Chapter 4
“You went to the Carrows before you came home.”
The Dowager Duchess of Greenstone said it without turning from the window, where she stood with her back to the room and her hands folded at the small of her waist, watching the last light go off the park.
She had been waiting for him in her drawing room.
She had dressed for it. A woman did not wear the grey silk and the good lace to sit alone of an evening, and Cole understood, crossing the threshold, that he had been summoned to a scene she had been composing since the moment the news of the parish meeting reached her.
“I did,” he said.
“Before the Abbey. Before your own mother. Before the steward, the tenants, the dozen people who have held this estate together with their two hands while you were abroad playing at soldiers.” She turned from the window then, and the years had not softened her so much as refined her, the way frost refines a landscape, taking away everything not essential to the cold.
“And then, not content with the insult of it, you contrived to single the girl out in front of half the county at a charity meeting. Over parish accounts. Cole, I have defended a great many of your follies. I find I have run short of the materials for this one.”
“It was not a folly. The accounts genuinely would not balance.”
“Do not be clever with me. You have not the standing for it any longer. Clever was permitted to Lord Cole. It is unbecoming in a duke.”
He came further into the room and did not sit, because to sit would be to settle in for the length of a thing he meant to keep short.
The fire had been lit against the September chill, and it threw its uneven light across the portraits, his father, his grandfather, Henry.
They had hung Henry while Cole was still abroad.
Better than a year in the ground and the portrait long since up, and the painter had given him a soldier’s straightness he had never quite owned in life, and Cole found he could not look at it for very long.
“You made a promise once,” the Dowager said.
“I am aware. You were a boy of five-and-twenty with a younger son’s freedom and a younger son’s prospects, and you formed an attachment to a baronet’s daughter with a clever tongue and four thousand pounds, and at the time I said nothing, because at the time it signified nothing.
A second son may please himself. That is the whole compensation of being second.
” She let the words sit. “You were Lord Cole when you made that promise.”
“I was not less honourable because I had fewer names.”
“You were less consequential. It is a thing the world is forever mistaking for honour, and you will find the world is the thing you must now live inside.” She moved to the fire. “You are Greenstone now.”
“Then Greenstone will have to learn to keep my word.”
It stopped her for a moment. Something crossed the fine cold face, surprise perhaps, or the memory of having once been spoken to like that by his father, and then it was gone and she was herself again.
“You speak as though the title were a coat you might wear or not as the weather suited. It is not. It is the whole of what you are now, and it has obligations that do not care in the smallest degree what you promised a girl in a garden before the war. There is a way these things are done. A man in your position looks where the great families look. Lady Cassandra Ridge is handsome, she is bred to it, her father’s interest in the Lords would be worth more to this house than four thousand pounds and a quick tongue.
The Eversleys would not have to think twice.
You would be doing the expected thing, and the expected thing, Cole, is a kind of safety you have never valued because you have never had to. ”
“You have given this no little thought.”
“One of us had to. You were occupied being shot at.” She took up the poker and set a fallen coal back among its fellows, an economy of motion that had never in her life been wasted.
“I will tell you what I have observed of soldiers home from a war, Cole, since you will not hear it from anyone gentler. They mistake having survived for having earned something. They come back to a country that managed without them and they cannot forgive it, and so they go looking for the one thing that will prove the years meant what they needed them to mean. You have fixed on the girl because she is the part of your old life the war did not touch. You want her to have stood still so that you may believe you have not changed. It is very human. It is also a poor reason to disorder a dukedom.”
“You are wrong about why.”
“Am I? You have been home four days.”
“I have been certain of her for considerably longer than four days. The war did not give me that. It very nearly took it, along with a good deal else, and it did not, and I have come home to find that the only thing that survived intact is the thing you would have me give up for a marquess’s votes.
” He held her eye. “You may call that the sentiment of a tired soldier if it comforts you. It will not change what I mean to do.”
“And what is it you mean to do? Enter into a matrimony where you please and let the estate make its own arrangements? Your father would never have indulged the notion for an instant.”
“My father is not here either. I am beginning to find the company of the absent rather crowded in this house.”
“Melody Carrow is not a country attachment to be weighed against a marquess’s interest in the Lords.”
“That is precisely what she is.”
“She was never merely anything.” He heard his own voice go flat and hard, the parade-ground voice, and made himself bring it down.
“You did not know her. You never troubled to. You saw four thousand pounds and a quick tongue, as you say, and you stopped looking. So you never learned that she is the most exact mind I have met in or out of a uniform, which she counts under her breath when she is frightened, that she has spent four years being pitied by people not fit to carry her gloves. You may tell me what the title requires. You may not tell me what she is. You forfeited the standing for that when you declined to find out.”
The Dowager regarded him with the long patience of a woman who had heard younger men make speeches before and watched the speeches come to nothing.
“How loyal,” she said. “Henry would have understood what the title required of him. He never confused what he wanted with what was owed. It was his great gift.”
“Henry also never had to. He was born to it. He had thirty years to make his peace with the thing while I was off learning to be useful in the only way a second son is permitted. You praise him for a serenity he was handed in the cradle and ask me to match it in an afternoon.”
“I ask you to honour it.”
“I buried him by proxy, madam. I had a letter three months after the fact, in a tent outside Bayonne, telling me my brother was deceased and I was a duke, and I read it twice and went out and did my duty because there was a battle the next morning and duty was the only thing on offer. Do not instruct me on honouring Henry. I have been honouring Henry since before you knew the title had changed hands.”
The thing she did with Henry was always the same.
She set him on the table between them like a sum already worked, the right answer, the better son, and dared Cole to argue with arithmetic.
The worst of it was that it was not even false.
Henry had been the steadier of them, had wanted the right things in the right order, and had never once, so far as anyone knew, lain awake wanting a thing he was not permitted.
Cole resented him for it, resented a man more than a year deceased who had asked for none of this and would have done it better.
Then he despised himself for the resentment, which was the genuine accomplishment of the manoeuvre that she could make him small in his own estimation merely by praising the brother he had buried in his absence.
“Henry is not here to understand anything,” Cole said. “I am. It is a poor exchange and the only one on offer.”
He should have left it there. Soldiering had taught him when a position could not be held, and this one could not, and the wise course was to withdraw in good order and choose better ground.
But there was a thing he had carried up the lane from Carrow House and into this room, and he could not put it down.
“I have a question, and I want a plain answer to it. When Henry passed away, the title and all its business came through this house, through Greenstone, through the steward and the lawyers and the post that the whole of it generates. Did letters come? For me, or from me, redirected. Anything that might have gone astray in the handover?”
“The wartime post was a disgrace,” the Dowager said. “Everyone’s letters went astray. Half the county had sons abroad and not one of them received a quarter of what was sent. You cannot lay the failures of the mail at this family’s door.”
It was an answer, and even, in its parts, a true one.
The post had been a disgrace and letters had gone astray and the county had grieved its uncertainties.
And it answered nothing he had asked, because he had not asked whether the post was reliable.
He had asked whether letters had come through this house, and she had stepped around the question so smoothly that a man less practised in being managed might not have noticed the step at all.
“That is not what I asked.”
“It is what I am able to tell you.” She turned back to the window, which was her way of ending things.
“You are tired from your journey and not thinking clearly. Go to bed, Cole. In the morning the title will still be yours, and the obligations will still be there, and the girl will still be a baronet’s daughter the whole county knows you outgrew.
None of it improves with a night’s brooding. ”
He went, because there was nothing further to be had in that room, and because he had decided something in the course of it that wanted doing while the decision was still hot.
His secretary was still at work in the estate office, a careful young man named Finch who had come with the title and regarded Cole with the wary devotion of a clerk who has heard the new master was a soldier and is waiting to discover what that will mean for his ledgers.
“A note, Finch. To Carrow House. To Miss Carrow directly, with a separate line to Sir Marcus.”
“Of course, Your Grace.” Finch drew paper towards him and dipped the quill and assumed, without being asked, the rolling cadence of a man who has spent his life turning plain wishes into ducal sentences.
“His Grace the Duke of Greenstone presents his compliments to Miss Carrow and requests the honour of being permitted to wait upon her, should she find herself at leisure and the weather prove agreeable, at such time as.”
“No.” Cole cut across the sentence before it could find its third clause, and Finch’s quill paused on the page.
“Not that. None of that. Read it back to yourself and tell me whether you would walk three steps to answer it.”
“It is the customary form, Your Grace.”
“It is the customary form for a man who has nothing to say and wishes to take a great while not saying it.” Cole came round the desk and looked at the words and disliked them thoroughly.
“Strike it. Begin again. And do not give me the honour of waiting upon her. A man does not need a herald to walk beside a woman he has known half his life.”
Finch waited, quill poised, his whole bearing that of someone asked to do an irregular thing by a man with the power to require it.
“Write this. Miss Carrow. I will not presume upon the past. I ask only for the chance to be less of a stranger tomorrow than I was today. And then to Sir Marcus, a separate line, plainly. I should like your leave to walk out with your daughter later in the week, in company, wherever she would choose to go. That is all. No honours, no compliments, no weather.”
Finch wrote it. He wrote it in a hand visibly relieved to be let off the long sentences, and he sanded it and held it out.
Cole read it over and found that it said the small true thing he had meant and nothing he did not, which was the most he had managed to say honestly to anyone since he stepped off the ship.
“That goes tonight,” he said. “Beale will take it. Not by the morning post. Tonight.”
“It is past nine, Your Grace. Carrow House will be abed.”
“Then it will be waiting on the salver when she comes down, which is better than my conscience waiting on the post. He can leave it with whoever answers the bell.” Cole folded the page himself and would not let Finch seal it, pressing the wax with his own ring, because a man ought at least to close his own honesty with his own hand.
“Thank you, Finch. You have written a great many fine sentences in your life, I have no doubt. That was not one of them. It was merely a true one. We shall manage better as we go on.”
Finch, who had served three masters and been thanked by none of them for failing to be ornamental, did not appear to know what to do with this, and settled for bowing.
He did not see his mother again that evening.
He learned of the rest of it only the next day, and learned it as one learns most of what the Dowager did, sideways, after the fact, by its effects.
A footman mentioned it to Beale, and Beale mentioned it to Cole over the morning’s boots, in the flat voice he kept for news he thought his master would not like.
The Dowager had sat down that same night, while Cole was crossing words with Finch over a single honest sentence, and had written a note of her own.
It had gone out before his did. It was an invitation, warm and gracious and entirely correct, to the Marquess and Marchioness of Eversley and their daughter Lady Cassandra, to dine at Greenstone Abbey on Thursday next, where they would find the family so very pleased with their company, and the duke, lately and gratefully returned, so very much at home.