Chapter Sixteen
Gavin appeared in the doorway of her dressing room with a flat blue case in both hands.
“They were my grandmother’s, not Helena’s, in case the provenance was going to trouble you. I checked the inventory this afternoon so that I could tell you the truth of it, which I am aware is the most Ravensmere sentence ever spoken over a gift.”
Elizabeth turned from the glass.
He wore his evening black, the man who had crossed the corridor a week ago and had been crossing it ever since, by daylight now, without the air of a man fording a river.
A week had taught her to read the smaller differences in him, the kind a stranger would have missed.
He still came to a threshold and waited to be let in.
He still preferred a thing he could hand over to a thing he had to say.
But the waiting had stopped being a wall and become a question, and a man who asks at a door is a different creature from one who haunts it.
“You might simply have said, here are some sapphires,” Elizabeth said.
“I might have. I have been a week learning the shorter sentences, and I am not yet fluent.” He looked down at the case. “Will you wear them tonight?”
“That depends. Who is coming?”
“Stannard. Selina. Lady Anstey. My aunt, who arranged the whole table and informed me after the invitations had gone, in the tone of a general telling me the ground was already chosen.”
“So we are to have our full measure taken again.”
“This time over dinner. My aunt appears to believe a longer meal will improve the accuracy.”
He came in when Elizabeth nodded and set the case on the dressing table. The stones lay dark against the velvet, old and deep in colour, with none of the bright insistence of new things.
“And the sapphires?” she asked. “What are they meant to tell them?”
His eyes came to hers in the glass.
“Whatever they choose to read in them. I am tired of arranging other people’s conclusions.”
“That is new.”
“Painfully.”
She touched one of the stones with the tip of her finger.
“Then why do you want me to wear them?”
“Because I do.”
The answer was so plain that she looked at him.
He went on before he could retreat from it.
“I know what this looks like. Another thing put into your hands because I cannot manage the sentence that ought to accompany it. You have charged me with that before, and justly.” He paused.
“I am not going to pretend I have stopped being the man who provisions. I am only trying to learn that a gift need not always be a defence against some disaster.”
“And these are not?”
“No.”
“Not evidence?”
“No.”
“Not armour?”
“Only if you choose to use them as such.”
She waited.
He looked at the sapphires, then back at her.
“I should like to see you wear them.”
There it was. No settlement behind it. No court. No county. Only the difficult little sentence, given to her without a document to hold it down.
“You have decided a great many things aloud these past days,” she said.
“I have a great many years of silence to make up for. It appears to be coming out all at once.”
“Do not apologise for it,” she said. “I was married four years to a man who decided everything aloud and meant about half of it. I find I prefer the tap.”
“Then let me decide one more thing aloud, and you may overrule it. I think you should wear the sapphires. You have spent a month being the duchess this house required, and you have never once been given a thing that was simply yours. I should like, this once, to hand you a thing that does no work at all except sit at your throat and belong to you.”
She looked at the stones a moment, then turned her back to him and lifted the loose hair from her nape. It was answer enough, and she heard him cross the small room.
“You will have to do the clasp,” she said. “Sally has gone down to help with the table.”
His hands were not steady at her neck. She would not have known it but for the small cold touch of the stones settling against her skin, and the warmth of his fingers behind them.
He took longer over the clasp than it warranted.
In the glass, she watched him look at the back of her neck as though it were a country he had once forbidden himself even to name, and the room went quiet and rather warm.
Then he stepped back the requisite foot, and the foot was deliberate. The inch he would not cross until it was hers to give.
“There,” he said. “You look like the Duchess of Ravensmere, which you have been on paper for a month and are about to be in fact before the worst-disposed audience in the Riding. Are you ready for them?”
“No. Ready is a thing one is for a journey. This is a battle, and one is never ready for those. One is only dressed.” She faced him.
“Say one honest thing to me before we go down, Gavin. Not a sapphire. A word. I find I can hold a hostile table for three hours on a single true word, and I would rather go down armed.”
He looked at her for a moment that cost him, the old refusal turning over in him before he answered.
“I would marry you again tomorrow,” he said, “with no scandal forcing it, no licence hurrying it, and no clause in it anywhere. That is the truest thing I have. Take it down to the table and spend it however you must.”
She took it down to the table.
***
The dining room at Ravensmere had been built to seat thirty and was the colder for holding six. Lady Matilda had placed them all with the deliberate cruelty of a woman who believed truth came out faster across a narrow table than a wide one.
“You have settled in at Ravensmere very quickly, Your Grace,” said Lady Anstey, who opened every reconnaissance with a compliment, so that the retreat might also look like one. “One hears the household runs more smoothly than it has these two years.”
“One hears a great deal, Lady Anstey, and quite half of it is even true, which is a better proportion than most households manage.”
“And which half is the smooth-running?”
“That half is true,” Elizabeth replied. “The rest I leave to the county to allot as it pleases, since it will allot regardless of my wishes, and I have given up spending strength in defence against compliments.”
Selina March sat in grey that was not quite mourning and not quite not, in the way she had perfected, and her eyes went to Elizabeth’s throat before the soup was done.
“How striking,” Selina said. “The Ravensmere sapphires. Helena did say they overpowered her. She had not the colouring for them, poor love. You carry them off a great deal more boldly, Your Grace, though boldness was never quite the same thing as suitability, was it?”
“They were the late Duke’s mother’s,” Elizabeth said.
“His Grace told me the provenance this evening, since he supposed I should be asked it before the fish, and I see he was right to the quarter hour. I find I do not mind being overpowered by my husband’s grandmother.
She was, by every account, a formidable woman, and I am dining with three people who would prefer me less formidable, so I shall take what reinforcement the dead can lend me. ”
Lady Anstey, who had been waiting to see whether the new duchess could take a wound without bleeding visibly, allowed herself the smallest movement of the mouth and addressed her wine.
Selina was not done.
“Helena would have found all this so very strange,” she said, to the table at large. “The house full again, the child speaking again, a new mistress in the old stones. I think of her constantly, you know, at moments precisely like this one.”
“How wearing for you,” said Lady Matilda, “to think so constantly and yet so selectively. I find I think of Helena most when I am being kind to her daughter, which is a quieter occupation than wearing her memory to other people’s dinners. But each of us grieves with the tools she was given.”
Stannard did not smile. He had Helena’s pale colouring and none of the softness the miniatures had given her, and he had come to take depositions over the lamb rather than to dine.
“You will forgive a plain question at a pleasant table,” he said, in the voice of a man who had never once been forgiven a plain question and had given up minding.
“My sister’s child was silent for the better part of two years.
She has now, I am told, begun to speak again, under your roof, Your Grace, and in your particular care.
I am glad of it. I should be gladder if I understood it.
A child does not unlock for a hired stranger.
So I find myself asking what exactly you are to Iris, and to this house, beyond the terms of a settlement I have read and did not find affectionate. ”
The table went still. The thing everyone had come for had been set down in the middle of it at last, between the salt and the candlesticks.
“You have read our settlement,” Elizabeth said.
“My counsel obtained it. It is a thorough document. It is not a warm one. A separate income and the right to leave your husband’s house without forfeit. One does not usually find so many doors in a marriage contract.”
“No. It is not warm. It was dictated by a frightened woman to a frightened man across a desk, and every clause in it was built to let each of us survive the other. I will not pretend to you it was a love match drawn up by candlelight, because you have the paper and I have my dignity, and the two would not survive the lie standing in the same room.”
She set down her fork.
“But you asked what I am to Iris. I will tell you, since you have come a long way over bad roads to hear it. I am the person who was in the house when she chose to speak again. I am the person whose hand she crossed a room to take in front of witnesses, because she had decided, in whatever way a child of six decides such things, that I was hers to keep. You may call that hired. The child does not.”
“A child’s preference is not a guardian’s fitness,” Stannard said.