upright since five o’clock. The other one.”
Seraphina watched her over the rim of her cup. “You met Cressida Loxley.”
“I poured her tea. She was very kind to Lady Amabel.”
“She is very kind to everyone. It is one of the more discouraging things about her.” Seraphina set down her cup.
“I am going to tell you something, and you will think an old woman is wandering, and you will be too well bred to say so. I shall go on regardless, which is one of the few pleasures age improves.”
Elowen sat still.
“When I was a girl, a little younger than you, there was a man. He was the second son of nobody in particular. He surveyed roads. He had a laugh that made the footmen forget themselves, and ink on his hands, always, like someone else I could name. He asked me to marry him in the orchard at Penhalland, in the wet, and I said no.”
Seraphina’s voice did not change. It had the evenness of something said so often in solitude that every rough edge had been worn away.
“Not because I did not want him. I knew my own heart perfectly. I said no because my father was ill, my brother was a fool, and the family wanted a connection I could make and he could not. It seemed to me then that wanting a thing so much was the very reason I could not be trusted to choose it. That a wish that strong must be a kind of selfishness.”
She smoothed one hand over her skirt.
“So I gave it up and made the suitable choice. The suitable choice died of a fever in the fourth year and left me his name and his house and no children, and I have been useful ever since.”
She smiled, and it was not a bitter smile, which made it worse.
“I will tell you the one thing I learned, and then we shall speak of the flowers again and never of this. The world will always have a reason ready for why you may not have the thing you want. It is generous that way. It will hand you the reason like a clean handkerchief. And the reason will very often be a good one. Mine was.”
The fire settled between them.
“That is what no one tells you. The reason may be perfectly sound, and you may give the thing up for all the proper reasons in the world, and still find that the reasons are poor company afterwards.”
Elowen looked at her hands.
“Why are you telling me this?” she asked. It was not the polished question. It was barely a question at all.
“Because you have the look of a woman who accepts a reason before anyone has finished offering it.” Seraphina’s voice softened.
“And because I have watched my nephew’s house grow warm for the first time in years, and I cannot bear to watch two careful people each decide, separately and in silence, that wanting something is sufficient cause to surrender it. ”
She took up the list of flowers again, her hands quite steady.
“Now. You said white hellebores for the supper room. I think them funereal and expect to be overruled, but I should like it recorded that I objected.”
It might have ended there: a confidence between two women that asked nothing and changed nothing, a dangerous half-hour to be folded away with the other things Elowen kept and used to nobody.
It would have, had the matter of the relief not come up the next morning and shown her, plainly and in daylight, exactly where the trouble lay.
The two flooded cottages at the mill row were to come down; the Duke had said so on the night of the storm, and would rebuild in the spring.
But spring was a long way off, and the two families were lodged through the winter in rooms that were not their own.
The parish had begun a subscription for their relief, the rector going round with his book and the farmers giving what they could.
It was natural work, and good work, and the rector, Mr Treloar, came up to the Hall to ask whether Miss Vane might be prevailed upon to manage it through the winter: the ordering of the relief, the keeping of the account, the visiting of the families, who knew her now and trusted her.
The eldest Tremlett girl had asked for her by name, and Mrs Pendarvis had put her forward as the only sensible woman in the parish who could add a column straight.
He did not ask Elowen.
He asked the Duke in the estate office, in the proper way, because the Duke was the Duke and Miss Vane was attached to the Duke’s household. Elowen knew of it only because she came in with the rent ledger in the middle of the conversation, heard her own name, and stopped in the doorway.
She stood there with the ledger in her arms and understood, in the space of a breath, that she wanted it.
Wanted it badly.
Not the labour; she had labour enough to break a stronger back.
But the families had asked for her. By name.
The village had looked round itself for the person it trusted with the money and the cold and the frightened children, and had settled upon Elowen Vane, who had been only a few months in the county and belonged to no one there.
Not the Duke’s housekeeper. Not Silas’s sister. Not the useful woman lent for the season.
Her.
It was the nearest thing to being wanted for herself that she had ever been offered, and it had come from a flooded village and a rector with a damp account book. She stood in the doorway and felt it open in her chest like a window thrown up in a shut room.
“That is good of the parish,” the Duke was saying, “and it is out of the question. Miss Vane has the whole house on her shoulders with Mrs Pike laid up, and the ball besides. I will not have her run off her feet for something the vestry can manage among them. Send the account to Felton; he will keep it. And tell the families I shall stand the cost of their relief myself until the cottages are rebuilt. There is no need to go round with the book at all. That eases it for everyone.”
It was generous. It was immediate. It was, like everything he did, complete before anyone else in the room had finished thinking.
The families were provided for, the rector spared his rounds, the vestry relieved of the account, and Miss Vane protected from one more burden upon a back he had decided was carrying enough.
He had not seen her in the doorway.
He saw her now.
“Miss Vane. Good. We were speaking of the mill-row relief. I have settled it. Felton will keep the account, and I shall fund the families directly, and you are spared the running of it. You have enough.”
He had already half turned back to the rector, the matter closed, his attention moving to the next thing.
“I have rearranged your week with Mrs Pike’s nurse, so you need not go down to the village again until after the ball. There. One less thing.”
It was sensible. More than sensible. Mr Treloar had come to ask the Duke of Marcombe whether a woman engaged in his household might be spared for outside work, and the Duke of Marcombe had said no.
He had every right to say it. Elowen had work enough already; more than enough.
He knew it, and had acted to protect her from still more.
There was nothing in it she could reasonably resent.
That was almost the worst of it.
“Of course,” she said.
Lucian looked at her.
She set the rent ledger on the table and squared it to the edge of the wood. “The Coker entry wants your initial, Your Grace.”
“Miss Vane.”
“The parish was very kind to think of me.”
Something in her own voice betrayed her. Not anger; she had none to spend on him. Only the small, humiliating loss of a thing she had possessed for perhaps three breaths.
Mr Treloar shifted beside the table. “They asked for you, miss. I should not have troubled His Grace with it otherwise.”
Elowen looked at him.
“Did they?”
“By name.”
There it was again. The thing itself, offered back to her when she had already made herself let it go.
“Thank you,” she said, and this time her voice nearly failed her. She bent her head over the ledger as though there were something in it requiring attention. “I am very glad they thought me capable.”
Lucian had gone still.
She could feel him looking at her, and wished he would not. There was nothing for him to correct. Nothing he had done wrongly. She was tired; the ball was days away; Mrs Pike could still scarcely leave her bed. If he asked her now whether she wished to undertake the relief, she ought to say no.
The trouble was that she would not have said no.
“The rents are on the table. I have marked the Coker entry; it wants your initial. I shall send Patty for the tea things.”
She picked up the ledger and went out before anyone could be kind to her.
Behind her, no one spoke for several moments.
She did not go down to the stillroom. She went out through the garden door into the cold and walked the length of the wet yew walk and back, the ledger held against her chest like a shield.
Lady Seraphina had told her only the night before that the world would always have a good reason ready.
This one was excellent.
She was tired. She was needed at the Hall. The work would have been too much. Lucian had been right to refuse it, and generous in seeing that the families lost nothing by his refusal.
The reason was perfectly sound.
Elowen walked to the end of the yew walk and turned back.
It did not alter the fact that, for three breaths in the doorway of the estate office, she had heard that a whole village had wanted her by name, and had been happy.
Then she went in and saw to the supper.