Chapter Two
Gavin had got no farther than his own study door before his aunt was upon him.
“You will tell me why, Gavin, and you will tell me before that woman has slept one night beneath this roof.”
Lady Matilda followed him into the study without waiting to be asked, and shut the door behind her with the particular softness of a woman who meant to raise her voice and did not want it carried down the passage.
“I have engaged a woman the child will endure,” he said. “They have been thin on the ground these two years.”
“A soldier’s widow.” Matilda crossed the carpet. “With no people to stand surety for her, no portion to steady her, and no character to her name but the word of an army surgeon who is very probably dead. In this house, of every house in England.”
“In my house,” said Gavin.
“In the house Helena’s family still watches as though the lease ran to them and not to you.
Tonight, you have made them a present of it.
You have made them a present of a paragraph.
” She set both hands flat upon the far edge of the desk and leant her weight into them.
“Why this one? Four women came and went through that schoolroom and you could scarcely be troubled to learn their faces. This one you settled inside the hour, over my plain objection, in front of the servants, who will have carried it to three kitchens by now.”
“She managed the child,” he said.
“She sat upon the floor with the child. That is not management, and you have commanded men enough to know the one thing from the other at a hundred paces.”
“Then she did inside an hour what four hired women could not contrive in a twelvemonth between them. Name it whatever soothes you. I mean to keep the result.”
“I am not quarrelling with your result, Gavin.” Matilda straightened from the desk and regarded him. “I am quarrelling with the speed of you. You came through that door this afternoon and went white, as though you had taken a ball in the chest.”
“I was tired,” he said flatly.
“You are forever tired. It has not before this rearranged your whole face in front of your aunt and your housekeeper.” She let the words settle, then turned down a fresh road.
“You are a widower of two years, with a daughter who does not speak and a chair standing empty at the foot of your table. If you mean to keep a young woman about the place, the county will write you a tale whether or not you sit to have it drawn. It will not be a kind tale, and it will not be a true one.”
“Let the county write,” he returned. “It has a poor hand and a worse memory, and I have outlasted its opinion before.”
“Iris cannot outlast it. You may weather any amount of talk. A girl of six, who will one day want a season and a name clean enough to carry her into it, cannot weather a single sentence of the wrong sort.” Matilda’s voice found an edge.
“If you want a woman in this house, then marry one. A suitable one. There are three within an afternoon’s drive who would take you by Michaelmas and quiet every tongue in the county by the Sunday following. ”
“I have been married.” He laid his palm flat and squared the blotter beneath it. “I did it suitably. I cannot in conscience recommend the experience.”
That brought her up short.
“Helena did not deserve to be spoken of in that tone,” she said, quieter.
“No. She did not deserve the tone, and she deserved a great deal more than she was handed.” He kept his eyes upon the wood.
“She wanted a husband who looked at her the way she had been raised to expect to be looked at. She was given one who was unfailingly civil, frequently absent, and quietly grateful each spring when the season carried her off to town and left him his silence. I will not lay that on a second woman to spare a few dowagers the labour of gossip.”
“And the child.” Matilda would not let it go. “You will give her a governess, and an aunt past sixty, and call the matter settled. A girl wants a mother, Gavin, not a succession of hired women and a grandmother’s understudy.”
“Iris wants to be let alone to grieve at her own pace, which is the one mercy this household has refused her for two years while it hired women to correct her into cheerfulness.” His voice stayed level, and the holding of it showed at the jaw.
“She has a governess now who does not try to mend her. I will not counterfeit the rest to please a county that never once asked after the child while she fell silent.”
“That is unjust,” said Matilda.
“It is just, and you know it,” he said, “or you would not have looked away just now.”
She did not deny the looking away.
The letter lay open beneath the lamp, and near the foot of it the agency had set the whole engagement down in a clerk’s careful hand. Mrs Elizabeth Mercer, widow of the late Captain Thomas Mercer, of the 43rd. His thumb came to rest upon the word widow and stayed there.
He had seen her first across a long table outside Badajoz, in the spring of 1812, before she was a widow.
The dinner ran loud with officers and louder with their telling of themselves, and Thomas Mercer was the loudest at the board, a captain with a fine laugh and a habit of being proved right too publicly.
His wife sat at his elbow and watched the room, marking who was about to make a fool of himself and who would have to mend it.
When a young ensign at the foot of the table went grey and swayed over his wine, fever taking him before the whole laughing company, not one of the men remarked it.
She rose without a word, crossed behind their chairs, and had the boy’s stock loosed and his head down between his knees before the colonel beside her had finished speaking.
The lamp guttered, and the word steadied again under his thumb.
“You have gone off somewhere I am not permitted to follow,” Matilda said. “You do that a great deal more than you used to do.”
“I was reading,” he said.
“You were not reading. The page has not so much as turned.” She came round the corner of the desk, nearer than she had stood before, and brought her voice low, in the way of a woman who already counted the walls among the listeners.
“I knew the regiment the moment the agency wrote it out. The 43rd. Her husband served under your own command.”
“So did a great many men,” he said.
“And yet this one’s widow you have engaged at forty pounds a year and a character in your own hand, on the strength of an hour.” She held his gaze without blinking. “Did you bury him yourself, Gavin? The captain.”
The question landed exactly where she had aimed to put it.
“I buried a good number of them myself. It was the portion of command they keep out of the songs.”
“Did you write the letter home?”
“I wrote a great many letters home. I had a steady hand and the worst news in England to carry in it.”
“And his widow has come to the very man who wrote hers, and put her hand to his daughter inside an hour.” Matilda spread her own hands. “You see why I do not sleep easy in my bed.”
“There is nothing improper in a child taking her governess’s hand.”
“That is not an answer to the thing I asked, and you have grown uncommonly skilled this evening at answering some gentler question in its place.” She studied his face the way she had once studied his school reports.
“You never speak of Spain. Four years, and not a word of it crosses the table. A man with nothing to hide grows tedious about his campaigns. The one who says nothing at all has chosen his silence on purpose.”
“Spain was mud and fever and other men’s funerals. I spare you because there is nothing in it worth an evening of yours.”
“Or because there is a great deal in it, and none of it worth your saying aloud.” Matilda drew breath and set her shoulders. “I shall put the plain thing to you one last time, and then I shall leave you to whatever it is you do in this room every night behind a shut door. Why did you keep her?”
He could have handed his aunt a dozen reasons: the two years of the child’s silence broken inside the hour, the whole house that turned upon a competence this widow carried in her two bare hands.
Every one of them would have been true, and every one of them would have been offered to keep her from the one reason he did not mean to say.
“Because Iris took her hand,” he said.
“That is not a sufficient answer,” said Matilda.
“It is the only one I intend to give,” he said evenly.
Matilda held his eyes a while, and whatever she found in his face she chose not to speak aloud, which from her was a rare enough mercy that he marked it.
“Then hear what I intend to give you, since you will take nothing kinder from my hand.” She gathered her shawl close at her throat.
“Selina March will have word of this before the week is out. There is not a household within thirty miles that fails to carry its tales to her by the second post, and a soldier’s widow lodged at Ravensmere, set in authority over Helena’s only daughter, is the precise tale she has waited four full years to be handed. ”
“Then she shall be disappointed in it,” said Gavin. “There is nothing here for her to carry away.”
“There does not need to be a thing here, Gavin. You have never understood as much, and it has never yet cost you, because you have never before given her the shape of a thing to point at.” Matilda’s tone hardened.
“She will not require a single fact. She will require a young widow, a silent child, a duke who will not remarry as he ought, and a parish with nothing better to do over its tea. You have furnished her the whole tableau and lit the candles besides.”
“And what would you have me do? Turn the woman out into the dark to feed Selina March a worse tale by morning?”