Chapter Twelve
The drawing room had filled with callers come to take the new duchess’s measure, and Lady Anstey opened the attack for them all.
“And was it a very sudden thing, the engagement? One heard nothing at all, and then one heard everything, the whole of it, in a single week.”
Lady Anstey arranged the question the way she arranged her teacup, with great care and no haste, and watched Elizabeth over the rim for the answer she had driven three miles to collect.
“It was sudden, Lady Anstey,” Elizabeth replied. “His Grace is not a man who lingers over a decision once he has reached it. I am told he was the same in the field.”
“In the field.” Mrs Goring took that up at once from the second chair, where she had been waiting for an opening with the patience of a terrier at a hole. “Yes. One hears a good deal about His Grace in the field, lately. One hears the field is where the acquaintance began.”
“The acquaintance began as most regimental acquaintances do, Mrs Goring. My late husband served under His Grace’s command. There is nothing in a regiment that a regiment does not already know.”
“Of course not.” Mrs Goring smiled. “I only meant that it is a great romance, in its way. The colonel and the captain’s wife, and the captain so tragically gone, and now the whole sad story tied up so neatly with a special licence. It wants only a ballad.”
“It wants only better manners than it is being shown,” said Matilda from the sofa, pouring as though she had heard nothing of interest. “More tea, Augusta? You have let yours go cold over the ballad.”
“You are too severe, Lady Matilda.” Lady Anstey smiled without troubling her eyes. “We are only curious. It is not every season a governess becomes a duchess in the same house where she was engaged. Curiosity is the natural tax on so swift a promotion.”
She turned back to Elizabeth.
“Tell us of your people, Duchess. One likes to know where a new name comes from before one lends it one’s own.”
“My father was a clergyman in Hampshire, Lady Anstey, with a small living and a large library. He is twelve years dead. My mother went the year after him. That is the whole of my people. It is a short account and an honest one, and I am told the two qualities keep company rarely in this county.”
“A clergyman’s daughter.” Mrs Goring made it sound like a diagnosis. “And yet you followed the drum. That is a long road, from a Hampshire vicarage to a Spanish camp.”
“It is the road a woman travels when she marries a soldier, Mrs Goring. The drum does not consult her father’s library first.”
The room held perhaps a dozen women, in two shifts of arrivals, and Elizabeth had understood within the first quarter hour that not one of them had come to wish her joy.
They had come to read her. They asked their questions in soft, sociable voices, the sort that could be denied later, and each one felt for a latch.
“You were a companion, I think, before,” Lady Anstey said. “To the child. A governess of sorts.”
“I was engaged to instruct Lady Iris, yes.”
“How quickly one rises, in this house.” Selina spoke for the first time from the window seat, where she sat in the grey-violet of half mourning now, a careful step out of crape, a woman observing the forms while making sure no one forgot the grief beneath them.
“My cousin took rather longer over the same distance, and she was born to it.”
“Your cousin had the leisure to take her time, Mrs March,” Elizabeth answered. “I have not been granted leisure at any point in my life. I have learnt to cover ground.”
“So one observes.”
Selina’s gaze moved over her, from the grey gown to the wedding ring.
“You have her rooms, I suppose. Helena’s. The duchess’s apartments. One does wonder how it sits, to dress in another woman’s glass.”
“I have the east room, Mrs March, which you know well enough is not Helena’s.
Your cousin’s apartments are shut, and her glass is covered.
They will stay so until Lady Iris is grown and may say herself what is to be done with her mother’s things.
I do not dress in dead women’s mirrors. I have my own, and it has seen worse mornings than this one. ”
“And is it a love match?” Mrs Goring produced the question she had plainly been saving.
“One asks because one cannot tell from the outside. There was no courtship anyone observed. No assembly, no dinners, no being seen. One morning a governess, the next a licence. It has the look of an arrangement, and arrangements are so much more interesting than love, do you not find, because one may speculate about the terms.”
“You may speculate about whatever you can afford, Mrs Goring,” Elizabeth returned.
“I do not discuss the terms of my marriage in my own drawing room, any more than you discuss the terms of yours, and for the same reason. The terms of a marriage are the one subject on which no caller has ever been told the truth, and every caller has gone home satisfied she heard it.”
It was then that Elizabeth saw the child.
Iris stood in the doorway to the hall, half behind the frame, in the precise place and the precise posture her father took when he watched a room he did not mean to enter.
She had been there long enough to have heard the ballad, and the cousin, and the arrangement.
Her small face had gone careful, the look it wore when she was storing a thing away to be frightened of later.
“Lady Iris,” said Lady Anstey, who missed nothing and used everything. “There she is. The cause of it all, one might say. Will you not come and make your curtsey, child, and let us see how you are getting on under your new mama?”
Iris did not move, and did not speak, and the silence stretched in the way silence does when a dozen women have decided to enjoy it.
“She is shy,” Elizabeth said, rising. “As I was, at her age, before I learnt that shyness only encourages the questioner. If you will excuse me one moment.”
But the child had already gone from the doorway, the way her father went, without a sound, leaving the place in the frame empty.
Elizabeth came back to the tea and the dozen faces, and kept her hand steady on the pot.
“A delicate child,” Mrs Goring observed. “They say she was silent for a long while after the late duchess. One does wonder what a child sees, to make her keep so much of herself tucked away.”
“One wonders a great many things, Mrs Goring, that one would do better to leave un-wondered in another woman’s drawing room.”
Matilda set down the pot.
“Lady Anstey, you came, I think, to take my nephew’s wife’s measure, and you have had three-quarters of an hour to take it in.
I will save you the fourth. She is steadier than the lot of us, she does not rise to bait, and she loves the child, which is more than this room has managed between the whole of it in two years of calling on the late duchess and never once asking after her daughter.
You may report all of that wherever you are going to report it. ”
A small silence followed, of a different quality than the last.
“You mistake me, Lady Matilda,” Lady Anstey said after a moment, and set her cup down with the air of a judge who had heard enough to rule.
“I did not come for a ballad. I came because the county will take its lead from whether I curtsey or cut, and I do not like to rule on a thing I have not seen for myself.”
She turned to Elizabeth, and the cool eyes had something in them now. It fell well short of warmth, and came at least as far as attention.
“You have not once defended yourself this hour. You have defended the child, and your husband’s decisiveness, and your own want of leisure, but not yourself. I find I have more time for a woman who does not think herself worth the defending.”
“I do not defend myself because there is nothing to defend, Lady Anstey. A woman defends herself when she has done a thing she is ashamed of and means to argue she has not. I married a man, and I love his child. I have done nothing this room would not have done in my place, and rather more of it sober.”
“There.” Lady Anstey very nearly laughed. “That is the first wholly unguarded thing you have said in the past hour, and naturally it is the one most likely to get you talked about, because nothing alarms a county like a woman who declines to be ashamed.”
Her gaze moved to Selina.
“You will not make a scandal of this through me, Mrs March. You must find another drawing room for it.”
“There is no scandal,” Elizabeth said. “Only a soldier’s widow who married a soldier, and a child who needed a face that would not leave. The rest is a ballad other people have written, and I cannot be expected to sing harmony to a tune I never agreed to.”
“No,” Lady Anstey agreed, rising, gathering the others to rise with her by the simple force of being the one who decided when calls ended. “I do not suppose you can. Good day, Duchess. I will call again, which you may take however you like, and which the county will take as it is meant.”
They went in their two shifts, in a rustle of leave-taking that cost Elizabeth more to stand through smiling than the whole hour before it.
Selina was the last to the door.
“It was Spain she meant, you understand,” Selina said, low, only for her.
“Goring. The ballad. They have all heard it now. The Peninsula version. The colonel who could not keep his eyes in his head where you were concerned. You may thank the major for the wide circulation. I only came to watch you hear it land.”
She drew on her gloves.
“You carry it well. Helena carried things well too, at the start. It is later that the carrying tells.”
And she went, in her careful grey-violet, having buried her cousin again on her way out the door.
Matilda found Elizabeth at the window when the last carriage had crunched away down the drive, and put a glass of something into her hand without asking whether she wanted it.
“Drink that. You have earned it twice over, and you did not put a foot wrong, which is more than I managed at my own first county call, when I told a bishop’s wife precisely what I thought of her bonnet.”
Elizabeth looked at the glass.
“It did not feel like a victory. It felt like standing very still in a high wind.”
“That is what victories feel like, at our end of things.” Matilda sat. “Anstey will curtsey now, and where Anstey curtseys the rest must follow, however Selina sulks. You have bought the child a season of being received instead of whispered at. It was well done.”
“Selina said the whole county has heard the Spain story.”
“Then the whole county has heard one more thing it cannot prove and has no business repeating. That has never stopped a county yet.” Matilda’s mouth thinned. “Renwick is at work, then.”
“He seems to prefer other people’s drawing rooms to his own.”
“He prefers any room where someone else may be made uncomfortable.”
Elizabeth looked down into the glass and did not drink.
“Did he look at me?” she asked.
Matilda’s gaze sharpened.
“Gavin. In Spain. The way they say.”
“I was not in Spain.”
“No. But you know him.”
“I know that a man may look at a thing once and spend four years acting as if he did not. I know that my nephew has faults enough to fill a sermon and not one of them is carelessness.” Matilda softened by a fraction.
“I also know that Lionel Renwick can take a true thing, shave off the restraint, the silence, and the years of doing nothing, and hand the remainder round as sin.”
Elizabeth’s fingers tightened on the glass.
“You think it was true.”
“I think there is a reason he cannot say your name without looking as though the word has cut him. Whether that reason began in Spain is his truth to tell, not mine.”
Elizabeth said nothing.
“I have told you what I can. Now go to the child before what those women said settles in her mind.”
***
She found Iris an hour later in the nursery, under the window, with a book open and unlooked at in her lap, in the posture of a person much older who has been given a thing too heavy to set down.
“They have all gone,” Elizabeth said, lowering herself to the floor beside her, the duchess’s good dress and all. “Every last one. The house is ours again, and a great deal quieter for it.”
Iris did not look up from the felt pages.
“You heard them. In the doorway. I saw you hear them.” Elizabeth did not soften it into a question the child could dodge.
“You may ask me anything they put into your head. I will tell you the truth of it. I am not in the habit of lying to people under four feet tall. They always know, and they never forget, and it is not worth the cost.”
The child’s hands moved on the page, then went still.
In a low voice, and without looking up, Iris asked the thing she had carried up from the doorway.
“Did you marry Papa because of me?”
Elizabeth did not gasp, though the whole of her wanted to. The sentence had come clear and whole, and she would not make a spectacle of the courage it had cost.
She took Iris’s small, cold hand into her own.
“In part,” she said gently. “But not in the way you are afraid of.”
Iris looked at her then.
“You did not make me do anything,” Elizabeth said. “No one used you to tie me here. I chose to stay because, when I thought of leaving this house, I thought of leaving you, and I found I could not bear it.”
The child’s fingers tightened in hers.
“That is not a burden, Iris. It is not blame. Sometimes a person is the reason we are brave enough to choose a thing we already wanted to choose.”
Iris held her gaze, very still.
“Papa married you because of me too,” she said. “I heard Aunt say it. To make me a scandal less.”
“Your papa married me for reasons that belong to him, and one day he must give them to you himself. But this much I know.” Elizabeth smoothed her thumb over the child’s knuckles.
“He wanted you safe. He wanted you steady. He wanted the person you reached for to remain where you could find her. That is not shameful, and it is not your fault. It is love doing what it knows how to do, even when it does it clumsily.”
Iris considered that with solemn care.
“Will you go away,” she asked, “if the ladies make you?”
“No.” Elizabeth answered at once. “No, my darling. Ladies with sharp tongues do not decide where I live. I came here because I chose to. I stayed because I chose to. And I am staying still.” Elizabeth folded the small hand between both of hers.
“You did not trap me here. Your papa did not trap me here. I am not caught, Iris.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
The child almost smiled. Not quite, but the corner of her mouth found the place a smile would stand once it had learnt it was allowed.
Then she leant her small weight against Elizabeth’s arm, and Elizabeth bent her cheek to the child’s hair.
They sat together under the window while the house settled around them, the empty cups cooling downstairs in a room where judgment had not quite gone the way it came.