Chapter Two #2
“And so you stopped,” she said. “I had wondered. We all wondered, below stairs, and none of us dared to ask, and I think now we were wrong not to.”
“I did not stop entirely. A duke cannot govern in silence.” He set the shawl down.
“I speak when duty requires it, when the law demands a voice, when an instruction cannot be carried by a nod or a written note. I do not speak for pleasure, and I have not wished to, because I learned in one afternoon precisely what an unnecessary word can buy.”
“Until yesterday,” Mrs. Croft said, and it was not a guess.
He did not confirm it, and his not confirming it was confirmation enough for a woman who had read him for four years. She gathered herself, and the housekeeping briskness returned to her like a garment taken up from a chair.
“I shall write to the Rennets this morning,” she said.
“I shall make it an opportunity and not an obligation, exactly as you have instructed, and I shall keep my opinions in my apron.” At the door she paused.
“I am glad of it, Your Grace, whatever it proves to be. Glad enough that I will say so once and then never mention it again, which I believe is the arrangement you prefer.”
She left with the gait of a woman carrying an unusual instruction she intended to execute perfectly while forming a great many private opinions about its origin.
Thomas sat in the silence she left behind and pulled a sheet of paper toward him, because some part of him wished to extend the offer in his own hand rather than hers.
He wrote, Miss Rennet, and stared at it until the ink dried, and by then the staring had become its own argument, since any sentence that required this much deliberation would reveal a good deal more than he intended.
He crossed it out and tried again. The second attempt read like a solicitor settling a claim against a firm, as though she had cracked a piece of furniture rather than caught fire in his kitchen while he stood close enough to feel the startled heat of her through two layers of cloth.
By the fourth attempt the floor near his chair had acquired a small drift of discarded paper, and by the fifth, which began with promising restraint and ended somehow with a remark about marmalade, he had begun to suspect himself of conducting a courtship through preserves.
Whitlock appeared in the doorway with the air of a man who had been sent and would rather not say by whom. “Mrs. Croft asks whether there is anything for the afternoon post, Your Grace. She mentioned a letter you might be wishing to send to Millcombe.”
“There is nothing of mine for the post.” Thomas swept the ruined sheets into the basket beside the desk with the flat of his hand. “Mrs. Croft’s letter to the Rennets will go, and it will go in her words rather than my own, which this morning are proving unequal to a single line of correspondence.”
“I find that a great comfort, Your Grace, if you will permit me to say so.” Whitlock’s expression remained scrupulously correct, though something behind it was plainly enjoying itself.
“I have ruined more letters than I have ever sent, and I had begun to think it a failing peculiar to the lower servants.”
“It is a failing peculiar to anyone who has too much to say and no safe way to say it.” He gathered the last fragment and dropped it after the others.
“Tell Mrs. Croft her letter stands, and that mine does not, and that she is at liberty to form whatever conclusions she may please, since she will do so regardless of my permission.”
Whitlock bowed, gathered the basket, and withdrew. The room fell silent yet once with the particular quiet of a place where a great deal had been left unsaid on purpose.
The letter from Hubert was where he had left it, in the second drawer on the right, beneath the estate ledger, where something could be ignored without being lost. He drew it out and read it again, though the contents had not improved with rest.
Cousin, it began, in a hand elegant and slightly too large, the hand of a man who wished to appear important on paper because his importance in person had always been assertion rather than evidence.
I write with familial concern regarding your situation at Aldermere.
The county talks, as counties do, and the talk has lately turned to the question of your domestic arrangements.
You are young yet, though time is not unlimited, and the future of the title is a matter of interest to more parties than yourself.
I do not presume to advise. I wish only to express my hope that you will consider the question with the seriousness it deserves, and to remind you that your family, such as it remains, stands ready to support whatever decision you reach.
He returned it to the drawer without answering it, because answering would require him to pretend the concern was real, and he did not spend words on pretence.
A knock came at the open door, and Mrs. Croft put her head in, her writing apparatus evidently already in employment.
“Forgive me, Your Grace. The letter to the Rennets I can manage, but I find I have a question about the other correspondence, the one I am told sits unanswered in your drawer.” Her tone was scrupulously light.
“Mr. Hubert Bennister wrote again, I believe. The footman who carries the London post mentioned it, and I do not like to send a household into a season without knowing whether I am to expect your cousin among the spring visitors.”
“You are not.”
“I am relieved to hear it.” She did not move from the doorway.
“May I be frank, since we have already been frank once this morning, and a second occasion will hardly ruin the score. Three letters in a twelvemonth from a gentleman who has never in my recollection written to enquire after your health out of affection. I should like to understand what it is he wishes, so that I may guard the house against wanting it for him.”
Thomas considered the question, and considered that she had earned the answer, and that saying it aloud to a person who would keep it was a different act from saying it carelessly to a person who would not.
“He is my nearest male relation,” he said. “The next name in the line of succession. He has no fortune of his own that amounts to anything, and he has built his credit, his position, and the expectations of every tailor and club secretary in London upon a single assumption.”
“That you will depart this life without an heir,” Mrs. Croft said, and had the grace to look as though she disliked the words in her own mouth.
“Every year I remain unattached is a year he can borrow against. Every hint that I might wed is a crack in the foundation he has built.” Thomas’s gaze went to the drawer. “A wife would trouble him. A child would ruin him.”
“And he has written three times now,” Mrs. Croft said, “which I confess I had not weighed properly until this moment. The footman remarked on the frequency, and I dismissed it as a cousin’s idleness.”