Chapter Fourteen
Lucian learned from Patty that Miss Vane’s room was cold, and not because he had asked.
The girl was laying his study fire and talking, as she always talked when she forgot to be frightened of him.
“And Miss Vane will never have her own grate lit, Your Grace, not until every family fire is going first,” she said, settling a coal with the tongs.
“The chimney in the upper passage smokes something cruel when the wind is in the east, so she keeps her window cracked and sleeps cold sooner than wake anybody. My mother says it is a wonder she has not taken ill.”
She sat back on her heels, pleased with the blaze. “Will that be all, Your Grace?”
“That will do, Patty. Thank you.”
The girl went out, pleased with herself.
Lucian sat at his desk with the lamp not yet lit and looked at the order already half formed beneath his hand: the south room over the library aired and warmed, the sweep brought up from Combe, Miss Vane moved into a chamber with a sound chimney before the ball.
The whole matter could be put right by Thursday, with no trouble required of her.
He had written as far as ‘Felton: see that…’ before he stopped.
He could hear what she would say. Not the words; she never gave him the same words twice. He heard only the level voice in which she thanked him for a kindness she had not requested, and felt the careful distance that would follow it.
He laid down the pen.
The chimney wanted seeing to. That much was plain. But the choice of another room was hers, and this time he would put the matter to her before he settled it.
It ought to have been a small distinction. To Lucian, it felt like standing before a locked door with the key in his hand and choosing to knock.
He folded the unfinished order and set it aside for the next morning, when she was due to bring up the books. Her room remained cold that night, which troubled him more than any difficulty so easily mended had a right to do.
Since the night in the conservatory, he had resolved to keep his distance.
It was a sound resolution. He observed it for three evenings.
He did not go to the Blue Morning Room. He sat instead in his study with the estate book, in a chair that did not face hers. On the fourth evening, he found himself in the doorway of the blue room with no clear memory of having crossed the house to reach it.
The fire was laid and lit, as it was every evening on no order anyone acknowledged giving. His chair stood at its angle by the hearth. The second chair was back at the window. The holly in the bowl had begun to dry at the edges.
He stood there like a man at the edge of cold water, and neither entered nor went away for some time.
On Friday, he rode to Larkwell about the timber.
That was the reason he gave the groom, and it was a true one. The oak for the spring rebuilding was coming down in the Cleave plantation and wanted inspecting; the plantation belonged to Pelham, and a man did not buy his neighbour’s timber without riding over to see what was being cut.
All of that was true.
He repeated it to himself on the road, which he might have noticed was more defence than a true thing generally required.
He came down the hill into Larkwell in the early afternoon.
The green opened below him, the old stone library on its farther side, and on the grass were the schoolchildren at some game involving a ball and a great deal of shrieking.
Mrs Carne stood in the doorway with her arms full of winter greenery.
Beside her were Pelham and Miss Vane.
Lucian drew rein beneath the yews and did not ride down.
They were doing nothing remarkable. That was the whole of it, and it was unbearable.
Pelham held one end of a rope of ivy and Miss Vane the other.
They were measuring it against the library door by eye and plainly disagreeing over the length.
She was laughing at him; not the careful laugh that disappeared the instant it was noticed, the one Lucian had spent months failing to earn across his own table, but the ordinary laugh of a woman with nothing to manage and no one to satisfy.
One of the children ran into her skirts. She caught the child without looking down, the way she caught everything, and went on arguing about the ivy. Pelham said something. She shook her head.
The clock above the green struck the half-hour, and she did not so much as turn towards it.
No one was calling her. No task waited behind the sound.
At Marcombe, every bell was a hand laid on her sleeve. Here the hour struck and passed, and she stood beneath it with her face open to the winter light, simply a woman on a village green.
Pelham had not given her that ease by any great act of care. He had given it by requiring nothing.
Lucian turned his horse before he was seen and rode back up the hill.
He did not look at the timber.
***
His aunt was in her small sitting room when he returned and saw his face before he had got it in order. That was the trouble with Seraphina: she had been reading him since he was in skirts, and the years had not blunted her.
“You have been to Larkwell,” she said.
“About the oak.”
“Of course. Sit down, Lucian. You look as though the oak objected.”
He sat and did not answer, which with his aunt was much the same as answering.
Seraphina laid down her work. “I suppose you saw Miss Vane.”
He looked at her.
“And Pelham,” she added. “There is no scandal in Peregrine Pelham, so you may put that expression away. He is the most unassailably decent man in the county.”
He looked towards the fire.
“He asks nothing of her,” Lucian said. The words came out before he had decided to spend them. “She carries this house on her back, and he handed her one end of a length of ivy, and she…”
He stopped.
“She rested,” Seraphina supplied.
“I have never seen her do it. I did not know her face did that.”
His aunt watched him for a moment. “And now you have decided that Pelham can give her something you cannot.”
“He can.”
“So you will stand aside.”
Lucian said nothing.
“You will do it very nobly,” Seraphina continued. “You will decide that she is happier with him, remove yourself without a word, and leave her to discover that she has been relinquished as thoroughly as she was once retained.”
“I have no claim upon her to relinquish.”
“No. Nor have you any right to choose Pelham for her.”
“I am not choosing him.”
“You are choosing yourself out. It is the same presumption travelling in the opposite direction.”
That landed.
Seraphina took up her cup but did not drink from it.
“You arranged for her to remain at Marcombe because you believed it best for everyone concerned. Now you mean to withdraw because you believe you know what she wants. In neither case does Miss Vane appear to be required.”
Lucian looked down at his hands.
“He gives her rest,” he said.
“And you wish you were the man who could give it to her.”
“Yes.”
The word was out before caution could reach it.
Seraphina’s face softened, though only a little. “Then you must learn the difference between giving a woman rest and deciding that she ought to rest in the manner you have chosen.”
“I know how to provide for people.”
“Yes. Admirably. You warm rooms, pay wages, settle accounts, and remove difficulties before anyone has had time to name them. Those are good qualities in a duke.”
She set down the cup.
“They are not, by themselves, a courtship.”
The word altered the air in the room.
Lucian rose and went to the window. Outside, the afternoon was already darkening over the lawn.
“I do not know how to do the other thing.”
“No,” Seraphina said. “But ignorance is not destiny, however comfortably a man may wear it.”
He turned back.
“What does a man do, then, if everything he knows how to offer looks like an order?”
“He begins by offering nothing she cannot refuse.”
It was so simple a sentence that he distrusted it at once.
Seraphina saw that too.
“You asked her whether she wished to attend the ball,” she said. “She answered no.”
“She did.”
“And you accepted the answer.”
“What else ought I to have done?”
“Nothing. That is the difficulty. Asking does not entitle you to the answer you wanted, and learning to ask will not immediately make her trust the question.”
He stood silent.
“She has spent a lifetime making herself useful because usefulness is safer than wanting,” Seraphina continued. “You have spent yours making decisions because deciding is safer than asking. You will not undo either habit in a week.”
“Pelham appears to have managed without any such difficulty.”
“Pelham is not asking her for anything yet. It is very easy to seem safe while one wants nothing.”
The qualification relieved him, and he disliked himself for the relief.
Seraphina resumed her stitching.
“Do not keep her. Do not give her away. Do not contrive a future for her and call the contrivance sacrifice. Speak to her when you have something honest to say, and be prepared to hear that she does not want it.”
“And if she does not?”
“Then you will at least have let her decide whom she disappoints.”
He had no answer to that.
“Go and change,” Seraphina said. “You are dining with me, and I will not hear one word about oak.”
Lucian left her and went towards his rooms.
At the turn of the upper passage, he stopped before the narrow back stair leading to the rooms beneath the roof. Three flights above him, Miss Vane’s window stood cracked against a smoking chimney, and her grate remained cold while the fires below burned bright.
The order he had begun was still folded on his desk. By the following evening, the south room could be aired and warmed, and the whole difficulty removed without troubling her at all.
Every practical instinct in him insisted that the discomfort mattered more than the manner of its cure.
But the room in which she slept was one of the few things in her life she might still choose for herself.
He went on to dress for dinner.
In the morning, he would ask.