Chapter Five #2
“Have I? And what have I told you?”
“That you do not know how your husband died. That the not knowing gnaws at you. That you have begun to wonder whether the man whose wages you take is the very man who could end the wondering in a sentence. Three keys, Mrs Mercer, and I had to lift none of them. You set them on the table yourself, beside the fork they neglected to lay you.”
“You were in the Peninsula yourself, then, Major?” This from a florid gentleman further up the board, friendly with wine. “And you knew His Grace out there? The colonel?”
“I knew them both, Sir John. The colonel and the captain.” His eyes touched Elizabeth and moved on. “And the captain’s wife, by sight, at the regimental dinners. A striking trio, the three of them, in those years. One does not forget a striking trio. One only waits to see how the story ends.”
“And how does it end, Major?” said Lady Carraway, who could not help herself.
“I have not the least notion, ma’am. I have only just arrived to watch. But I have a great fondness for a last act, and I am reliably told Ravensmere is approaching one.”
“You were truly with the army, Mrs Mercer?” Sir John pressed, leaning round. “A lady, in the field?”
“With my husband, sir, where the army was. A great many wives were. We are simply left out of the histories, because we did the parts the histories find dull. The mending. The nursing. The burying.”
“The burying.” Renwick took it up before Sir John could. “There is the soldier’s frankness again. Tell me, ma’am, did you bury your own, at the last, or were you spared the sight?”
“I was in England when my husband died, Major, as you know perfectly well, since you appear to keep the regiment’s whole history to the hour. I buried a deal box of his effects. His Grace buried the rest of him.”
The table cooled a degree, as it will when a name is spoken that everyone has agreed to leave unsaid.
“His Grace buried the rest,” Renwick said softly. “Yes. He would have. He was always very thorough, the colonel, about the burying of things.”
“They say you were upon his arm at church, Mrs Mercer.” A thin lady down the board, all teeth and bright interest. “Is it the custom now, for a duke to walk his daughter’s governess out before the whole parish?”
“It is the custom for a gentleman to offer his arm to a woman with a child on her other hand and a wet path before her, ma’am. I took it for no more than that. If the parish chose to read an elbow as something grander, the parish has a richer fancy than the agency ever credited me with managing.”
“The parish always reads more into an elbow. It is rather what a parish is for.”
“Then I am sorry for it, ma’am, that it keeps so little of its own worth the reading.”
“You will find it keeps a great deal by the week’s end, Mrs Mercer,” said Selina, “and only prefers to read about other people. Everyone does. But you play, I am given to understand. The pianoforte. Do give us something to be going on with. The company is flagging, and a hired accomplishment is so much more useful than an idle one. It is half the reason one engages the genteel poor at all.”
The table turned to the woman at the dim end. The deaf canon woke. Elizabeth set down her fork and put her hands to the table’s edge to rise, because a servant asked to perform performs, and she had taken the wage and the wage had terms.
“Mrs Mercer is not employed for your amusement, Selina.”
The Duke had not raised his voice. He had no need to raise it. It went into the bright chatter the way a stone goes into a still pond, and the surface of the room went flat and quiet around the place it fell.
“My dear Gavin,” Selina began, “I am sure I meant only—”
“She is my daughter’s governess and a guest at your table.
She will play if she has a mind to, and sit if she has a mind to, but she will not be set to sing for her supper before people who came here to look at her.
” He had gone entirely still, the way Elizabeth remembered from a parade ground.
“If the company is flagging, Selina, the company is welcome to its carriages.”
“Well,” said Lady Carraway, to her plate.
The silence held, and no one moved to fill it. Selina’s colour rose, was mastered, and rose again.
“You are very fierce in her defence, Gavin,” she said at last, the silk back in it. “Fiercer than the case wants, for a servant engaged so lately. One does grow curious.”
“Be curious. It is a cheap pastime, and it harms no one but the curious.”
“On the contrary. It is the most expensive pastime there is. It is only that the bill is so often sent to other people.” She raised her glass to him, and her smile to the table. “To your governess, Gavin. May she give every satisfaction.”
The table drank to her, and Elizabeth sat at the dim end and was toasted like a horse at a fair. She did not lift a glass, because no one had thought to fill the one beside her plate.
And into the settling of it Renwick spoke again, low, pitched for Elizabeth and the two or three nearest, and no soul beyond.
“You observe how it stands, Mrs Mercer. Ravensmere was never indifferent to the Mercers. Not to your husband in life, whatever the poor man believed, and not to his widow now, in front of a county. I am only surprised he let you believe otherwise so long. A woman ought to know where she truly stands. It is the one plain mercy nobody thinks to do her, and I have made a life of the things nobody else will.”
Elizabeth folded her hands in her lap and gave him back nothing at all, the one coin she carried that he could not spend.
Across the wreck of the table Gavin was looking at her down the length of all that candlelight as though no one else were sitting along it, and there was not a soul present who had missed him doing it.
She rose when the cloth was drawn, a moment before the ladies were properly called to withdraw, and made her curtsey to the table at large.
“You will forgive me, Mrs March. I must see Lady Iris settled. She does not sleep in a strange house unless someone she knows sits by her until she does.”
“How devoted,” said Selina.
Elizabeth made her curtsey to the table. “Good evening.”
And went.
The paragraph was in the next morning’s sheet, in the column that prints a man’s initials and leaves the whole rest of him to the reader’s appetite:
A certain Silent Duke of the northern counties, widowed these two years and most conveniently solitary, is said to keep beneath his roof a Soldier’s Widow of no fortune and rather less family, set in sole authority over his own motherless girl, and seen but last Sunday upon his very arm before the assembled parish.
The late and gallant Captain, we are credibly assured, bore His Grace no love at all while he lived.
The county is left to wonder, over its tea, what precisely it is that His Grace now bears towards the Captain’s widow.
Elizabeth read it twice in the cold schoolroom light, then folded it small, the way she had folded the note, and laid the one inside the other beneath the spools.
She was no longer a private woman with a private question.
She had become a paragraph, and a paragraph, once set in print, belongs to every soul in England save the one whose name it has so carefully declined to spell.