Chapter Eight
Elizabeth had nearly finished harnessing the gig when the stable-office door opened behind her.
The little room off the yard smelled of neat’s-foot oil and damp leather. Ledgers lay open on the desk. The mare stood patient in the lamplight while Elizabeth drew the last strap through its buckle.
“You are not going to Coldenholme.”
Gavin’s voice carried across the room before he had taken more than a step inside.
She did not look round.
“I am going where my questions may be answered, Your Grace,” she said, settling the buckle with careful fingers. “You have made it plain enough that they will not be answered under this roof.”
“Renwick will not give you answers,” Gavin said. “He will give you a version cut and trimmed to resemble them, and you will pay for believing it.”
“Then I must take that or nothing. Everyone else has handed me silence and called it kindness.” She drew the strap tight through the buckle. “Stand out of the doorway, if you please. The mare dislikes being crowded, and so, this evening, do I.”
He did not stand out of the doorway.
“Mrs Mercer. I am asking you not to go.”
“You are forbidding me to go. The two wear different coats and the very same boots, and I have learnt over four years to tell a man’s asking from his forbidding by the boots. Yours are planted in my doorway, which is forbidding, whatever the coat above them says.”
“If you are seen at Coldenholme, alone, after dark, with that man, you are finished. Not damaged. Finished. There is no character in my hand large enough to cover a widow who calls upon Renwick by lamplight.”
“I had thought he meant to help me,” she said quietly.
“He means to use you.”
“I find I can manage being used a great deal better than I can manage being kept, Your Grace. I have been useful all my life. I know the shape of it, and the terms. I can walk into it with my eyes open. A used woman knows what is being asked of her. A kept one learns the terms only at the end, when the keeping stops.”
“And the child.” He had not meant to reach for her, so he reached for the one thing that might hold.
“If you drive to Coldenholme tonight and are seen, you do not finish only yourself. You finish your place in this house. Iris will wake to find the one person she has chosen gone in the night without a word. Have you weighed that into your accounting?”
Her hand stilled on the mare’s flank, and that was answer enough before she could shut the door on it.
“That is not fair, Your Grace,” she said. “You would use the child to keep me. You, who will not spend a single plain word to keep me, will spend her.”
“I would use anything I have to hand.” He did not look away. “I find I am not proud of it. That much at least you may believe of me without wanting it in writing.”
She let the strap fall against the mare’s flank and turned to face him fully, and the lamp put one half of her in light and gave the other half to the dark of the office.
“You wrote the dispatch.” She did not put it as a question.
“Briggs told me this afternoon. The notice in the Gazette that named Thomas for gallantry. Your hand. Your signature at the foot of it. Not the whole truth, perhaps, but enough of its shape. You know the manner of my husband’s death, Your Grace, and you stood in your study some days past and let me beg you for it as though it were a thing you had put in the ground with him. ”
“The dispatch is true. Every word in it is true. He was gallant. He went forward, and he did not come back.”
“Then why could you not say so to me? Why hand me in a private room the very silence you signed your name beneath in a public one?”
“Because the dispatch is the what, Mrs Mercer. You have never once wanted the what. You want the why, and the why is not a thing a man can put his signature to.”
“What will it take, then, to keep me out of that gig tonight?” she asked.
“Tell me, and I will weigh it.”
“The truth. The whole of it, in plain words, before I climb up. That is the only fare I will take, and you have refused to pay it at every turning. Do not stand in my doorway asking what it will take when you have already settled in your own mind that you will not give it.”
“And if I cannot?”
“Cannot, or will not?”
“I no longer know the difference between the two. I have kept the thing so long that the keeping and I have grown into one creature, and I could not tell you any longer where the silence leaves off and the man begins.”
“That,” she said, after a moment, “is the truest thing you have said to me since I came into this house. And you do not even know what it confesses.”
She had not moved away from him, and the lamp held them both in the one small ring of light.
“I have asked it a dozen ways,” she went on, “and you have stepped around it a dozen times, so I will put it the plainest way I have left. Captain Mercer died under your command. That is why you do all of this. The fires. The wage no governess in England was ever paid. The east room. The standing in my doorway as though I were a thing of yours to keep. It is guilt. You buried a man and cannot dig him up again, so you provision his widow in his stead and call the provisioning duty. That is the whole of it. Is it not?”
“No.”
“Then why?” She asked it quietly, as though he were a frightened creature she had decided not to startle further into the corner. “Why, then? Tell me one true thing, Your Grace, before I drive out and buy a false one from a better salesman than you have ever troubled to be.”
The room had gone still. He could hear the mare shift in the half-harness and the lamp ticking in its bracket.
The turning had brought her close, near enough to see the pulse at her throat above the worn collar, near enough to count the few grey threads the lamplight picked out at her temple.
She smelled of lamp-oil and cold night air and plain hard soap, a woman with nothing left over for scent, and his hand wanted the edge of the table to hold.
“Because I remember you,” he said.
She went very still herself, the stillness of a woman who has heard a board creak in a house she had believed empty. “As his widow.”
“Before that.”
The two words settled into the lamplit room and would not be gathered up again. He watched her turn them over. The meaning of before that climbed into her face, and he could no more have called it back than the rain over the grave four years gone.
“There was no before that,” she said, very low, though her face had already ceased believing her own words. “I was a captain’s wife. You were a colonel, and a married man, and we were never once introduced. You buried him, and you wrote me a letter, and that is the whole of our before.”
“It is not the whole of it.”
“Then what is the rest?” She did not step back. “Say it, Your Grace. You have come this far into a sentence you cannot finish. Finish it.”
He opened his mouth on the rest of it.
The door, which he had not heard open behind him, stood wide.
Selina stood there, with Renwick just behind her. No one else. The absence of an audience did not comfort him. Those two were more than audience enough.
For one foolish instant, Gavin was aware only of the absurd smallness of the room, the mare half-harnessed behind them, Elizabeth standing too near, and the sentence he had not finished still alive in the air between them.
“Gavin.” Selina’s voice was all civility, which made it worse.
“Forgive the hour. Major Renwick dined with me this evening and afterwards remembered he had promised to return your aunt’s music.
I had been meaning to call upon Lady Matilda myself, and as we were coming this way, I thought to accompany him. ”
“How considerate,” Gavin said.
“Is it not?” Renwick stepped just far enough into the lamplight for courtesy, and no farther. “Lady Matilda was good enough to lend me the folio last week. I should have returned it earlier.”
His gaze moved from Gavin to Elizabeth, then to the half-harnessed gig.
“Though I fear we have interrupted something more urgent than music.”
Nothing had happened, and that would not weigh a feather against what the doorway held.
A duke and his daughter’s governess stood alone in a lamplit office after dark, too near each other, with a mare half-put-to behind them and the air still charged with a sentence none of the two visitors had heard and both of them could read.
“Mrs Mercer was preparing the gig against the morning,” Gavin said. The lie came out flat and reasonable, the sort that deceives no one and must be told all the same. “I came to tell her the near trace wanted seeing to before she trusted her weight to it.”
“Ah,” Selina said. “The trace.”
Renwick smiled a little. “Dangerous things, traces. A frayed one may take a man much farther than he ever meant to go.”
Gavin looked at him. “You came to return music, Major.”
“So I did.” Renwick inclined his head. “And have been rewarded for the errand with a lesson in stable management besides.”
Elizabeth’s voice came steady, though Gavin could hear what the steadiness cost her. “Then I am sorry the errand was not better rewarded for the distance.”
“On the contrary, Mrs Mercer. I find the evening most instructive.”
Selina’s gaze travelled once over the gig and the woman beside it. “You keep very late hours, Mrs Mercer.”
“When the work requires it, Mrs March.”
“And His Grace supervises even that, it seems.”
“When a servant is using one of his carriages,” Elizabeth returned, “it is hardly remarkable that His Grace should concern himself with whether it is sound.”
“Hardly remarkable,” Selina agreed, and made the words mean precisely the opposite.
Renwick had not taken his eyes from Gavin. “I am reminded, oddly enough, of Spain.”
“You will not speak of Spain here,” Gavin said.
The words were quiet. They were also a warning, and the room felt it.
Renwick’s smile deepened by a fraction. “No? I had not thought the subject forbidden.”
Selina’s glance sharpened, moving between them.
Renwick lifted one hand, yielding nothing. “As you wish. I should hate to trespass where memory is private property.”
“It is not yours,” Gavin said.
“Very little ever is, in the end. One borrows. One observes. One remembers.” Renwick looked then to Elizabeth. “And sometimes one is asked, quite directly, to explain what others would rather leave undisturbed.”
Elizabeth said nothing.
The silence that followed was worse than speech, because it gave every person in the room time to understand that Renwick had not guessed at random.
Selina drew her shawl a little closer. “I think we had better find Lady Matilda and return the folio, Major. We have already trespassed long enough upon His Grace’s stable business.”
“Of course.” Renwick inclined his head to Elizabeth. “Mrs Mercer.”
“Major.”
“Ravensmere.” His gaze rested on Gavin a moment longer. “I shall still be at Coldenholme, should anyone wish to finish an interrupted conversation.”
Gavin did not answer.
Selina turned towards the yard, then paused at the threshold. “Do not trouble to see us in, Gavin. We know the way to your aunt’s sitting room well enough. And you are plainly occupied.”
They went out across the dark yard towards the house, their voices low beneath the rattle of the music folio in Renwick’s hand.
Gavin stood in the doorway of his own estate office and listened to them go. A printed paragraph might be denied, and a whisper outlived in a dull enough season. But Selina had seen enough to make a cleaner weapon of it, and Renwick had heard enough silence to know where to put the knife.
Beside him, Elizabeth had gone pale in the lamplight, her face turned not towards the yard but towards the half-harnessed mare.
The word Spain still hung where Renwick had left it, and Gavin watched her gather it in and set it beside all the others she had been keeping.
Renwick had not told her the truth. He had done worse.
He had proved to her that there was one.