Chapter Five
“Are you comfortable here?” Thomas said, to an empty study, and the words fell into the silence with the graceless weight of a man who had not practised conversation in four years and was discovering, too late, that the skill atrophied like any other.
“You did quite well today,” he tried instead, and disliked it at once, since it announced that he had been watching closely enough to judge her.
“I am pleased you returned.” Worse still, a confession dressed as a remark.
“Your Grace?”
Mrs. Croft stood in the doorway with the morning tray, her face arranged into the careful blankness of a woman who had plainly heard more than one rehearsed sentence through the door and had decided to pretend she had heard none of them.
“I was reviewing some correspondence,” Thomas said.
“Of course, Your Grace.” She set the tray down.
“Though if it is correspondence to a young person who has done well and whom you are glad to see returned, I might observe that such letters are generally easier to write than to say aloud to an empty room, and a great deal easier still if one simply declares the truth and relieves his conscience of the matter.”
“You overheard.”
“I hear a good deal, Your Grace, and repeat almost none of it, which is the whole of my value to this house.” She straightened a cup that did not need straightening.
“I will say only that the girl is downstairs by seven each morning, and that a sentence spoken to her face would cost you less, in the end, than a hundred spoken to the window. I shall leave you to your correspondence.”
She withdrew, and Thomas crossed to the window and looked down at the empty kitchen courtyard.
Jane had not yet come. It was half past six and her hours began at seven, and he had been awake since five for reasons he declined to examine.
His conduct was becoming absurd, and he was aware of it the way a man is aware of a fever, able to name the condition and do nothing to bring the temperature down.
He was still at the window when the carriage came up the drive.
Louisa descended first, as she always did, having never once in her life waited for a door she could open herself.
She was Thomas’s younger sister by three years, fair where he was dark, and gifted with an observing intelligence that had frightened every governess she was handed.
Philip came out after her at the unhurried pace of a man who had learned across years of matrimony that his wife set the speed and his part was to match it, sociable where Thomas was silent, thinking like the barrister he had trained to be, in evidence and in patience, where Louisa read people on instinct.
He was fond of Thomas and had never said so, since Philip did not say aloud what his conduct already made plain.
“You look thin,” Louisa announced, crossing the entrance hall to kiss his cheek, “and you have not been sleeping, and you have had the lane re-gravelled, and there are French recipe books in the library that were certainly not there at Christmas.” She drew off her gloves with the efficiency of a woman who had been cataloguing since the carriage turned in at the gate.
“And the footman at the lower gate has been changed for a more alert specimen, which tells me you have either developed strong opinions on gate posture or something else has transpired entirely, and I find I do not believe in your sudden passion for gate posture.”
“You have not removed your bonnet, Louisa, and you have already inspected the lane, the library, and the staff.”
“I have been here four minutes, Thomas. Give me ten and I shall have the whole of it out of the very walls, and you know perfectly well that I will, so you may save us both the labour and simply tell me her name.”
Philip shook his hand with a grip that was firm and brief and conveyed, in the manner of a barrister’s handshake, that he had marked everything his wife had marked. “Good to see you,” he said, and meant it, and left it there.
They took tea in the drawing room, and Louisa conducted the first quarter hour with the deliberation of a field surgeon who had decided the wound wanted cleaning whether the patient cared for the procedure or not.
“Mrs. Croft tells me you have taken on an apprentice in the kitchen.”
“Mrs. Croft has been writing to you.”
“Mrs. Croft writes to me every fortnight, as she has done since Henry passed away, because somebody in this house must keep up with the outside world, and you have made it abundantly clear you would rather it were not you.” She set her cup down with the care of a woman conscious that the china was absorbing the force she was holding back.
“A baker’s daughter from Millcombe. A Miss Rennet, who came to deliver muffins, set herself alight in your kitchen, and was offered a place before the week was out. ”
“The morning after. Mrs. Croft wrote the letter the same day.”
“Thomas, I promise you that the speed of it does not improve the picture in the smallest degree.”
Philip cleared his throat, which was the sound he made when he wished to enter something factual into a conversation that had begun to run hot.
“The position itself is sound,” he offered, crossing one ankle over the other.
“An apprenticeship under a senior cook, full wages, professional terms throughout. Made by anyone other than you, for anyone other than her, it would pass entirely without remark.”
“But it was made by him,” Louisa said, “for her, and there is not a soul in this household confused about the reason.”
“I observe only that the structure is defensible, which is completely different from saying it is innocent.”
“The structure is a fig leaf, Philip, and you know it as well as I do.”
Philip inclined his head with the small smile of a man argued neatly into a corner who found he did not mind the corner.
“I do know it, since I am bound to you in matrimonial wedlock, and very little escapes my notice in that condition. I have merely learned which of my observations are best saved for the carriage ride home.”
“And the gravelled lane?” Louisa pressed, turning back to her brother with the relentlessness of an advocate presenting each exhibit in its order.
“And the French vocabulary in a hand that matches no one under this roof but the single person here who reads French? And the footman you turned out last week for laughing when the girl dropped a tray of sugar moulds?”
“His conduct was inappropriate.”
“He laughed, Thomas. People laugh. You stripped a man of his livelihood because he made a sound in the neighbourhood of a woman you are at great pains to pretend you have not noticed, and I must tell you truthfully that your looks did not escape the notice of a single soul under this roof; and what is whispered in this house, the entire county will possess by Michaelmas.”
Thomas said nothing, because the catalogue she had just laid before him was the very one he had drawn up against himself in the privacy of his study, and hearing it in the mouth of someone who held him dearly in her highest affections, did not soften it. It only sharpened it.
“She is not protected by rank,” Louisa went on, and her voice changed, the prosecutor’s edge falling away into something quieter and more careful.
“Jane Rennet is a baker’s daughter in your kitchen.
If your regard for her becomes visible, and it is already visible, she will suffer for it long before you do.
You are a duke, Thomas. The worst that can befall you is embarrassment.
The worst that can befall her is ruin, and the distance between those two words is the whole of my argument. ”
“I understand you,” Thomas said.
“Do you? Truly? Because you have the look of a man understanding a thing with his head while another part of him has stopped listening altogether.”
“I understand you,” he said again, “and I am not certain it will change what I do, and I would rather tell you that honestly than promise you a thing we both know I may not keep.”
That stopped her, briefly, in a way his arguments rarely did.
“For what it is worth, Thomas,” Philip said, into the pause, “and I am aware it may be worth very little, I once wanted a woman whose situation made the wanting a great inconvenience to everyone concerned, including myself.” He glanced at his wife with the ghost of a smile.
“I wedded her in the end, and I have never been argued into a corner so regularly or so happily since. I do not say your case is mine. I say only that I am the last man in this room entitled to tell you that success is beyond your reach.”
“You are not helping, Philip,” Louisa said.
“I am helping a little. I am merely helping him rather than you, which is a novelty for us all.” He settled back, his expression holding no judgement and a good deal of recognition.
“Then I will not ask you to promise,” Louisa said at last. “I will only ask you to be careful with her. Not because she is fragile, for everything Mrs. Croft writes says she is nothing of the kind, but because she has far less room to recover from a mistake than you have, and the people who will judge her for your attention are not the same people who will ever dare to judge you.”
Thomas nodded. She kissed his cheek again, more gently this time, and Philip shook his hand, and the two of them went up to dress for dinner.
He stood alone in the drawing room and looked at the lane through the glass and understood that his sister’s warning was correct and proportionate and wise in every particular, and that he was not going to be able to pay heed to it.
***
The stillroom sat at the back of the kitchen corridor, a small place lined with stone shelves and smelling of vinegar and fruit and the heavy sweetness of preserves long on the boil.
Thomas had no business in it. The stillroom was Mrs. Vale’s ground, and entering it without purpose was the household’s nearest equivalent to trespass.