Chapter Nineteen
He left the green door unlocked.
It was the nearest thing to a declaration he had in him, and he made it in the only way he knew: silently, and at one remove. He told the head gardener that Miss Vane was to have the freedom of the west garden, to come and go as she pleased, and that no one was to question her business there.
Then he went away and did not watch for what came of it.
He watched for it throughout the next two days.
She found the door open on the second afternoon. He happened to be standing at the long window on the half-landing, where a man might quite naturally happen to stand, and saw her come along the wall and put her hand to the green door.
It yielded.
She paused and looked up at the house without seeing him. Then she went in.
She remained there for more than an hour, among the bare winter bones of his mother’s garden. When she came out, there was something in her face that no arrangement, draught or expenditure of his had put there. It was simply ease.
She did not know she had been seen.
Lucian came away from the window feeling as though he had stolen something precious and escaped without discovery.
He told his aunt that evening. Not in so many words.
They sat at the chessboard, which they maintained for form’s sake, though neither of them had played to win in years.
“I have given Miss Vane the freedom of the west garden,” he said, studying the pieces.
His aunt went still over her bishop. She knew what that garden was and what it had cost him to keep it closed. She did not look up, which was a kindness.
“Have you?”
“I find I should like her to see it in May, when the heartsease is properly out. She has only seen it in winter.”
His aunt moved a pawn that had no need to move.
“And after May,” she said. “When she has seen it. What then?”
“I have not got that far.”
“You have got precisely that far, and we both know it. You are pretending the board is interesting so that you need not say the word.”
She looked up then.
“Say it to me if you cannot yet say it to her. Practise upon an old woman. It will not leave this room.”
He moved a knight to no purpose.
He did not say it. But neither did he deny it, and he allowed her to see the denial withheld. It was as near as he had ever come, with any living person, to laying a wish in the open where it might be examined.
His aunt received the admission carefully, as one receives a thing long awaited and not yet safe from breaking.
“Well,” she said at last, her voice not quite steady. “It is about time. That is all I shall say. It is about time, and your mother would have loved her beyond reason.”
She bent over the pieces and did not look at him again for some while.
May came after Lady Day.
Lady Day was when Elowen was to return to Wrenfield, according to every arrangement yet made. Lucian had spoken of May as though Lady Day did not exist, as though she would of course still be at Marcombe when the heartsease flowered.
They had both heard him do it.
His aunt moved her bishop without improving its position.
“You had better give her reason, then, to be here in May,” she said.
There was a brightness in her voice that she could not quite master.
***
For several days afterwards, the fact of Lady Day seemed to recede a little, as though neither of them need look at it yet.
Elowen allowed herself to feel it too.
Lucian saw that in the small ways she could not entirely conceal.
She came into the estate office that week without the old look of having first measured the room and all that might be required of her in it.
She allowed him to pour her tea, and drank it while it was warm.
At dinner, she laughed at something Amabel said and did not immediately fold the sound away.
After years of expecting nothing, she had begun to expect something. The something was him. He knew it, and had never in his life been so frightened and so glad at once.
Then the ball returned.
The fever had spent itself in the cottages without reaching the house.
The parish was recovering, and there was no longer sufficient reason to keep the county from dancing.
The Twelfth Night ball, which could no longer be held at Twelfth Night, was fixed for the last Thursday in January, and Marcombe came awake.
Lucian had forgotten, or had never allowed himself to notice, what it cost to bring the house to a ball. He noticed now because he had learnt to look closely, and what he saw he could not afterwards make himself unsee.
He saw the bells.
In a stone passage off the servants’ hall hung the bell-board, two dozen bells upon coiled springs beneath their painted names. From the moment the new date was fixed, the passage was rarely quiet.
Lucian went below on some thin pretext on Monday morning and stood before it. It was not a part of the house he often had cause to visit.
The bells rang for everything.
The Blue Morning Room rang. The library rang. Lady Seraphina required a message sent. Amabel wanted Elowen’s judgment upon slippers. The steward sought her over the wine merchant, and the kitchen over the ices. Mr Felton had a question concerning the additional carriages expected from Exeter.
And each time, from whatever she was doing, Miss Vane answered.
Not every bell called for her. That was the worst of it. She heard a need anywhere in the house and made it hers before anyone could tell her it belonged to someone else.
Lucian watched her pass the end of the stone corridor again and again, quick and composed, with a memorandum in one hand and a ring of household keys at her waist. He counted her journeys until the counting became absurd. She did not sit once.
“You are watching the bells, Your Grace.”
Mrs Pike stood in the doorway of her room, wrapped in her shawl and leaning upon her stick. No one ever heard Mrs Pike approach.
She looked at the board beside him: her working life hung in two rows upon a wall.
“Near forty years I answered that board. I could have named every bell upon it in the dark. Now, Miss Vane is learning them as I did.”
One of the bells sprang to life. Mrs Pike did not turn her head, though something in her face answered it.
“It is a grand feeling, being the one everyone sends for. Makes you think you are the heart of the place. I thought so for forty years.”
Her tired eyes moved to him.
“Then comes the day you cannot answer, and the board rings on for somebody else, and you learn you were never the heart at all. Only the hand nearest the pull.”
She drew the shawl more closely around herself.
“Miss Vane is too good at being useful. Those are the ones a house uses up fastest.”
Then she turned and went back into her room, one slow step brought to meet the other, leaving him before the bells.
Elowen was still not strong.
The fever had left a thinness in her that ten days had not repaired. Now that he was looking, he saw the hand she sometimes put to the wall at the turn of the stair when she thought herself unobserved; the moment she took to steady her breath before answering the next request.
And she always answered it.
Not because anyone commanded her to. Because something was wanted, and she did not know how to hear a want and leave it unmet.
The understanding came upon him all at once. He had been preparing to ask her to remain.
More than remain. He had left open the garden and spoken of May. In his slow, hopeful, cowardly way, he had been moving towards making her his wife. The Duchess of Marcombe.
A duchess need not run from bell to bell. He knew that. No title compelled her to carry ledgers, settle servants’ quarrels or count candles. He could give her a household large enough that she need never lift a hand unless she chose.
But Elowen would choose.
She would hear every uncertainty beneath the roof and believe it hers to resolve.
A larger house would only give her more corners in which to make herself indispensable.
A greater position would furnish her with grander reasons never to rest. She would spend herself upon Marcombe as she had spent herself upon Wrenfield, and everyone would praise her for devotion while he sat at the head of the table loving her and allowing it.
The rank would not be the harness.
She would make the harness from the rank, because that was what she had been taught to do with every place offered her.
Pelham’s life seemed, in that moment, plain by comparison.
A smaller house. Fewer claims. A man who appeared to want her company more than her competence.
At Larkwell, she might sit beside a fire and finish a cup of tea before it cooled, with no great establishment waiting to discover how much she could carry.
Lucian had Marcombe.
He had a house that had already learnt to turn towards her whenever anything went wrong.
He had himself, who had done the same. He had wealth enough to ease every labour and authority enough to forbid half of them, but neither wealth nor authority could teach her to let a need go unanswered.
He had only just begun to understand that asking her to stop was not the same as making it possible for her to stop.
Mrs Pike had said that those who were too good at being useful were the ones a house used fastest.
Standing before the bell-board, Lucian thought of Elowen and saw how readily Marcombe had begun to use her.
A man who loved her ought to give her a life beyond the reach of bells. Yet he could not imagine how to give her such a life here, because Marcombe was the bells, and he was Marcombe.
It did not occur to him, not then, that he might change the house rather than surrender the woman. He had spent too much of his life mistaking renunciation for restraint. Faced with the fear of wanting her selfishly, he reached instinctively for the opposite error and called it love.
The Blue Morning Room bell rang.
He watched it dance upon its spring. Somewhere above, he heard Elowen’s step quicken towards the summons.
Lucian remained in the cold passage long after she had gone. And in the locked place where he made all his worst decisions alone, he began to persuade himself that loving her might indeed mean letting her go.