Chapter 9
“It came on this afternoon,” Albina announced her headache, from her position on the chaise in her sitting room, where she was reclining with every appearance of comfort and a novel open on her lap. “Quite sudden, and now I’m afraid dinner is entirely out of the question.”
Temperance looked at her mother with suspicion.
“You seem very comfortable,” Temperance said.
“I find that comfort helps.” Albina turned a page. “You’ll manage perfectly well without me, and you’ll have your friends. I suppose it is a good thing that I shall not be there, but in any case, you will not be alone.”
“Harper will be there.”
“Yes.” Albina did not look up. “I know.”
Temperance studied her mother for a moment longer, with the particular attention she brought to things she suspected were more deliberate than they appeared. Albina did not let much on, however.
“I hope you feel better,” Temperance said, finally. She knew that it was no use interrogating her mother.
“I’m sure I will,” Albina said, pleasantly. “By morning.”
The dinner was at the Pembridge townhouse, which was large and well-lit.
But more so, full of exactly the kind of people Temperance had been navigating for three years.
Hypocrites, she liked to call then. They were the ones who were perfectly civil to your face and perfectly entertaining about you the moment you turned away.
In any case, she had dressed carefully for the occasion.
Harper handed her down from the carriage without comment and they walked in together in relative silence. It was better off this way, she had thought to herself.
Her conversations with the duke were always difficult, to say the least.
She found Charity and Alethea within ten minutes, which was fast even by her standards, and she stayed with them.
It is better this way, she told herself again.
But she was aware of Harper, across the room the way one was aware of a change in weather, which was not always looking directly at it but always knowing it was there.
He was talking to a man she didn’t recognize, who said something, and Harper’s mouth moved in what might, on another face, have been described as a smile, and Temperance turned firmly back to Charity.
“My mother has a headache,” she said, trying to take her mind off him.
“Your mother,” Charity said, “has the constitution of someone who has never had a headache in her life and the instincts of a woman who knows exactly what she’s doing. She left you alone with him.”
That would be devious, but not unlike Albina in the slightest.
“She left me alone with forty other people, two of whom are you.” Temperance accepted a glass of wine from a footman. “It’s a dinner party, please.”
Harper’s friend’s name was Edmund Carew, and he had known Harper since they were seventeen years old.
“You look tired,” Edmund said, by way of greeting.
“I’m perfectly well,” Harper said.
“You look tired,” Edmund said again, “How is the new estate? I heard you finally made the journey.”
“Two weeks ago.”
“And?” Edmund raised his eyebrows. “The scandal sheet dowager, the spinster daughter. Oh, I have heard many things. Was everything as you expected?”
“Nothing,” Harper said, “was what I expected.”
Edmund looked at him with the alert interest of a man who had known Harper long enough to understand that this sentence.
“Tell me,” he said.
Harper told him the relevant parts, and Edmund listened without interrupting, which was one of the things Harper had always valued about him, and when Harper had finished, he looked across the room to where Temperance was standing with her friends.
“That’s her?” he said.
“Yes.”
“She doesn’t look like the scandal sheets,” Edmund looked. “What are they like? The two of them together?”
Harper considered the question with more care than it perhaps deserved.
“Formidable,” he said.
“Formidable,” Edmund raised an eyebrow.
“Individually. Together, “ He stopped. “Together they are something else.”
Edmund looked at him for a moment with the expression he wore when he was paying closer attention than his posture suggested.
“You like them?” he said, with the slight note of someone making a discovery.
“I didn’t say that.”
“You said formidable with the tone you use for things you respect, which in your case is closely adjacent to liking.” Edmund drank his wine. “What’s the plan? The daughter, she’s to marry?”
“That’s the intention.”
“How is she taking it?”
“Better than I expected,” Harper said.
Edmund glanced across the room again. “She’s been here the whole season?”
“Three years, I’m told. She and her mother both.
” Harper followed his gaze briefly. Temperance had tilted her head at something Charity was saying, and there was a small, private smile on her face of the kind she didn’t produce for general consumption.
“The ton has apparently found them very entertaining.”
“Oh, very,” Edmund said, with a slight change of tone that Harper registered and filed away.
“The dowager especially, obviously, she’s been in the columns enough times that she’s practically a regular feature.
But the daughter as well with the spinster angle.
“People love an oddity. A girl raised in a nunnery, no prospects, no income, dragged around the season by a mother who shows up to balls in trousers, they invite them because they’re entertaining, Harper.
You must know that, half the invitations they receive aren’t kindness, they’re… ”
“Don’t,” Harper said.
Edmund stopped.
Harper had not raised his voice. He had not changed his posture or his expression by any outward measure that would have been visible to a casual observer.
But something in the single word made Edmund go very still in the way of someone who had known a person long enough to recognize the specific quality of a line being drawn.
“Don’t talk about her that way,” Harper said. “Either of them.”
Edmund looked at him for a moment. Something moved in his expression.
“All right,” he said, simply.
Harper looked across the room. Temperance was laughing now, properly, at something Duncan Grey had apparently said, and the sound of it didn’t carry across the room but the fact of it did, the open, unguarded quality of it, the realness of it in a room full of people performing their best versions of themselves.
“She is not entertainment,” he said. It came out with a flatness that was not anger, exactly, but was something that had passed through anger and come out the other side as something more settled.
“She is a woman who has had a considerably more difficult life than most of the people in this room are capable of imagining, and she is navigating it with more grace than it deserves, and I will not sit here and listen to you.”
He stopped himself.
“I’m going to get some air,” Harper said.
“Harper, don’t react like this.”
“I’ll be back in a moment.”
He was not back in a moment, and instead he tracked down Temperance instead.
“I need a word,” he said quietly.
“Of course. The Caldwell dinner is Thursday, I haven’t forgotten. What more needs to be said?”
“Not about the dinner.” He looked at her steadily. “A word in private. Five minutes, please.”
Temperance stood with her back to the wall and her arms at her sides and looked at him with the expression he had been trying to get behind for three days.
He had prepared for this.
He had known, for at least two days, that the conversation needed to happen, and he had thought about what he intended to say with the same methodical care he brought to everything that needed to be done properly. He knew where he had been wrong. He knew what he owed her.
And then he looked at her and all of the prepared sentences became temporarily unavailable.
“I owe you an apology,” he said.
She said nothing. But something very slight shifted in her face.
“Alford,” he said. “I should not have put you in that position without knowing more about him. I was more interested in the outcome than in the process, and that was wrong. You deserve better than to be handed to the first willing man and expected to make the best of it. I’m sorry.”
“What did he say?” Temperance asked. “To you? After.”
Harper was quiet for a moment.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters to me.”
He looked at her. She looked back, and there was something in her expression now that was not the pleasant closed door, something more direct, more real, the face she used when she had decided that honesty was worth the exposure.
“He said you weren’t what he expected,” Harper said carefully. “That you were too… well, that you were not worth his time.”
Something moved through her expression and was gone.
“And you heard this?”
“On my way across the room to speak to you, and I turned around and told him not to approach you again.’
“You didn’t come and tell me,” she said.
“No, you were laughing with your friends. And I thought it could wait,” he said, which was not the full truth but was the part of it he could offer. “And I am telling you now.”
Temperance looked at him for a long moment.
“All right,” she said.
“All right,” he repeated.
“I accept the apology.” She said it simply. “And I will tell you, in future, when someone says something that merits your knowing. Rather than assuming you wouldn’t believe me, as I did before.”
“I would have believed you,” he said.
“You didn’t believe my mother,” she said, mildly.
He had no clean answer to that, and she didn’t appear to require one. She shifted slightly, her weight moving from one foot to the other, and looked at the floor for a moment in the way of someone deciding how much further to go.
“I will marry,” she said. “I want you to know that I am not refusing, because I understand the situation and I am not being difficult for the sake of it.” She looked up. “I want the stability. Not for me, particularly. For my mother.” She said it plainly, without self-pity, as a fact.
“She has finally free, in the way she should have been allowed to be for thirty years, and I cannot watch that be taken away. If marrying gives me the means to protect her, then I will marry willingly.”
Harper looked at her.
“And for yourself?”
She seemed momentarily surprised by the question. As though the category of for yourself was one she had not recently consulted.
“I would like,” she said, after a moment, “not to be a burden.”
“The nunnery,” she said, in the tone of someone deciding to hand something over, “was not — kind. I don’t mean that the women were cruel, not most of them.
I mean that it was never meant for me. I was sent there as an infant, which I’m sure you know.
I grew up in it the way a plant grows in the wrong soil — you manage, you find a way, but there is always the sense of not quite fitting the container you’ve been put in.
” She glanced at him and then away, quickly, in the manner of someone checking that they are still being listened to and finding the checking mildly embarrassing.
“I got in trouble constantly. Not for anything serious — for reading when I was supposed to be at prayer, for arguing with Sister Marguerite about things that didn’t warrant argument, for laughing too loudly.
Small things. The kind of things that don’t seem like much individually but accumulate.
” She paused. “Twenty-two years of accumulation is quite a lot.”
“Yes,” Harper said. “It is.”
She looked at him, briefly, at that. As though the two words had been more than she expected.
“I came home three years ago,” she said, “and my father died that same evening. Before I had said more than a dozen words to him.” She said it without drama.
“I was not — I found I was not very sorry. About the death itself. I was sorry for my mother, because she had to feel whatever she felt about it, which was complicated for reasons I understood only later. But for myself, I was not sorry.”
Harper looked at her.
She was looking at the floor again, and there was a small, slightly lopsided expression on her face that was not quite a smile and not quite not a smile.
“What?” he said.
“I’m telling you things,” she said. “I don’t usually tell people things, as I’m not sure what that means.”
Harper looked at her. At the small smile and the green eyes and the slight flush that had come into her face somewhere in the last few minutes without either of them apparently noting its arrival.
He felt, with a clarity that was not especially welcome, the precise and specific desire to reach out and take her hand.
He looked at her hand. He looked at his own. He understood, in the space of approximately two seconds, that he was standing at a dinner party experiencing something he had not experienced in such a long time that he had genuinely begun to believe the capacity for it had simply gone.
He stepped back. One step, small, barely perceptible. He did it with a composure that he was working for rather than arriving at naturally, and he turned his gaze to the wall beside her head and kept it there until he was reasonably confident his face was doing what he needed it to do.
“We should go back in,” he said and he was grateful for the steadiness. “They’ll be moving to the drawing room.”
“Yes,” she said. She was looking at him with a slight expression of assessment, as though she had noticed the step back and was filing it somewhere. “Probably.”
He offered his arm. She took it, in the easy, formal way she had, and they walked back toward the door together.
“The next event,” she said, as they reached it, “tell me who will be there first. Before you decide anything.”
“I will,” he said.
“And if I say someone is unpleasant, believe me.”
“I will,” he said again, and meant it both times.
She glanced at him sideways. The small smile was still there, barely, at the corner of her mouth. “That was almost easy,” she said. “You agreeing with me.”
“Don’t get used to it,” he said.
She laughed and pushed open the door, and the warmth and noise of the party came out to meet them, and Harper followed her back inside and spent the remainder of the evening being extremely attentive to the conversation around him and not at all attentive to the feeling that was sitting quietly in the center of his chest, which he had not asked for and did not intend to examine until he was somewhere private and could do it properly.
He did not succeed at this.
But he was, at least, thorough about pretending.