Chapter Six
“You will have read it, I expect.” Elizabeth was in the study doorway before the footman had finished announcing her, her bonnet still on and a folded square of paper in her hand. “The whole county has. Sally read it aloud to the kitchen before I had it off the breakfast tray.”
“I have read it.” Gavin set the sheet face down on the desk, which accomplished nothing, since they both had it by heart already.
“Then we need not spend the morning establishing that it exists. It exists. I am in print, Your Grace, and so are you, and so, I fear, is a child of six who cannot answer one word of it.”
“It will pass. These things pass. The county finds a fresh scandal by the quarter and forgets the last one entirely.”
“Does it? You have a dukedom to do your forgetting for you. I have a name, a character, and a child’s good opinion, and those three are the whole of my estate. Whether you meant it or not, I have become a matter for the county’s amusement.”
“I will speak to the editor,” said Gavin.
“You will not.” Her voice sharpened, then steadied again.
“A denial repeats the charge for the benefit of anyone who missed it the first time. No. Pray do nothing until doing something can be of use.” She shut the door behind her.
“But I did not climb your stairs about the paragraph. The paragraph is only weather. I came about this.”
She laid the note on the blotter in front of him.
He did not need to open it. He had been a soldier long enough to know the weight of a thing built to look weightless, and the seven words inside tied his quiet house to a year in Spain he had spent several years trying not to think of.
Ask Ravensmere why your husband hated him.
“Someone folded that in with the schoolroom post, in a hand made to look like nobody’s. I have carried it since it came, and I am done carrying it.” She did not sit. “So I am going to ask you what the note tells me to ask, and I am asking plainly. Did my husband have reason to hate you?”
“Yes.”
“Did you wrong him?”
“Not in the way he believed.”
“That is a soldier’s answer, Your Grace.”
“It is a coward’s answer.”
He stopped, with the rest of it standing in his throat where it had stood for four years and would go on standing, because to say the next sentence aloud was to hand her the weapon and the wound in the same breath.
She waited for the rest. He gave her none, and the waiting in her face cooled, then tired, the look of a woman who had reached a door and found it locked after all.
“I have spent four years asking officers one question,” she said quietly, “and every one of you stops in the same place. You call it kindness. You call it delicacy. You call it sparing me. I have yet to discover whom that kindness truly serves.”
“Mrs Mercer.” He had got that far before, a hundred times, and never one word further. “There are things a man cannot say to a woman without doing her more harm in the telling than the silence does.”
“Then you are still choosing for me.” There was no heat in it now, which was worse.
“That is the part of it I have never learnt to forgive. Not the silence itself, perhaps, but the certainty behind it. The certainty that a woman may live inside the consequences and still not be trusted with the cause.”
He had no answer that would not open the whole grave between them.
She took the note back off the blotter and folded it away. “Very well. Someone, somewhere, still remembers what happened. I shall ask until I find the one man willing to tell me.”
“Who gave you that note?” Gavin asked.
“It came unsigned, Your Grace,” she said. “That is rather the entire point of it.”
“It came from Renwick, or from a man Renwick pays to do the things he would rather not be seen to do himself.” He had gone very still.
“He is three miles off, in a hired house, and he has taken an interest in you. A note of that kind is a first round, never a last. Be careful which ‘honest’ man you allow to tell you the honest things, Mrs Mercer. The most willing truth-teller in the county is the one I would trust the least.”
“Then tell me yourself,” she said, “and spare me the bravery of strangers.”
He did not. Of course he did not.
“As I thought,” she said, and went, and he let her go.
The note had named the thing in seven words, and he had just done it again in front of the woman it was written about.
***
Matilda found him before noon with the consequences already gathered up in her two hands. They always reached Matilda first.
“You have had a busy morning, the pair of you, and the clock has not yet struck twelve.” She laid a letter on the desk beside the note he had not moved.
“Lady Iris is uninvited from the Carraway children’s tea on Thursday.
The card came round by hand, with regrets so warm you might have toasted bread at them.
A girl of six, Gavin, struck off a guest list of children because her governess took an arm on a church path. ”
“Iris does not care for a tea.”
“Iris may care very much, in ten years, that the striking-off began at six and did not afterwards stop.” She set one finger on the letter. “And this came by the same post. Helena’s family. Read it, since you will be told nothing.”
He read it.