Chapter Fifteen
Three days before the ball, the green silk came home from the dressmaker, and Amabel cried.
Not at once. She was brave through the unpacking, and braver through the trying-on, while Patty pinned and Elowen knelt to the hem.
The gown was everything it ought to be, soft and green and grown-up, and Amabel stood in the middle of the Blue Morning Room before the long glass that had been carried up for the purpose and was, for a moment, transformed.
Then her chin began to go.
“Take it off me, please. Take it off.”
When it was off and Patty had carried it away to hang, Amabel sat on the window seat in her shift and stays, her arms round her knees, and wept as though something had broken.
Elowen sent Patty for tea that would not be wanted, and sat down beside her.
“It is a beautiful gown,” she said.
“I know it is.” Amabel scrubbed at her face.
“That is the worst of it. It is the most beautiful thing I have ever had, and I shall stand up in it on Thursday and be looked at by every person in the county, and they will all say how pretty, what a match she will make, and not one of them…” Her breath caught.
“Not one of them will know there is anyone inside it.”
“Amabel.”
“It is true, and you know it is true. You are too honest to tell me it is not.” She turned her wet face to Elowen, and it was not a child’s face just then, which was the worst of it.
“I could not read a column of figures in September, and now I keep my own pin-money accounts. I can follow the household books without losing my place, and speak to a stranger for ten minutes without wishing the floor would open beneath me. And on Thursday, none of it will matter. They will see a green gown with eight thousand pounds, and the girl inside may be anybody, so long as she is pretty and quiet and says nothing peculiar.”
She pressed her mouth to her knees.
“The part of me that you helped me find will sit inside the gown where no one can see it. And I shall be grateful, because it will be a good match, and everyone will say how lucky I am.”
Elowen did not answer for a moment. The fire ticked. Beyond the long windows, the park lay under a hard grey sky, and somewhere below, a door opened and shut.
She had meant to say the comfortable thing. There was always a comfortable thing to be said, and she had a stock of them, smooth from use: that the right man would see her; that being looked at was not the same as being known.
The words were ready. Then she looked at the girl curled small on the window seat, and could not say them. Amabel had just paid her the compliment of calling her honest.
“I am going to tell you something,” Elowen said. “I have never told it to anyone, and when I have told you, we shall neither of us speak of it again. Will you have it?”
Amabel went still, and nodded.
“I was never the pretty one.” Elowen kept her eyes on the grey park because it was easier than the girl’s face.
“No one ever sat where you are sitting and feared that for me. I had not the looks to be in danger of it. I was the useful one. The one who could run a house at fifteen, and nurse a fever, and turn a hem, and add a column straight.”
She drew a breath.
“It comes to much the same thing, Amabel. The face or the hands. My brother calls me a treasure. He has called me a treasure since I was a little girl, and I thought it the kindest word in the world. Then one winter the previous cook left and I had the influenza, and I got up from my bed to do the kitchen accounts because they would not get done otherwise. Silas patted my shoulder as he went past and said, ‘You are a treasure, El,’ and went out to his dinner.”
Her hands had tightened in her lap.
“I sat there with the fever still in me and the ledger in front of me, and understood at last what a treasure was. A thing you are glad to own. You keep it for what it is worth to you.”
“Miss Vane…”
“You polish it, and you are proud of it, and the day it is worth nothing, you put it in a drawer.” The words were coming now, and she could not seem to stop them.
“I have got up from every sickbed of my life, Amabel, because I was so afraid of the drawer. And no one has ever once let me lie there and be no use to them and wanted me in the room anyway.”
Her voice broke cleanly across, and she let it.
“That is the one thing I would give anything not to have taught you. And you have gone and learned it for yourself, in a green gown, at seventeen.”
She stopped.
There had been no sound. But she felt the doorway before she saw it, and turned her head.
The Duke of Marcombe stood in the open door.
She did not know how long he had been there. Long enough. She saw it on him at once, the way one sees weather.
He had come up, no doubt, for some ordinary purpose: to find his sister, to ask about the carriages.
Whatever it had been, there was no trace of it now.
He did not come in. He did not go. He stood in the doorway of his mother’s blue room and looked at Elowen as though a door had opened in a wall he had walked past every day of his life without knowing it was there.
One hand had come up against the frame and remained there.
For one moment, none of them moved.
Then Amabel, who had seen her brother’s face without understanding half of it, said, wretched and seventeen, “Lucian, do not be cross with her. She was only…”
“I am not cross.”
His voice was low and not quite even. He looked at his sister curled on the window seat in her shift, and at Elowen beside her with her face undone, and whatever he had come to say was gone past recovering.
“Amabel. You will be the cleverest woman in the room on Thursday, and one of the few worth talking to. Any man who wants the gown and not the girl is a fool, and there will be a great many fools there, and you are not to marry one.”
It came out rough and plain and entirely unlike him.
“Forgive me. I did not mean to come in upon you.”
He went before either of them could answer.
They heard his steps recede along the passage, not quickly, but with the care of a man carrying something he had not yet got a steady hold of.
Amabel let out a long breath.
“He is not cross,” she said, wondering. “I thought he would be cross. He said I was clever.”
She wiped her face on her knee and looked sideways at Elowen, the resilience of seventeen already beginning to gather her up from her own despair.
“He has never once said I was clever.”
“No,” said Elowen.
She rose because her knees had gone stiff, and because if she stayed there one moment longer, she did not know what she would do.
She shook out her skirts, found Amabel’s wrapper, and put it round the girl’s shoulders.
Her hands did all of this by themselves while the rest of her stood very still in the wreckage of what she had just confessed.
“Wear the green on Thursday,” she said. “Stand up straight in it. You may be beautiful and clever both, whatever the gown made you think. And you will dance every dance, because I shall be standing by the supper-room door counting them.”
She tucked the wrapper close.
“Now. I must see to the candles for the long gallery, or there will be no ball at all for you to be frightened of.”
She went out and down the cold stairs, with her work waiting at the bottom of them as it always did. All the way down, she refused to think of the look on the Duke’s face, or of what she had put into his hands without meaning to.
She had told Amabel that no one had ever wanted her in a room when she was no use to them.
She would not ask herself why, when she had looked towards the doorway, Lucian had seemed as though the words had struck him.