Chapter 2 #3
"He has seen the world as it actually is," she continued, choosing her words with care.
"Not as it is presented to us in London drawing rooms or described in diplomatic dispatches carefully edited before they reach polite society.
He has lived among people whose existence we discuss in the abstract and never encounter in reality.
" She met her father's eyes. "That is not something to be pitied. It is something to be reckoned with."
The Earl considered this with the measured fairness that Catherine had always respected in him.
"I grant you that a man with broad experience of the world is a more interesting man than one without it.
But whatever he witnessed out there — and one imagines it was considerable — survival in such conditions is not an enviable fate.
The man has endured hardships that most of us cannot comprehend. "
"The hardships you speak of, Papa," Catherine said, "exist here as well.
One does not need to travel to Africa to encounter human suffering on a considerable scale.
The factories in Stepney, the workhouses in Whitechapel — the conditions there would not strike a man who had survived the African continent as entirely foreign. "
A brief silence settled over the table.
"Catherine," her father said, in the tone he reserved for conversations he wished to have properly rather than dismiss, "I am proud of your sense of justice.
I have always been proud of it. But one cannot reasonably compare the hardships of industrial labor — real and regrettable as they are — with surviving alone in a foreign continent after a shipwreck. "
"I do not compare the form," Catherine replied.
"I compare the principle. A child working fourteen hours in a Stepney mill suffers in a different manner than a man shipwrecked off the Cape Colony.
But in both cases, a human being is being used beyond endurance for someone else's profit, with no recourse and no voice.
The severity differs. The exploitation does not.
" She looked at her father steadily. "I believe human exploitation is the same in its essence, regardless of the form it takes or the degree of its severity. "
The Earl was quiet for a moment. He was, Catherine reflected, one of the few men of her acquaintance who was capable of genuine consideration rather than reflexive defense.
"You are not wrong," he said at last, "that the principle bears resemblance.
But I caution you against drawing equivalencies that flatten the particular horror of each situation.
The mill worker in Stepney has a parish, has law however inadequate, has some framework of society around him.
The man alone in Africa after a shipwreck has nothing whatsoever.
" He paused. "Do not believe everything you hear from those who would oversimplify the world's problems to serve their own argument, however righteous the argument may sound. "
"I believe what I see, Papa," Catherine said quietly. "And I endeavor to see as much as I am permitted to."
Her mother, with the timing of a woman long practiced at redirecting conversations before they reached a temperature that required intervention, reached for the teapot. "In any case, the Duke is hosting a grand ball next week to announce his return to society formally. We are invited."
Catherine absorbed this shift without resistance. "Are we?"
"You will attend," her father said, with the affection that had always distinguished his firmness from true severity. "You have avoided the last three social engagements to which we were invited, my dear. The Duchess of Marlborough's soirée alone cost me considerable diplomatic effort to excuse."
"I will attend," Catherine said, without the performance of reluctance she might have managed an hour earlier.
In truth, her interest was genuine — though not for any reason her father would have immediately recognized.
A man who had spent eight years outside the insulated world of English aristocracy, who had seen the conditions she had been arguing about from the inside rather than through a drawing room window, who returned with secrets he declined to share in polite company — such a man was either hiding something deeply inconvenient, or protecting something of considerable importance.
She found herself curious to determine which.
"He is quite the most eligible bachelor in England now, of course," her father added, with the expression of a man attempting to appear as though the observation had arrived casually.
"Papa."
"I state only facts."
"You state facts with a very particular emphasis."
Her mother laughed. The Earl maintained his expression of perfect innocence with the practiced ease of a man who had been deploying it for thirty years.
"Meet the man first," her mother said gently, refilling Catherine's cup. "Form your own judgment. That is all anyone asks."
Catherine looked down at the pale surface of her tea.
She thought of Mrs. Jenkins's hollow cheeks.
She thought of the map spread across Lady Beatrice's low table, marked with streets she had never walked.
She thought of a man arriving at his own front door in the rain after eight years, wearing a black hood and carrying eight years of silence.
Perhaps the Duke of Wexford had seen things that had changed the way he understood the world.
Perhaps, she thought — with the careful private precision of someone who had learned not to hope too quickly — he understood it the way she was beginning to.
She would go to the ball.
She would form her own judgment.
That, after all, was what she did.