Chapter Sixteen #2
“No. But it is better evidence than gossip carried by a man with reasons of his own to see this marriage broken.” Elizabeth looked at him steadily.
“And I think, Lord Stannard, that beneath the lawyer’s phrases there is a brother who loved his sister, and who has been told a story about my husband by someone who loved no one.
Perhaps you came here tonight half hoping to find the story false.
I cannot prove it false across a leg of lamb.
I can only let you watch us until the savoury and form your own view, which is, I believe, precisely what Lady Matilda arranged this table to permit. ”
“There is a less delicate matter,” Stannard said. “It is widely reported that the Duke and Duchess of Ravensmere keep separate apartments at the two ends of a corridor, and have done since the wedding. A family asked to accept this marriage will want to know what to make of it.”
The question had been bound to come from somewhere, though she had not looked for it served quite so flatly between the lamb and the savoury.
“Then I shall give the family the answer I give you. I came into this house under a settlement and behind a wall, and walls take a great deal longer to come down than licences take to sign. We have kept separate rooms. I will not turn a household arrangement into a romance merely to soothe your suspicions. But I would ask you what you imagine the fact proves. A shared room is not proof of tenderness any more than a separate one is proof of indifference. The floor plan of a marriage is poor evidence of its worth.”
Stannard’s eyes moved to Gavin then, as every eye at the table moved to Gavin in the end. His silence had been a thing the county had built whole opinions upon for two years, and Stannard plainly expected to build one more.
“And you, Ravensmere,” Stannard said. “Your wife defends you with great spirit. Have you nothing to say in your own house, on your own behalf, about your own child? Or is the report true, that the Duke of Ravensmere has not strung six sentences together since he buried my sister, and lets a hired widow do his talking as he lets her do his mothering?”
Elizabeth did not look at Gavin. The month had taught her that much. She kept her eyes on Stannard and left her husband the room to fail or not fail in, because it was his.
“The report is true,” Gavin said.
The table held still.
“I buried your sister, and I found I had very little to say, to her or to anyone. So I said almost nothing for two years. Helena deserved better of me in that than she got. I have told my wife so, and I will tell you the same, since you loved your sister and have the better right to hear it.”
He set his hands flat on either side of his plate.
“But you have come to my table to ask whether I can speak for my own child, so I will speak for her. Iris is mine. Not Helena’s to will to a brother, not the county’s to discuss into a different household, and not, Stannard, available.
I was a poor enough father while I was drowning that a hired stranger taught her she might say no aloud and be safe in the saying.
I will be better now, because the woman wearing my grandmother’s sapphires has shown me how it is done.
I have decided that the worst thing a man can do to a child is sit in the next room being sad at her, and that is the one inheritance I am determined Iris shall not have from me. ”
It was the longest anyone at the table, save Elizabeth, had heard him speak in two years, and he had spent it on the child, on his own failure, and on his wife’s throat.
Lady Anstey set down her glass and looked at him with frank, reassessing interest. Selina’s grey-gloved hand closed on her napkin. Stannard, who had come to take a deposition, sat like a man who had dredged a pond expecting a body and brought up something alive.
After a moment, Stannard said, more quietly, “Helena wrote to me, the last year. She said the house was very quiet, and that she did not think her husband disliked her, which she had decided to count as a mercy. I have hated you for that letter two years, Ravensmere. A man should be more to his wife than a thing she has decided not to mind.”
“He should,” Gavin said. “I will not insult your sister by making a defence of it across her brother. I was a poor husband to a good woman who deserved a warmer one.”
“And after she died,” Stannard said, “you shut the doors.”
There it was. Not all of it, perhaps, but more of it than grief.
“I ceased to call,” Gavin said.
“You ceased a great deal more than that. While Helena lived, Ravensmere remembered her family existed. There were dinners. Introductions. A word in the proper quarter when one was wanted. Afterward, there was nothing.”
“Nothing you were owed.”
Stannard’s face altered.
“No,” he said after a moment. “Perhaps not.”
The admission seemed to cost him more than the accusation had.
“But a man may grow accustomed to a place before he discovers it was never his. Then another woman comes into the house, and suddenly there are dinners again, and county calls, and a child speaking, and all the life one had been kept outside of. You may call it ugly if you please. I have called it a great many prettier things myself.”
“I know,” Gavin said. “So have I.”
For the first time that evening, Stannard looked at Elizabeth without appearing to measure what she had taken.
“I had thought you the proof of my grievance,” he said.
“And now?” Elizabeth asked.
“Now I think I may have mistaken the grievance for the proof.”
It was not an apology. It was not surrender. But it was the sound of a man discovering that a wrong done to his pride was not necessarily a wrong done to him.
“I see,” Stannard said at last. “I shall have to think.”
“I would think less of you if one dinner were enough to settle it,” Gavin said.
A faint, unwilling change came over Stannard’s mouth.
“That is convenient.”
“It is. I am learning to make use of convenience where I find it.”
“More wine for Lord Stannard,” said Lady Matilda to the footman, with great serenity. “He has discovered over dinner that two years of righteous indignation may contain a small quantity of injured vanity. It is thirsty work.”
“Aunt.”
“I said small.”
“Well,” said Lady Anstey, and she said it in the tone the whole county would be quoting by Friday.
“Well. I arrived expecting a sad house and a hired wife, and I find I have been seated the entire evening at a marriage. One does so dislike being misinformed. I shall have a great deal of correcting to do, at length, and with enormous enjoyment.”
Elizabeth lifted her wine and did not let her hand shake around it.
Under the table, where no cousin and no county could make anything of it, Gavin’s hand found hers and held it. She let it. The holding said the thing the sapphires had only spelt.
And for the first time since she had dictated the leave-clause, Elizabeth could not quite remember why she had ever needed the door so desperately open.