Chapter 2
“Your Grace, the horses cannot be made to outrun four years of absence. They have tried. I have watched them try since Dover.”
Beale said it from the opposite seat without looking up from the strap he was mending, in the tone of a man who had earned the right to say far worse and chosen this instead.
He had been Sergeant Beale at Salamanca and was something less easily named now, valet and groom and keeper of the duke’s worse impulses, and he was the only person in England who still spoke to Cole as though the title were a coat he might be persuaded to take off indoors.
“I am not trying to outrun anything,” Cole said.
“No, Your Grace. You are merely sitting very forward in your seat, as a man sits when he wishes the road would hurry.”
Cole sat back, and Beale returned to his strap, satisfied, while the carriage went on swaying through the gold end of the afternoon, past hedgerows heavy with the last of the blackberries, past fields shorn to stubble and waiting for the plough.
England in September was something he had carried in his head through four winters and most of a fifth, and the real country kept failing to match the carried one, kept being smaller and softer and more indifferent to his return than the one he had defended in his imagination.
They had stopped near Maidenhead to change horses, and the landlord had come out wiping his hands and begun, “Lord Cole, we heard,” and then gone scarlet and corrected himself, “Your Grace, forgive me, Your Grace,” and bowed so low Cole had wanted to take him by the elbow and set him upright.
It happened at every stage. The name went ahead of him down the post road like a herald, and the herald was a stranger, and the stranger wore his face.
He had not gone home first.
His mother would have an opinion about that, and the opinion would be correct in every point of form and wrong in the only way that mattered.
A duke newly returned ought to present himself at the Abbey, receive his people, observe the proper order of things.
Cole had ordered the coachman to Carrow House instead, before he could talk himself into prudence.
The Abbey was a duty and Carrow House was the reason he had survived to perform any duty at all, and a man ought to know the difference between what he owed and what he wanted, even when the world had arranged the two to look the same.
The lane to Carrow House climbed between two stands of beech, and the sight of it did something to his chest he had not braced for.
He had stood with her at the top of that lane once.
Summer, the year before he left, the air thick with cut grass.
Melody two-and-twenty with a book held against her hip the way other women held a fan, telling him, with the grave courtesy she used only when she meant to be insulting, that he read military histories because he enjoyed being agreed with by deceased men.
Living men, she had said, had the inconvenient habit of answering back.
He had laughed then, and could still hear precisely how, the surprised bark of it, the way she had pretended not to be pleased and been pleased.
He found himself smiling at the beech trees as a gentle breeze wafted through his dark brown hair.
His countenance, bronzed from his long months upon the battlefield, was softened by the expression, and his piercing, steel-blue eyes shone.
Then, he stopped; for the smile belonged to a man who had not yet learned what waited at the bottom of the lane.
He had rehearsed any number of things on the crossing.
Apologies for the years, and for the silence, though the silence had not been his.
An account of Henry, if she wished one, and of what the title had cost and failed to buy.
He had rehearsed the careful, unhurried way he would say that nothing had changed, that he had held to every word, that he had come the moment duty released its grip on him.
He had not rehearsed a single syllable for the possibility that she might receive him as a stranger, because in none of the long imagined versions had it occurred to him that she would want to.
“We are arrived, Your Grace,” said Beale, gently, which was how Cole understood that he had gone still.
Lady Carrow met him in the hall, and the meeting nearly undid his composure before he had set down his hat.
She had aged more than four years’ worth.
She took both his hands in hers and could not speak for a moment, and when she did it was only his name, the wrong one, “Lord Cole,” and then, flustered, “forgive me, Your Grace, oh, we are so very,” and the sentence went nowhere and did not need to.
He pressed her hands, and whatever the rest of this house held for him, this much was real.
Sir Marcus was another matter.
He stood by the cold hearth with his hands behind his back and his chin at an angle that cost him something to maintain, a baronet receiving a duke in a room whose carpet had been turned to hide the wear, and he bowed with perfect correctness and not one degree more.
“Greenstone,” he said. “You are welcome to this house.”
The flatness of it was its own kind of speech.
Cole had been Lord Cole the last time he stood here, a younger son who corrected the man’s sums and ate his mutton and was understood, by everyone including Sir Marcus, to be courting his daughter.
Now he was Greenstone, welcome to the house, and the welcome had a wall built into it.
“Sir Marcus. I am glad to find you well.”
“We manage.” A pause that did several things at once. “You will forgive the cold grate. We do not light fires before October in this house. Economy is a habit, and habits keep one warm in their own fashion.”
“I remember the room as a warm one regardless.”
“You remember it as a younger man’s. Rooms change with the company that fills them.” His chin stayed at its careful angle. “Melody will be down directly. She was not certain you would come today. She was not, I think, certain you would come at all.”
She came down, in the end, when the tea had been brought and Lady Carrow had asked three times whether his journey had been very tiring and he had said three times that it had not.
He heard the step on the stair and was on his feet before he had decided to stand, and then she was in the doorway, and the carried version failed again, because she was not the girl from the top of the lane and he had been fool enough to half expect her.
She was seven and twenty and she wore it well and entirely without softness.
There was a stillness to her now that the younger woman had not owned, a composure held the way one holds a full glass across a crowded room, and she crossed to a chair near the window and arranged herself in it before she so much as looked at him.
He bowed. “Miss Carrow.”
“Your Grace.” She curtsied to the precise depth her father had bowed, and the title came out of her smooth and cool and final, a stone set into a wall.
He should have left it there. He had told himself on the whole length of the lane that he would be patient and that he would not presume, that he would let her set the pace and meet it. The resolution lasted until he was looking at her.
“Melody,” he said.
Something crossed her countenance and then it was gone. “I do not believe,” she said, “that we are on such terms, Your Grace.”
“We were.”
“A great many things were.”
Lady Carrow began to pour, and her hand was unsteady, and Melody rose at once and took the pot from her with a quiet “let me, Mama,” and sat again with it, and began to pour herself.
The stream wavered, the cup filling unevenly.
Cole watched her wrist and the small fight she was having with it and said nothing for as long as he could manage, which was not very long.
“You need not pour, if your hand is tired,” he said.
“My hand is perfectly steady.”
He looked at the tea, which had slopped into the saucer. “So I see.”
Her eyes came up to his then, and there was a flash in them he remembered, the old quickness, except that it had something underneath it now that had not been there before, something that had been put there in his absence and that he did not yet have the right to ask about.
She set the pot down with great care. She did not like being seen.
That much he understood, and understood too that the seeing was itself the offence, that a man who had been gone four years and more had not earned the intimacy of noticing how she held her hands.
“You take an interest in my teapot, Your Grace,” she said. “I am flattered. I had not thought dukes attended to such small domestic matters.”
“I attend to the small things. It is a habit of soldiering. One learns they are generally the ones that destroy you.”
“How fortunate that you survived them all.”
“Fortune had less to do with it than I should like. Mostly it was a great deal of being told what to do by sergeants.” He set his cup down untouched. “You used to ask me about the campaigns. You wanted the maps. You said the newspapers reported only the parts that flattered the generals.”
“I was younger then. I had not yet learned how little the parts that flatter the generals cost the people who believe them.”
“And now you have learned it.”
“Now I read the last page first, Your Grace, and save myself the disappointment of the middle.”
“Melody.” He heard the wrongness of the name a beat too late, the second time he had reached for it and the second time it had landed like a hand on a closed door. “Miss Carrow. I came because I owed my first call to this house. Before the Abbey. Before anything.”
“How dutiful of you.” She handed him his cup, and their fingers did not come near each other, and the avoidance was so neat it had plainly been practised. “We must all be grateful the war ended before the obligation became entirely inconvenient.”
The bitterness in it stopped him. He had come prepared for anger, had braced for grief, and had built himself to withstand reproach for the years and the lateness and the long quiet.
He had not built himself for contempt, for the cool contempt a person reserves for someone they have decided is beneath their hurt, and it took him a moment to understand that she was not angry at a man who had stayed away too long.
She was scornful of a man she believed had not wanted to come at all.
“You speak as though I chose the silence,” he said.
“I speak as though there was a silence. The choosing is your own affair.”
“I wrote to you.”
Her cup stopped halfway to the saucer.
“From the Peninsula,” he said. “From Spain, from Portugal, from a tent in the rain with my hands too cold to hold the quill. After Henry. After Waterloo. I wrote to you more often than I wrote to my own mother.”
“Then your mother and I have something in common, for I received as little as she could have wished.”
“You received nothing?”
“I received the pleasure of being asked, for four years, whether I had heard from you. I received the kindness of strangers who lowered their voices when I entered a room. I received a great deal, Your Grace. None of it in your hand.”
“That is not possible. Did you receive nothing at all? In four years and more, was there never one letter, never a line?”
For a moment the whole arrangement of her composure trembled, the way the surface of water trembles before it is broken, and he saw that the question had reached something, that whatever she had decided about him sat on top of a question of her own that she had never been able to answer.
“Now,” said Sir Marcus, “you must tell us of the crossing. Was the sea kind? My wife frets terribly about the Channel. She has convinced herself the whole of it is storms.”
It was done well. It was done by a man who had spent a lifetime steering wives and creditors and difficult guests away from the edges of things, and the question dropped neatly over the other question and smothered it, and Lady Carrow took it up with relief, and Melody’s face closed again like a fan folding, and the moment was gone past recovering.
Cole answered about the sea. He said it had been calm.
He remembered not a word of the crossing, and still he said it had been calm, and Lady Carrow was pleased, and the talk moved on to the safe country of weather and roads and the comfort of the inns.
Beneath it the unasked question lay where it had fallen and went on bleeding quietly into the carpet that had been turned to hide its wear.
He stayed the correct quarter of an hour and not a minute past it.
He spoke of the parish and the harvest and a wounded sergeant’s family he meant to see settled, and Sir Marcus thawed by a degree over the practical matters, and Lady Carrow watched him with a hope so utterly undisguised, it was painful to behold, and Melody said almost nothing and looked out of the window.
Twice he caught her thumb pressing into the seam of her glove, hard, a small private violence, and twice he made himself look away.
When he rose to go she rose with him, because the forms required it, and walked with her parents to see him to the hall. Beale had the carriage round. The light had gone copper across the gravel.
“I hope,” Melody said, as he took up his hat, “that Greenstone finds Your Grace everything you deserve.”
It was beautifully said. It was the sort of thing one might embroider and hang on a wall.
He turned it over and found the farewell folded inside it, neat as a letter sealed and addressed to someone leaving forever, and the discovery arrived in him with a cold he had not expected, colder than the Channel he claimed to remember.
“Miss Carrow,” he said, and bowed, because there was nothing else the moment would hold.
He climbed into the carriage. Beale shut the door and swung up, and the horses leaned into the traces, and Carrow House began to slide backward into its beeches.
Cole did not look at the road. He looked at the window of the front room, where a curtain had been let fall, and he sat very forward in his seat, forward as a man sits when something is getting away from him, and turned the sentence over once more in the failing light.
He had crossed an ocean and four years certain of one thing above all others, that whatever else had broken, she had been waiting.
For the first time it occurred to him, in the plain unhurried way that the worst things occur to a man, that she might have stopped a long time ago.