Chapter 12
“The thing about French architecture,” Albina said, reaching for her wine unhurried ease, “is that it is completely impractical for anyone who actually has to live inside it.”
Temperance looked up from her soup. “Mother, we were talking about the drainage.”
“Were we still? I thought we had moved on.”
“You moved on, as you often do between topics,” Harper said. “I was still on the drainage.”
Albina considered this without visible concern.
“Well. You can go back to it. I simply wanted to make the point about France.”
It was, Harper had come to understand, how dinner always went.
Not because anyone around the table was deliberately trying to make it difficult, but because the conversational instincts of the people in it were so fundamentally different from each other that order was less something to be maintained and more something to be periodically recovered.
He had stopped fighting it somewhere around the third week. He had not, however, stopped trying to steer it.
The dining room was warm and well lit. Joseph was to Harper’s left, eating his dinner with careful attention.
He was quieter than usual, his eyes moving around the table in the watchful, interested way he had when he was taking things in rather than contributing to them.
Harper had noticed this about his son in recent weeks, the way he sat at dinner and watched Temperance and Albina with the expression of someone observing something he found genuinely interesting.
“Some of the architecture in Paris,” Albina was saying, “is extraordinary. Entirely without function, obviously.” She looked at Temperance. “You would love it.”
“I would,” Temperance agreed.
“Spring,” Albina said. “You would have to go in spring. Summer is too hot and everything turns brown at the edges, which ruins the effect completely.”
Harper set down his fork with the patience of a man measuring it out in careful increments.
“The decision I need,” he said, to the table, “is whether we reinforce the existing foundation or replace the section entirely. The cost difference is significant, and I would prefer to make the right choice the first time rather than address it twice.”
“Reinforce,” said Joseph.
Everyone looked at him. He looked up from his plate, shyly.
“Why?” Harper said.
“The apple tree roots,” he said. “They go very deep in that section. Deeper than the wall itself, I think. If you dig it up you will have to take the roots with it, which means taking up a considerable amount of ground, which means the repair becomes much larger than the original problem.”
Harper looked at his son. “How do you know about the roots?”
“I was in the garden,” Joseph said. “The root structure is visible near the base if you know where to look. And then I read the estate records, and there was a note from the groundskeeper at the time saying the east wall foundation had been assessed and replacement was not recommended due to the root system of the established trees.”
Harper looked at his son for a moment. He had not known Joseph was reading the estate records. He had not suggested it, and it came as a surprise to him.
“The roots have been a problem since before Frederick’s time,” Albina added, as if confirming a long-established fact. “He had three men at it for a week once. They gave up in the end and put the section back the way it was.”
“Reinforce, then. I’ll tell Davies in the morning,” Harper nodded.
“Good,” Albina said. “Now. Temperance, what was the name of that book about the Italian gardens? I want to find the chapter on the water features because I have been thinking about the south end of our garden and I think there is something that could be done with the space near the old bench that would be very…”
“Mother. We are still at dinner,” Temperance said dismissively.
But Harper could not help but be fascinated by the conversation. It occurred to him that these women were interesting indeed, and that perhaps their influence was rubbing off on his son.
Which, to his surprise, he did not mind.
The second course arrived, and the conversation moved along. Harper found himself engaged, which was not something he could say about most dinner conversations.
“The east wing wants repainting,” Albina said. “That yellow has to go.”
“It really does,” Temperance agreed.
“I’ve been looking at it for three years. Every morning I come downstairs and it makes me feel slightly ill.”
“There is no need,” Harper interjected, “It does not require repainting.”
Both women looked at him.
“Oh, but why would you say that?” Albina argued. “I think it’s so very unfashionable, and one should always look to change.”
Joseph had been eating quietly through all of this, and spoke up for the first time.
“Fashion is inefficient,” he said, “The rules change every few years for no reason except that someone decides they should, and then everyone has to change everything they own, and the whole thing starts again.”
“That is a very practical view of it,” Temperance said, laughing. “And rather insightful, I might add.”
“It is the correct view,” Joseph said.
“It is one view,” Temperance said. “There are people who find genuine pleasure in it. Your father, for instance, always looks impeccable, which requires a certain engagement with the question of fashion whether he admits it or not.”
Joseph looked at his father, who suddenly felt as though he had been put under the spot.
“I am not engaged with fashion,” Harper said, rolling his eyes.
“You are always very well dressed,” she said, a rare compliment from her which Harper did not know what to make of.
“That is not the same thing,” he said hastily.
“Yes, you may say that but it requires the same decisions.”
“It requires a tailor and a consistent standard. I would call it maintenance, if anything.”
“Maintenance of what, exactly?” Temperance said, seeming amused. “You can be so stubborn about being labelled, there is nothing bad about being deemed fashionable.”
“Of an appropriate appearance,” Harper brushed it off.
“Appropriate to what?”
Harper paused. He could feel Joseph watching this exchange with the bright, interested attention he brought to conversations he was learning from, and he chose his next words with the awareness of that audience.
“Appropriate to one’s position,” he said. “To the expectations that come with it, looking as though one takes those expectations seriously.”
Temperance considered this, and was quiet for a few moments.
“I understand that,” she said. “I do. But I think there is a difference between taking one’s position seriously and performing it constantly. One can be a serious person without the performance.”
“The performance, as you call it, is what other people see,” he said. “It is how trust is established.”
“Or it is how people learn to judge the coat rather than the person inside it.”
“If you give people the coat,” Harper said, “you give them the least of yourself. The coat is easy but the rest is considerably harder to earn.”
“All I am saying,” Temperance said, setting her fork down, “is that not every rule deserves the respect it receives simply because it has always been there. Some of them would not survive five minutes of honest examination and everyone knows it and no one says so because the examination itself isn’t done. ”
“There is a considerable difference between rules that warrant examination and rules that you personally find inconvenient, and you are treating those two categories as though they are the same thing.”
She looked at him, and narrowed her eyes.
“I said unexamined, not inconvenient. Give me an example and I will demonstrate the difference.”
“You give me an example,” he said. “You’re the one making the argument.”
She considered this for approximately one second.
“A woman requires a chaperone to walk in a public park in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon.”
“That exists for her protection,” he said.
“It exists for appearances,” she said, “which is not the same thing and I think you know that. A woman alone in a park on a clear afternoon is in no meaningful danger from anyone or anything. She requires a chaperone because without one people will talk, and people will talk because it simply isn’t done, and it isn’t done because someone decided it wasn’t. ”
Harper did consider it genuinely, turning it over in his mind.
“The rule also covers the situations where the protection is actually necessary,” he said.
“You are arguing against it on the basis of the straightforward cases. The rule exists for the harder ones, the ones where a woman alone is not safe and needs the standard to exist regardless of whether a particular Tuesday afternoon warrants it.”
“So the answer is to restrict everyone on the basis of the worst possible situation rather than to address the worst possible situation directly,” she said. “We apply the exception to the whole.”
“We establish a consistent standard,” he said, “rather than asking people to assess each situation individually.”
“Or,” she said, “we trust people to use their judgment and accept that they will occasionally get it wrong, which is considerably less condescending.”
“You have a great deal of faith in individual judgment,” he said.
“I have a great deal of experience,” she said, “with rules that existed entirely for someone else’s benefit being applied to me as though they were for mine.”
He was quiet for a moment, and she let him be quiet, which was another thing he had noticed about her.
“That’s a fair point,” he said. “But your original point was that the east wing wanted repainting.”
She laughed in deliciously bubbly manner, and he felt something in his chest.
“My original point,” she said, when she had recovered herself, “was that not everything deserves to remain as it is simply because it has always been that way. Some things should be looked at honestly and either kept or changed on their actual merits rather than on the basis of how long they have been sitting there going unquestioned.”
“I agree with that,” he said, surprising himself.
She stopped with her wine glass halfway to her mouth.
“You agree? I expected more resistance,” she admitted.
“The principle is sound,” he said. “My argument is with the application of it, not the principle itself. You encounter a rule that restricts you and your instinct is that the restriction is the problem. But sometimes the restriction is precisely the point, and the fact that it is uncomfortable does not make it wrong.”
“And sometimes,” she said, setting her glass down, “the restriction is the point for everyone except the people being restricted, who had no say in the matter and are simply expected to find it reasonable because the people who wrote it down did.”
“That,” he said finally, “is inconveniently accurate but I’m not conceding the argument.”
“I didn’t think you were but you could simply say I’m right,” she teased.
“I won’t, but the option is there.”
It was at this point that Harrow, the butler, appeared in the dining room doorway. Harper noticed him first and nodded.
Harrow stepped forward.
“A delivery has arrived, Your Grace,” he said. “For Miss Hosmer.”
“A delivery,” she said, surprised.
“Yes, miss. A box, from a shop on Regent Street. The boy says it was ordered earlier this week.”
Oh. It had finally arrived. Harper suddenly found himself feeling full of anticipation.
“Yes, miss.”
“Have it brought up,” Harper said, to Harrow, without looking up from his plate. “She can look at it after dinner.”
“As you wish, Your Grace.”
“Harper,” Temperance said. “Did you have anything to do with his this?”
“It is nothing significant,” he said, trying to play it down. “I saw something that seemed appropriate for the next occasion we are required to attend. You should be presentable and I had the means to ensure it, so I did.”
Temperance looked at him for a long moment. He met her eyes briefly and then returned to his dinner.
“Did you get her a dress? That is very practical,” Albina said, in the mild, pleasant tone that Harper had learned, over several weeks, to treat with some caution.
“I thought it was only appropriate and practical,” Harper said.
“Very thoughtful practicality,” Albina added.
“Mother,” Temperance said, quietly.
Albina picked up her wine and said nothing further, but the expression on her face showed that she was choosing not to comment.
“What color is it?” Joseph with the innocent curiosity of a child asking a perfectly reasonable question. Albina made a sound into her wine glass that was almost certainly a laugh.
“Green,” Harper said.
Temperance looked at him. Something moved across her face that was too quick and too complex for him to read before she looked back at her plate, and she picked up her fork, “Thank you.”
He did not trust himself to say the right thing, so he said nothing, and ate his dinner.
There would be time for that later, though he suspected he would not make very good use of that time. But the intention, at least, was sound.