Chapter Twenty-Two
The dismantling went forward the way everything proceeded at Marcombe under the Duke’s hand: thoroughly, quietly and without a wasted motion.
Anyone looking on would have seen only a great house running as smoothly as it always had, and never known that what it was smoothly doing was removing a woman from itself, one thread at a time.
Their hour over the books was the first thing to go, which was fitting, because it had been the first thing between them.
The meetings did not end. An abrupt ending might have been merciful, and abrupt mercies were not in Lucian’s nature. Instead, the weekly business passed through Felton.
The household books came up to the estate office as before, but now the steward brought them and remained.
The long, scarred table that had held two chairs and two inkwells through the autumn now held three people conducting the business that had once required only two.
A third chair stood between them, ensuring that nothing need pass across the table without a witness to make it ordinary.
Elowen sat through the first meeting with her hands folded and her face composed.
It was the most exquisitely painful hour she had spent at Marcombe, worse by far than any of the uncertain ones, because those had at least been alive.
This was the corpse of the thing set upright at the table.
“The coal account stands how, Miss Vane?”
“Three pounds to the good upon the quarter, Your Grace. The merchant lowered his price when I pointed out that the dairy might as easily burn culm.”
“Good. And the state rooms suffered no damage from the ball?”
“None worth speaking of. The carpet required brushing where the supper trays had passed over it. It has been done.”
“Good,” he said again.
Felton wrote it down and turned his papers square.
The clock upon the mantel seemed to do more talking than it ever had before, because nothing else in the room dared venture beyond necessity. Every question Lucian put to her could be answered with a figure, a yes or a no. Every answer Elowen gave him was a figure, a yes or a no.
The opening that had once existed at the end of her sentences was closed now so completely that a stranger entering the room would never have known it had been there.
Once, and only once, she forgot.
Lucian asked about the spring repairs and the lime required for the flooded cottage walls. Elowen answered with the old quickness before she remembered that they were no longer those people.
“We shall want it slaked before the work begins, and the Coker boy will cart it if you allow him to keep the spoil.”
She heard the we as soon as it left her.
The word had entered their speech during the long work of the flood and had remained there, unnoticed, ever since.
She saw it reach him.
Lucian went still over the map, as a man might when an old hurt is touched without warning.
Elowen took the word back in the only way she could: smoothly, without acknowledging that it had ever been given. She added a precise observation about the cost of carting, Felton recorded the figure, and the moment closed over.
Nobody said anything about the word at all.
***
Lucian held to the distance he had set between them through the coal account, the state rooms and the lime, his hands flat upon the estate map and his voice level.
He had decided that the kindest thing he could do now was make her leaving easy: give her composure to lean upon, behave with such perfect correctness that she need never bear the weight of knowing what it cost him.
The effort demanded more than he had imagined a man might pay while remaining upright in his chair.
Across the table, Elowen’s hands lay smoothly folded. Her face was pleasant and unreadable. Every answer returned to him neat and finished, with no opening left at the end of it.
He looked at her and understood exactly what he needed to understand.
She was reconciled. She was bearing it well. Perhaps she was even relieved.
All these months he had been learning the small signs of her: the cold tea, the bitten lip, the laugh put carefully away. Now, when reading her rightly mattered most, he mistook the composure he had forced upon her for peace.
And so, he held the distance, never knowing that she had not accepted his choice at all.
She had merely ceased to expect him to ask.
***
Lady Seraphina came to her on Thursday in the stillroom, where few people ventured besides Patty and the cat.
“Sit down, Miss Vane.”
She indicated the stool beside the bench, but Elowen remained where she was, one hand resting among the bottles.
“No, I see you will not. You have gone all upright again. I have not seen that particular stiffness in you since your first weeks here, and I find I cannot bear to see it return.”
The old woman lowered herself carefully onto the stool and rested both dry hands upon the head of her stick.
“I am going to say something, and you are going to hear me, because I am too old to be refused and you are too well-bred to leave me talking to myself.”
“I would never walk out upon you, my lady.”
“You have withdrawn so far from the rest of us that I am not certain you would notice the difference.”
Seraphina looked at her, steady and shrewd and, beneath both, frightened. Elowen had never seen fear in that face and did not know where to look when she found it there.
“He does not mean what it appears he means. Whatever he has said to you, whatever fine, cold, generous arrangement he has built over your head, he has not done it because he wishes you gone. I have known that boy since he was in skirts. He is committing the stupidest act of his life for reasons precisely opposite to those you have taken from it. If you go before he comes to his senses, you will both spend the rest of your lives—”
“My lady.”
Elowen said it softly, and the words stopped the old woman as gently as a hand laid over hers.
“I am sure he did not mean it unkindly. He never does. That is rather the whole of the trouble.”
She turned back to the bottles she had been sorting. If she looked another moment at Lady Seraphina’s frightened face, she might not be able to do what she had decided upon, and it had to be done.
“Your nephew has been kinder to me than anyone in my life. He has listened as no one else listened and seen what no one else saw. Then he took all that he had heard and seen and settled, very generously, that I ought to be sent away for my own good.”
She placed one bottle beside another, though they were already in order.
“I cannot wait here to discover whether he may change his mind. I have spent too much of my life waiting to be wanted by people who were very kind to me. I have only the one life, my lady, and I find I would rather spend what remains of it somewhere the kindness does not cost quite so much.”
Seraphina was silent for a long while.
“You are in love with him,” she said at last.
“I am going to Larkwell,” said Elowen.
It was not a denial, and both of them knew it. The old woman had the grace not to press a point already won.
Elowen went to Larkwell in the carrier’s cart, with the cold, bright winter sun upon the beech mast in the lanes. For the length of the journey, she allowed herself to do what she had thus far forbidden.
She allowed herself to want the life awaiting her there.
Mrs Carne’s parlour was warm and crowded and smelled of apples and woodsmoke. The schoolchildren were at their letters. Sukey, the grave little girl, had mastered her E’s and advanced to the more difficult letters, though she was making heavy weather of a capital G.
Mr Pelham was there among the copybooks, retying the knot in another child’s sampler. He rose when Elowen entered, took her hand long enough to steady her upon the icy step, and said only:
“Miss Vane. You have come back. Sit by the fire; you are cold from the cart.”
Then he returned to the knot and asked her nothing.
The simplicity of it worked upon her like warmth upon a chilblain, half pain and half relief.
No one in the room wanted anything from her that she could not give within five minutes and be finished with.
She showed Sukey how to form the body of the G in one stroke and add the bar in another.
The child went away pleased. Mrs Carne filled Elowen’s cup twice without being asked.
Mr Pelham spoke of the new rector, the price of slates and a goose he had been given that was too large for one man and his housekeeper to finish.
Throughout the whole warm hour, no one summoned her, thanked her beyond proportion or looked upon her as something they were fortunate to possess.
Mr Pelham walked her back to the cart when it was time to leave. The pony stamped against the cold.
“You will think me an interfering old fool,” he said, looking at the pony rather than at her, “and I have no right to the question, so you must forgive the asking and answer or not as you please. But you have the look of someone leaving a place.” He paused. “I have worn that look myself.”
Elowen said nothing.
“If you should require somewhere to go, the school wants a steady hand more than it wants almost anything. Mrs Carne has rooms above the parlour that have stood empty since her sister died, and she would let them to the right woman for the company alone.”
His gaze remained upon the road.
“There is a quiet life to be had here, Miss Vane, for someone who has had enough of a louder one. I am not offering you anything but the parish, you understand. The parish, and a fire, and people who will let you carry the box and then oblige you to sit while they pour the tea.”
A slight smile touched his face.
“That is all Larkwell has. I have found it enough. I thought you ought to know it was here before you decided where to go.”
It was the gentlest thing anyone had ever laid before her. It asked nothing, and that was precisely its danger.
She felt the whole tired weight of herself incline towards it.
A life with fewer claims. A man who would not summon her merely to prove that she would come. It was peace.
It was the peace she had once seen from a distance and had at last ceased calling surrender.
“You are very good, Mr Pelham,” she said. “I think I shall come to Larkwell. Not…”
She stopped and chose the words carefully. He was too kind to be left in doubt, and she would not do to him what had been done to her.
“Not to anything beyond the parish. I am not in a condition to offer anyone more than the carrying of boxes, and you must not let me take the rooms under any other understanding.”
“I understand you perfectly,” he said.
She saw that he did. She saw also, in his steady, weathered face, the flicker of something he put away before it could be looked at.
She was sorry for it and could do nothing. She had only one heart, and it had gone somewhere foolish and would not be called back merely because another course would be sensible.
“The parish, then,” Pelham said. “Mrs Carne will have the rooms aired. Come when you choose. The school will be glad, and so shall I, and neither of us will make a great noise about it.”
He handed her into the cart.
“Good evening, Miss Vane.”
She rode back to Marcombe in the early darkness with the matter decided.
The decision sat quietly within her, certain and without alarm. That was how she knew it was a choice and not merely an escape.
She would not wait for Lady Day.
That was the final piece, the one that made the departure hers rather than his. Lucian had arranged that she should be freed in March, generously and upon his own calendar. She could no more bear to be released upon a date he had selected than she could bear the rest of his careful plan.
She would go sooner.
A fortnight would allow her to finish the stillroom book and leave the new arrangements steady enough to stand without her.
That evening, she would write to Silas and tell him she would not return to Wrenfield.
She had accepted a situation of her own choosing, in her own time, and he might henceforth manage his cravats himself.
She would leave Marcombe in good order, owing nothing and asking nothing, as she had come to it. She would depart upon her own chosen morning and her own two feet, not stand smiling in the hall to be thanked and handed down from the great house like a parcel returned to its sender.
That night, she completed the fair copy of the household instructions, every small working of the house set down clearly for the woman from Exeter.
Then she trimmed the candle, drew out her trunk and began at last to pack: the grey gown, the brown, the one good blue, her workbox and the stoppered bottles.
The household ledger she left upon the table.
It belonged to Marcombe now, not to her.
She packed steadily in the cold.
Later, passing the Blue Morning Room, she did not allow herself to look through the open door.
She reached her room with the last of her belongings and put her hand upon the latch. Behind her, the trunk was nearly full. Her departure sat packed and quiet, almost completed.
Her fingers rested upon the cold iron.
For one moment, she stood in the dark, listening to the great, silent house continue around her. Then, against everything she had decided and every sensible instinct she possessed, she waited. Only for half a minute. Only for the sound of a step in the passage.
None came.
Elowen lifted the latch, entered the cold room and closed the door.
Then she finished packing alone.