Chapter 19 #2
The Duke of Cornwall was committed to prison within a fortnight of the verdict, along with four associates whose names had appeared with sufficient frequency in Alexander's documentation to leave the court no reasonable alternative.
Sir Edmund Thornhill was apprehended at Southampton before his ship cleared the harbor.
The frozen assets and suspended ventures left a considerable crater in the financial landscape of the City, which the newspapers described with varying degrees of satisfaction depending on who owned them.
The Crown issued a formal statement commending the outcome and said nothing whatsoever about how long the practices in question had continued under their watch, which surprised nobody.
Alexander called on Catherine at Fairfax House three days after the trial, with the Earl's full knowledge and a bunch of hothouse flowers that Margaret had insisted upon and that Catherine received with genuine pleasure and only a small amount of amusement.
He called again four days after that. And then again.
The Earl observed these visits from behind his newspaper with the expression of a man pretending not to be pleased, and Lady Eleanor made no pretense whatsoever.
London, predictably, had a great deal to say about all of it. Alexander ignored this with the practiced ease of a man who had stopped caring what London said about him somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean eight years ago.
◆◆◆
The restaurant was everything the occasion was supposed to be.
Quietly elegant, candlelit, the kind of establishment where the staff were trained to be invisible and the menus arrived without prices and the other diners were too well-bred to stare, though several of them tried.
Alexander had reserved a corner table. Catherine had worn her good blue silk. Everything was entirely correct.
They were halfway through the first course when Catherine set down her fork.
"This does not feel like us," she said.
Alexander looked at her across the table — at the candlelight, the white linen, the careful arrangement of everything — and found he could not disagree.
"No," he said. "It does not."
"We are doing what everyone else does." She said it without complaint, simply as an observation. "The correct restaurant. The correct hour. The correct degree of visible but respectable courtship." She met his eyes. "It is perfectly pleasant. It is not us at all."
Alexander was quiet for a moment. Then: "What are you thinking?"
Catherine's expression shifted into something he recognised — the particular look of a woman who has already decided and is now simply waiting for permission to act on it.
"Come with me," she said. "I have an idea."
He left sufficient money on the table to cover the meal they had not finished, helped her with her cloak, and followed her out into the London night without asking where they were going. He had learned, by now, that this was generally the correct approach.
◆◆◆
The soup kitchen on Aldgate Street smelled exactly as it always had — boiled mutton and damp wool and the particular warmth of a room that has been heated by the combined presence of many cold people seeking something hot.
The long tables were full. The serving line moved with its usual steady industry.
Nothing about it had changed since the first evening Catherine had stood behind that table with a ladle and the quiet certainty that she was precisely where she was supposed to be.
Mrs. Jenkins looked up from the far end of the serving table as they came through the door, and her expression moved through surprise, recognition, and something considerably warmer in the space of approximately two seconds.
"Well," she said. "Look what the evening has brought us."
The word moved through the room the way words always moved in places like this — quickly, and with feeling.
Heads turned. The quiet industry of the serving line faltered for a moment.
A man near the back of the room said something to his neighbor that Alexander did not catch, but caught the tone of, and felt it settle somewhere in his chest.
Mrs. Jenkins was already untying a spare apron.
"Roll up your sleeves then, Your Grace," she said, holding it out to Alexander with the air of a woman entirely unintimidated by dukes. "We are short-handed tonight and the soup will not serve itself."
Alexander looked at the apron. Then he took it, tied it without ceremony, and took his place beside Catherine at the serving table.
The first man to reach him in the line stopped entirely.
He was perhaps sixty, with the weathered hands of someone who had worked outdoors for forty years, and he looked at Alexander with an expression of pure bewilderment — as though the laws of the natural world had been quietly suspended and no one had thought to inform him.
"Your Grace," the man said. He seemed to have nothing further to add to this.
"Good evening," Alexander said, and filled his bowl, and held it out with the same attention he would have given anyone.
The man took it. He stood there for a moment longer, bowl in both hands, looking at Alexander with an expression that had moved past bewilderment into something that had no clean name.
Then he nodded — a single, dignified nod, the nod of a man acknowledging something he had not expected to encounter — and moved on.
It happened again with the next person, and the one after that.
A gradual settling, as the room accustomed itself to what it was seeing — the Duke of Wexford in an apron, standing behind a table in Aldgate Street, filling bowls of soup with the unhurried steadiness of a man entirely comfortable with where he was.
No performance. No audience management. Simply present, in the way he had been present in every room Catherine had ever watched him occupy, except that this room required nothing of him except the ladle and his attention, and he gave both without reservation.
Catherine worked beside him and said nothing for a long while. She did not need to. She could feel it — the particular quality of the evening, the ease of it, the sense of two people occupying the same space without effort or performance or the careful management of impression.
This, she thought. This is us.
At one point a child — a girl of perhaps seven, very small, with enormous serious eyes — held up her bowl and looked at Alexander with the direct, uncomplicated gaze of someone too young to know she was supposed to be impressed by dukes.
Alexander crouched to her level. He filled her bowl with great care, making sure it was full to the appropriate depth. "There you are," he said gravely, as though it were a matter of some importance.
The child examined the contents with equal gravity. Then she looked at him and said: "You are very tall."
"I am," Alexander agreed. "It is my primary distinction."
The child appeared to find this satisfactory. She carried her bowl away with the solemnity of someone transporting something precious, and Alexander rose, and Catherine caught his eye, and they both looked away before either of them laughed.
Later, when the line had thinned and the evening was winding toward its close, they found themselves side by side at the end of the table, the ladles set down, the work of the night largely done around them.
The room had settled into the quieter industry of its final hour — tables being wiped, children falling asleep against their mothers' shoulders, the low murmur of people who have been cold and are now warm.
"Better?" Catherine asked.
Alexander looked at the room. At the low light and the long tables and the ordinary, unremarkable dignity of people being fed by people who had chosen to feed them.
"Considerably," he said.
Catherine looked at him — at the apron still tied around his coat, at the ease in his face, at the man who had sailed away from England at twenty-five and come back at thirty-three with everything changed and the most important things intact.
"This is us," she said quietly.
Alexander looked at her.
"Yes," he said simply. "It is."
Mrs. Jenkins appeared at Catherine's elbow with the expression of a woman with one final task to delegate.
"The bread wants carrying out to the back table," she said, with the serenity of someone who had long ago stopped making any distinction between earls' daughters and kitchen volunteers. "If either of you can be spared."
"We can be spared," Alexander said, and picked up the basket, and Catherine laughed, and they went.