Chapter 3
“Miss Carrow. How brave of you to come.”
Mrs Greer said it from behind a half-packed hamper, a length of grey flannel folded over her arm, and she said it warmly, the way one commends a child for mastering their tears during a painful trial.
“It required no bravery at all,” Melody said. “Only a bonnet, and I happened to own one.”
The parish room behind the church had been given over for the morning to the business of charity.
Three long tables ran the length of it, heaped with flannel and worsted and tea twisted into paper screws, and a dozen women of the neighbourhood moved among them packing baskets for the soldiers’ families and the poorer tenants, now that the war was done and the men were coming home in the broken pieces the war returned them in.
It was good work, and Melody had always thought it good work, and she had come partly because her mother had pressed her hand at breakfast and said, with terrible gentleness, that it would do her good to be among people, and partly because to stay away would have told the neighbourhood exactly what staying away meant.
She took up a stack of folded blankets and began counting the stitches along the hem of the topmost one, quietly, behind her eyes, the way she counted most things within reach.
It steadied her, the counting, for the room was all voices and a roomful of voices left her short of breath, and a hem she could always find.
“We were speaking of His Grace,” said Lady Eversley.
She was a tall woman, the Marchioness, with a long pale face and the unhurried manner of a person who had never in her life waited for anything she wanted.
She kept her eyes on the flannel while she spoke, smoothing it, never once turning them on Melody, as though Melody were a draught from a badly hung door that one acknowledged only by adjusting one’s shawl.
“His Grace has been generous to the parish already,” Lady Eversley went on.
“The Hatcher family, I understand. The boy who lost his foot at Toulouse. A half pay for his services, and the cottage put right. It speaks well of him. A man in his position has so many calls upon him now. London will want him by the spring, and London is not patient.”
“London never is,” said Cassandra. She had come up on Melody’s other side with a basket balanced on her hip, lovely and industrious, the very portrait of a great lady stooping graciously to good works.
“It is the great cruelty of rank, I have always thought. A man may begin his life as anything he wishes, but the title catches up with him, and then he must put away the things that suited the smaller man he was. It is not unkind of him. It is simply arithmetic.”
“I admire ladies who make peace with altered expectations,” Lady Eversley said, to the flannel. “It shows such strength of character.”
“I find strength is most admired,” Melody said, “by those who have no intention of ever needing it.”
Cassandra laughed, low and pleased. “You are too quick for us, Miss Carrow. You always were. I have said to Mama a dozen times, there is no one in the county half so clever, and what a pity cleverness is not a thing one can settle a girl with. A house, a name, a competence, those one can settle. Cleverness one must simply enjoy on its own.”
“You speak of me as though I were a difficult parcel the post could not deliver.”
“I speak of you as a friend.” Cassandra laid a length of worsted into her basket, smoothing it with two fingers.
“Or near enough. We were girls together, were we not, in a manner of speaking. I remember when everyone said you would do very well. It is only that the world moves, Miss Carrow, and a wise woman moves with it rather than standing in the road insisting the carriage stop.”
“And an unwise one?”
“An unwise one waits. I have always thought waiting the saddest of the occupations. It asks so much and promises nothing, and it is so very hard to give up once one has begun.”
The stitches were small and even and there were a hundred of them.
Melody had reached forty before she trusted herself to answer, and she kept her thumb pressed hard into the seam of her glove where the table hid her hand, and she made her voice the smooth, light, unbothered thing she had spent four years learning to make it.
“Then I am fortunate,” she said. “Most women must wait for a house to discover whether they can bear their own company. I have had the matter settled early and cheaply.”
“Miss Carrow.”
She had not heard him come in. He stood at the door of the parish room with his hat in his hand and the rain just beginning to spot the shoulders of his coat, and he had plainly been there long enough.
His eyes went from Cassandra to Lady Eversley to the basket on Cassandra’s hip and then to Melody’s face, and whatever he read there made the line of his mouth change.
“Your Grace,” said Lady Eversley, and the whole table inclined.
“Lady Eversley. Lady Cassandra.” He bowed, correct to the inch, and then, as though it were the most natural redirection in the world, “You must forgive me. I have a tedious matter of parish accounts that wants settling before I ride out, and I require Miss Carrow’s opinion on it.”
A small silence opened in the room.
“A parish matter, Your Grace?” Cassandra’s brows rose a delicate degree. “Surely the vicar can attend to the matter.”
“The vicar is an excellent man who cannot add. I have learned to apply where the sense is, rather than where the office is.” He said it pleasantly, almost idly, and it took a half-second for the edge of it to surface, the suggestion, gentle as a glove laid on a table, that sense and decoration did not always keep the same company.
“Miss Carrow has a head for figures that has embarrassed better men than the vicar. If you can spare her.”
Cassandra could hardly say she could not. To object would be to insist that Miss Carrow’s morning was too valuable for the duke’s accounts, and no one in the room believed Miss Carrow’s morning was valuable at all, which was rather the trap of it.
“By all means,” she said. “We would not keep her from anything so important.”
He drew Melody to a smaller table near the window where the parish ledger lay open, and held her chair, and sat across from her, and only when the room had returned to its packing and its murmur did she let herself look at him properly.
“You need not rescue me,” she said, low.
“I did not rescue you. I consulted you.”
“With remarkable timing.”
“I have always had a gift for arriving where I am inconvenient. You used to say so.” He turned the ledger towards her. “This part, at least, is true. The relief fund will not balance and I cannot find where it goes wrong. Beale insists it is the candles. I suspect the coal.”
She looked down at the columns out of pure reflex, and the figures took her the way figures always took her, cleanly, like cold water on a hot day, and her breath came easier the moment her mind had something with edges to hold.
“It is neither,” she said after a moment. “It is here. Someone has entered the Michaelmas quarter twice and the midsummer not at all. Your candles are blameless. Your clerk cannot read his own sevens.”
“Show me.”
She showed him the place on the page. He bent over it beside her, near enough that she could smell the rain on his coat and the clean ordinary scent of him underneath it.
She kept her eyes on the ledger and her finger on the offending seven and pretended, with everything she had, that the nearness was a thing happening in some other room to some other woman.
“You used to correct my sums,” he said quietly. “On the long table at the Abbey, when Henry’s tutor set us problems to keep us out of the way. You were merciless. You marked my errors in a hand half the size of mine, so I should feel the smallness of them.”
“I did not correct your sums,” Melody said. “Your sums were generally adequate. I corrected your arrogance.”
“I have often thought the two were written in the same hand.”
“They were not. Your arrogance was much larger and took up the whole margin.” She turned the ledger a quarter-inch to catch the grey window light.
“You always wanted to be right before you had finished being careful. It is a failing in a boy and a catastrophe in a general, and I have spent a number of years half expecting to read your name in the casualty lists under the heading of men who were certain.”
“And were you sorry not to find it there?”
The question came lightly, but it was not a light question, and she did not look up.
She could not, just then, look up, because there was a danger in the small dry pleasure of being talked to like this, like a person whose opinion had weight, and she had built her composure out of being talked at and talked about and not, for a very long time, talked to.
“I did not read the lists,” she said, which was a falsehood, and they both let it be one. “The midsummer quarter. If your clerk will write it in legibly, the fund balances and the Hatchers have their coal. There. You did not require me at all. You required a man who can read his own writing.”
“I required exactly what I asked for.” He closed the ledger. “Thank you, Miss Carrow.”
The rain settled it before she could answer.
It came against the high windows all at once, hard, a grey roar of it, and through the streaming glass the lane beyond the churchyard had already begun to shine and run, the water finding the ruts and filling them.
The women began gathering shawls and calling for carriages.
Outside, the gig and the few carriages that had brought them stood in a sodden line, and the drivers were getting the horses turned in the narrow space, which would take time.
Melody found her mother near the door, flushed and anxious, being handed up into the Carrow carriage by the maid, who had stayed back to manage Lady Carrow’s bad knee on the wet step and could not be in two places.
“Go, Sarah, see her settled,” Melody said. “I will wait under the porch. It is three steps.”
It was three steps, and the duke crossed them with her.
The alternative was to let her stand alone in the driving rain while half the county watched from their carriage windows, and that he would not do.
She understood that he would not do it, and resented the gallantry, and was grateful for it in roughly equal measure.
The church porch was deep and old and dry, stone worn shallow by three hundred years of christenings and burials, and it held them out of the worst of the wet with a yard of decent air between them and the lych-gate in full view of the lane. Propriety was satisfied, and nothing else was.
Thunder broke directly overhead, a flat enormous crack that came up through the stone.
She started involuntarily, quite unable to check the impulse in time, a small hard jolt through the shoulders, and her hand closed on the strings of her reticule, and she despised the sound, and detested yet more that he had witnessed her aversion to it.
“You used to count,” he said. “Between the flash and the sound. You told me once it gave the storm a size, and a form with a size could be argued with.”
“I was young.”
“You were frightened.”
“I was calculating distance. There is a difference. One is a weakness and the other is natural philosophy.”
“Of course.” His mouth did the thing it had always done, the small grave amusement that was worse than laughing because one could not call it out. “Terror by arithmetic. Forgive me. I had forgotten the rigour of your methods.”
She almost smiled, and turned her face to the rain so he should not see how near it came.
The counting started despite her, out of an old habit her body remembered better than her pride did, one, and two, and three.
On four the thunder came again, softer, going away over the hills, and the storm had a size, and the size could be borne.
“Four miles,” she said. “It is leaving.”
“You see. Argued with.” He was quiet a moment, watching the rain come off the porch roof in a bright unbroken sheet.
“I am sorry for a great many things, Miss Carrow. I had thought to begin apologising in some order, but I find the order eludes me. Perhaps I might simply apologise as the occasions present themselves.”
“That sounds a tedious arrangement for us both.”
“It is the only honest one I have been able to devise. A man who apologises all at once is generally apologising for the wrong things, in my experience. He chooses the grand crimes and overlooks the small ones, and it is nearly always the small ones that did the damage.”
“And which are you guilty of? The grand or the small?”
“I begin to suspect both. I had assumed only the grand, which was its own kind of arrogance, as you would no doubt tell me.” He looked at her then, plainly, without the shield of his dryness. “You need not answer. I did not bring you under a church roof to extract a verdict from you in the rain.”
“You need not apologise for the rain, in any case. Even Your Grace cannot have arranged it.”
“No. Though I confess I am not entirely sorry it came.”
She did not answer that. The carriage came round at last, the maid’s face anxious at the window.
He handed Melody down the three streaming steps with a hand beneath her elbow, and then his gloved hand closed briefly over her gloved fingers as she gained the door, steadying her against the wet stone.
The touch lasted no longer than such a touch should and somehow a half-second longer than that, and the warmth of it came through two layers of kid as though there had been none at all.
She got herself into the carriage. She did not look back at him, which cost her something she was careful not to count.
But she looked, once, through the rain-blurred glass as they pulled away, and saw him standing bareheaded on the church step with the water darkening his shoulders and his hat forgotten in his hand.
And beyond him, at the window of the Eversley carriage, drawn up close under the yew, Lady Cassandra Ridge sat watching the porch with a small still attention that had nothing graceful in it at all.