Chapter Five
The church had filled to its walls by the time Elizabeth took her place in the pew with Iris beside her, and the murmuring began before the first hymn.
“That will be the Mercer woman. The soldier’s widow he keeps up at the great house.”
The whisper came from two pews back, behind a fan that did nothing to lower it, and Elizabeth kept her eyes on the prayer book and gave the speaker none of the turned head she had paid for.
“Of the regiment, they say. There was a husband, you will recall. There is always a husband, with that sort, and the only question is ever how recently.”
Beside her, Iris had gone still with the stillness of a child who knows she is being looked at and cannot tell what she has done to earn it. Her hand crept across the wood and took a fold of Elizabeth’s skirt.
“They are admiring your bonnet,” Elizabeth murmured down. “It is a very fine bonnet, and they are quite right to.”
The child did not believe her, being no fool, but the lie said I am here, and she kept her hold through the whole of a sermon on charity.
He was waiting at the foot of the church path when they came out into the grey, his hat already in his hand. He glanced once towards the knot of parishioners lingering by the gate, then back to Iris, who had drawn close against Elizabeth’s side.
“Will you return with us, Mrs Mercer?” he asked.
“I had thought to take Lady Iris back on foot.”
“So you shall,” he said. “Though not on foot.” He stepped aside to let Iris pass between them. “The carriage is this way.”
They had gone only a few paces before he quietly offered Elizabeth his arm.
“Your Grace…” She kept her voice low. “People are watching.”
“I know.”
“Then you should not.”
He met her eyes for the briefest moment. “I think I should.”
He did not take the arm back.
She hesitated. Refusing him there, before half the parish, would only furnish them with a fresher story than the one they already possessed. She laid her hand lightly on his sleeve, and together, with Iris between them, they walked towards the waiting carriage.
No one called after them. No one needed to. She could feel the eyes upon her back all the same.
The groom shut the carriage door behind them, and the horses had not yet cleared the churchyard before she turned to him.
“You should not have done that,” she said quietly. “Whatever you meant by it, and I believe you meant it kindly.”
“They were unkind to you in church. I will not stand by and have it done.”
“They were curious, Your Grace. Curiosity is not unkindness. It is only the raw stuff unkindness is later made from, and you have handed the parish enough of it for a month.” She kept her voice level.
“A whisper might have died by Tuesday. You have made it a certainty, and I am the one who must wear that certainty about the lanes, not you. You will be wearing a dukedom. It covers a very great deal that a widow’s pelisse does not. ”
“I will not let them insult you,” he said evenly.
“Then let them forget me.” She kept her voice low, for Iris had grown quiet between them. “That would be kinder.”
He looked towards the window. “I meant only to make it plain that you are under my protection.”
“I know. But protection can look very like possession, from the road.” She folded her hands in her lap. “That is the danger.”
“You think me careless of your name.”
“I think you are used to a name that can bear a great deal. Mine cannot. A widow’s respectability is a thin thing, Your Grace. Once people begin to pull at it, one never quite gets it smooth again.”
He was quiet, and the carriage took a rut and recovered.
“I did not think of it so,” he said.
“No. You thought of me as someone wronged, and yourself as someone able to put it right. That is a generous instinct. It is also a perilous one, if I am not consulted before you act upon it.”
“What would you have had me do?”
“Ask me,” she said simply. “Or do nothing. Often doing nothing is the kinder course, though it feels the poorer one.”
His mouth tightened, not in anger, but against something less easily named.
“And if doing nothing leaves you to their cruelty?”
“Then I shall bear it, as women generally do. But I would rather bear a slight than a story.” She glanced down at Iris, asleep now against her side. “A slight bruises. A story follows.”
He had no answer to that. The wheels turned over the wet road, and neither of them moved to wake the child between them. The not-moving was the nearest they came to agreement the whole way home.
***
The note came two days after, folded among the schoolroom post that Sally carried up, her name on it in a hand at pains to look like nobody’s.
Ask Ravensmere why your husband hated him.
Hated was colder than any word Elizabeth had let herself use.
Thomas had despised the colonel over a dozen fires, a tyrant by practice, ice for blood, the small coin of a captain corrected once too often before his men.
Despising she understood. Hatred wanted a cause beneath it, and a cause was a fact, and facts were the one thing every man in England had spent four years declining to give her.
She folded the paper into the workbox beneath the spools, and her hand went back to it twice before supper.
Iris was wanted at Mrs March’s only long enough to be looked at, and Elizabeth went because the child would not be taken there without her.
The children were brought down before the soup, six of them, scrubbed and silk-sashed and ranged along the hearthrug like a row of costly dolls. Iris came last, in the grey she was forever put into, eyes on the carpet.
“And this is poor Ravensmere’s girl.” Selina’s hand came to rest on Iris’s shoulder, light as a brand. “Iris, my love, make your curtsey. There. Now say good evening to Lady Carraway, who drove such a way to see you.”
Iris made the curtsey. She did not say good evening to Lady Carraway.
“She is shy,” said Lady Carraway, charitably.
“She is silent, I am sorry to say. Two years now.” Selina said it to the room, not the child, with the sorrow of a woman enjoying her evening. “It is such a difficulty in a girl. A girl who cannot make conversation cannot make a match, and then whatever is one to do with her?”
“One might let her be six,” Elizabeth said, from the edge of the room where the attendants were made to stand. “She has many years ahead in which to learn conversation, my lady, and very few left to be six. I would not spend the second in purchasing the first.”
“You have a great deal to say,” said Selina, “for a woman engaged to be quiet.”
“I am engaged to teach the child, Mrs March. No one has yet paid me to watch her handled unkindly, and that I find I will not do for free.”
“Iris,” said Selina, sharp now.
But the child had already let go of the hearthrug and was crossing the carpet, past the silk sashes and candlelight, to stand against Elizabeth’s side and put her hand up into the governess’s in front of the whole company.
The room saw it. Every soul in it saw it, and the gossip the morning paper would carry took its first clean breath there, before the soup was in.
Elizabeth bent and murmured something no one else could hear. A footman led the child away to the nursery stairs, and the company went in to table with a new thing to chew that had nothing to do with the courses.
Elizabeth was seated, when they sat, at the dim end between a deaf canon and an empty chair, in the place a house keeps for those it has been obliged to feed and would rather not be seen feeding. The gentleman across from her was neither deaf nor dim, and knew her name before she gave it.
“Mrs Mercer.” Major Renwick said it as a man says the name of an old friend met by the purest accident. “Thomas Mercer’s widow, at Ravensmere of all houses in the kingdom. The world is a very small and very strange dining room.”
“You knew my husband, Major?”
“I knew everyone’s husband. It was always my particular gift.” His smile came easily, and his eyes did not come with it. “Poor Mercer. Brave as a lion and twice as ready to walk into the one thing in the field that would kill him. We all said someone really ought to have held the man’s coat.”
He let it lie.
“Did no one ever tell you the manner of it, at the end? A widow ought to be told. I have always held that very strongly.”
“No one has told me the manner of it, Major. Every man agrees he was brave and falls silent directly after. I have begun to suspect bravery is the word a man reaches for when he wants to shut a door in a widow’s face without appearing to.”
“How extremely well you put it.” He leant in a degree. “You make me sound a kind of confessor, Mrs Mercer.”
“Do I? I had thought a confessor kept what he was told.”
“A very proper distinction. Perhaps I am only a man with a better memory than is convenient.” He smiled, and again the eyes stayed out of it.
“But you wrong me. I do not want your confession; I want to make you a gift of mine. I do not mean to pry. I only wonder whether anyone has ever offered you the truth. The world has been delicate with you about your husband’s death, ma’am, and delicacy is not always kindness. ”
“Then say the sentence, Major.”
“Oh, not here.” He sat back, well pleased.
“A truth said before forty people is only a scandal, and a scandal does no useful work. A truth said quietly, to one person, in her own good time, is a key. I deal in keys, Mrs Mercer. Scandals are Mrs March’s department, and she is so much better at them than I could ever hope to be. ”
“You are very confiding, Major, for a man I met ten minutes since over a soup I have not yet been given.”
“I am confiding with everyone. It is how I learn which confidences are worth the keeping and which are worth the selling. The great joke of it is that the giver can never tell me which he has just handed over, and that is the whole charm of the trade.” He turned the stem of his glass in the candlelight.
“You, for one, have told me a great deal already this evening, and you have hardly said a word that signified.”