Chapter Twenty #2
“I am a great deal louder than you are, which is not the same as calmer, though it carries better across a crowded room.” Her hand was steady on his sleeve, and beneath the fabric she could feel the tension in his arm, the held tightness of a man keeping himself together through discipline rather than ease.
“You are under no obligation to do this tonight. We might easily dine upon Margaret’s bread, and leave the county to strangle itself with its own inquisitiveness. ”
“I have been silent for a long time, Jane. I find I have a great deal saved up, and I would rather spend it here, where it will do some good, than carry it home unspent again.”
The hall was crowded to excess. Every family of consequence within twenty miles had found a reason to attend the Michaelmas assembly, and the reasons had nothing to do with the season.
The reasons were standing in the doorway in a dark blue coat and the composure of a man about to do the most frightening thing he had attempted since the afternoon his brother had passed.
Piers Garrick was seated near the centre of the hall, at a table with his mother and a cousin whose name Jane did not know. His expression, when he saw her enter, performed the pleasant rearrangement she had come to associate with his own private brand of cruelty.
“He is expecting me to look ashamed,” she said under her breath.
“Then he will have a tedious evening.” Thomas did not look at Piers. “Do not give him your attention. He has been living on it for months, and I should like him to go hungry.”
Jane allowed her gaze to rest on Piers exactly long enough to tell him she saw him and was not afraid, and then she looked away and gave her attention instead to a man of middling height near the back wall, seated between two strangers, his careful concern never quite reaching his eyes and his whole focus fixed on Thomas like a creditor watching a debtor cross thin ice.
“The man by the back wall,” she said. “That is your cousin. I have never met him, but you described him so exactly that I should know him in the dark.”
“That is Hubert. Do not let him near you tonight, whatever happens. He is at his most dangerous when he is most concerned, and he has arranged his face into a great deal of concern this evening.”
The supper was served, with Margaret’s bread on every table and Mrs. Vale’s pastry on every plate, the formal cakes holding the head table with the quiet authority of objects that knew their own worth.
Jane slipped back to the service entrance, where Margaret stood with flour still faintly visible at her cuffs, having adjusted the bread placement until ten minutes before the doors opened.
“Look at them,” Jane murmured. “They have stopped talking to taste. There is no surer compliment in the world, and not one of them means to be paying it.”
“The woman in the green silk has had three slices and is eyeing a fourth as though it were a moral failing,” Margaret said, her eyes never leaving the room.
“And the colonel has given up pretending he does not want more. They came here tonight to look down on us, Jane, and they are sitting in rows with their mouths full of our bread, unable to say a single unkind thing while they chew.”
“You ought to sit and enjoy it. You have done your part better than anyone in this hall could have.”
“I will sit when the last of them has reached for seconds, and not a moment before. I have waited twenty-three years to watch this county eat our work and run out of cruelties with their mouths too full to speak them.” Margaret’s chin did not lower. “I do not mean to spend that moment in a chair.”
Mrs. Vale appeared at Margaret’s other shoulder, surveying the room with the flat assessing eye she usually reserved for an oven that might or might not be holding its heat.
“The pastry is going faster than the bread, which I had not predicted and do not entirely approve of, since the bread is the better work and they are too ignorant to know it.” She allowed herself one brief second of satisfaction.
“Still. I have fed grander rooms than this and seen less honest eating. Your family may hold its head up, Miss Margaret, and so, for that matter, may my kitchen.”
Jane observed the room a moment longer with her, and the satisfaction of it settled into her bones, because the looks that passed from plate to plate to the small card bearing the Rennet name had nothing of condescension left in it.
It had turned, somewhere between the first slice and the third, into respect.
The meal ended. The tables were cleared. The room settled into the restlessness of an assembly that knew the formal part of the evening approached and did not know what it would contain.
Thomas rose to his feet.
The room went quiet at once, two hundred people ceasing to talk in the same instant, because the Duke of Aldermere had risen from his chair and had not stood to address a public gathering in living county memory.
He led Jane to the front with him rather than leaving her behind the formality of a duke’s address, his hand closing around hers as they walked, deliberate and visible to every soul in the hall, and when he turned to face the room he held to her with the grip of a man about to jump from a high place who was keeping fast to the one person he trusted to catch him.
“There has been talk,” Thomas said, and his voice carried across the silent hall with the clarity that comes from years of saying very little, “concerning my wife, her family, and the circumstances under which she entered my household.” He paused, and the pause was his natural rhythm rather than hesitation, the rhythm of a man who placed each word with the care of someone who understood what careless ones could cost. “This ends tonight.”
Some two hundred people drew breath as one; it was the sound of a multitude that had long waited in anticipation, and had only now learned the truth.
“Six months ago, Miss Jane Rennet, as she then was, delivered baked goods to this house on behalf of her family’s business.
She was offered an apprenticeship in my kitchen on the strength of her skill, her character, and the quality of her work, and that apprenticeship was professional, properly supervised, and conducted with the full knowledge and consent of her family.
” He released Jane’s hand, reached into his coat, and withdrew the sheaf of papers Philip had assembled, laying them on the table before him with the precision of a man who had been building toward this for months.
“Since that day, my wife’s family has been subjected to a campaign of harassment, of coercion, and of criminal sabotage, directed by Mr. Piers Garrick of Garrick House, financed by my cousin, Mr. Hubert Bennister, and designed to discredit my matrimony and to destroy my wife’s family’s livelihood. ”
The room shifted audibly, a collective intake of breath and a rustling of fabric, the sound of a crowd of people recalculating their understanding of the past six months.
Piers Garrick’s pleasant expression faltered, the smooth mask cracking at the edges, the first real consequence he had faced since the campaign began.
“I will show you what I mean, since I am told this county prefers evidence to rumour, whatever its recent conduct might suggest.” Thomas lifted the first item, and the brass stag’s head caught the lantern light.
“This button was found in the ashes of the Rennet bakery flue, where a fire was deliberately set. It belongs to a livery worn by exactly one household in this district, and I will leave you the small entertainment of recalling whose.”
He set it down and lifted a folded statement.
“This is the sworn account of a stable boy, who will tell you, as he has already told a magistrate, who paid him and what exactly he was set to do.” Thomas read the passage aloud, and the room listened with the held attention of people hearing something they would repeat for years.
“And this is the account of a labourer, concerning dampened flour, a blocked vent, and lamp oil applied to the wadding in the flue so that a small fire might be made to look an accident. I will not dress these facts in feeling, for they do not require it, and a man who needs to shout his evidence has generally none worth hearing.”
The calm was the weapon. Every person in the room understood that a man who spoke this quietly about arson held evidence that would survive any challenge.
“And this,” he said, raising a single sheet, “is a letter from Garrick House to the holder of the bakery’s lease, citing concerns for the reputation of the property.” He read the phrase aloud, and it sat in the silent hall with the precision of a knife laid on a table.
Piers stood. “Your Grace, this is hardly the place for such an extraordinary recitation.”
“It is precisely the place.” Thomas’s voice did not rise, and the not-rising was devastating in a room silent enough that a whisper would have carried.
“You chose public falsehood, Mr. Garrick.
“You spread your slanders in the drawing-room. You offered insults upon the public highway. You set fire to a bakery that stood in full view of the village road. You chose a public theater for your misdeeds, and upon that very stage you shall receive your chastisement.”
“These are inventions,” Piers tried, and his voice did not carry the way Thomas’s did, because a voice accustomed to murmuring in drawing rooms has no practice filling a hall.
“A button in an ashpit and the word of a paid stable boy. Any gentleman of this company could be ruined on such, such scraps.”
“Then any gentleman of this company is welcome to examine the scraps,” Thomas said, without heat, gesturing to the papers on the table.
“They are here. Read them. I have found that scraps, laid in their proper order, make a remarkably complete picture, and that the men most eager to call them scraps are generally the men in the picture.”