Chapter 5
“Mama, please do not look as though a coronet has just stepped on your heart.”
Lady Carrow had been holding the note for some moments, not reading it, since she had read it four times already and the words were not going to improve with a fifth.
She had a careful face she wore when she was trying not to hope, and it was a worse face than open hoping would have been, because it had so much management in it, so much practice at being disappointed gracefully.
“I am not looking as anything,” she said. “I am admiring the hand. It is a very plain hand for a duke.”
“It is a very plain note for a duke. That is rather the trouble with it.”
“I see no trouble in plainness.”
“There is no trouble in plainness, Mama. There is a great deal of trouble in a man who has discovered that plainness is the most effective thing he can offer a woman who has armoured herself against everything else.” Melody took the note back, because her mother’s thumb had begun to move over the folded edge of it in a way that would soften the paper, and a softened note was harder to be sensible about than a crisp one.
“He is not plain. He has merely calculated that I will mistrust ornament, and so he has sent me the absence of ornament and trusted me to be charmed by my own cleverness in noticing it.”
“That is an extraordinary weight to attach to a mere three lines.”
“I have had practice reading a very great deal into very little. It is the chief occupation of a woman in my position. We become scholars of the small text.”
The morning room at Carrow House caught the east light and made the most of it, which was as well, because little else in the room was making the most of anything.
The carpet had been turned to hide its wear, and the good chairs had been recovered once and would not bear a second recovering.
On the side table the silver tea things gleamed with the thin brightness of silver polished too often, rubbed so hopefully that the engraving had begun to wear away at the edges.
Melody had taught herself not to look too long at the Carrow crest on the teapot, which was fading from the lid like something being slowly forgotten.
Her father came in with the post and a face arranged for cheerfulness.
“Nothing of consequence,” Sir Marcus said, which was what he always said, and set the letters down with their seals turned discreetly under, the surest sign that at least two of them were bills.
“Hewitt writes about the south field. We shall let it lie fallow another year, I think. The land wants rest.”
The land did not want rest. The land wanted draining, which wanted money, which was the one thing the south field had never once produced, and they all three knew it, and they all three agreed gravely that the land wanted rest, because the alternative was to say aloud at the breakfast table that the Carrows could not afford to drain their own acre.
Her father had a genius for the phrase that frightened no one.
He spoke of economies as preferences and of debts as small matters of timing, and her mother, who knew better, let him, because the kindness of the fiction was the last luxury the house could still afford.
Melody had gone over the household books the night before by a single candle.
She had found, among the butcher and the chandler and the long patient account at the draper’s, a reminder from the wine merchant in town, the second reminder, the kind that begins to use the word obliged in a way that is not at all about obligation.
She had slid it under the household ledger and then, when her mother came in, under a book of sermons, where it remained, a small folded admission of how thin the ice had worn, hidden beneath a volume nobody in the house had opened in a twelvemonth.
“You have not eaten,” her mother observed.
“I am not hungry in the mornings. You know this.”
“I know you are not hungry when you are bracing for something.” Lady Carrow sat, and arranged her shawl, the grey one she had retrimmed with a length of ribbon bought specially, three inches of new ribbon to make an old gown fit for an evening she had not yet been invited to.
“I only wished you to remember, the other day, that not every room is an enemy. That is all I meant by sending you to the meeting. I did not mean to deliver you to the Eversleys for sport.”
“I know what you meant.”
“You came home looking as though you had been to a funeral.”
“No. Some rooms are merely audiences.” Melody softened it, because her mother’s face had done the careful thing again.
“It was not as bad as that. His Grace required my opinion on a column of figures, and I gave it, and the Hatchers will have their coal. It was the most useful I have been in a twelvemonth. I should be grateful to him.”
“You say his title as though it were a thing you were spitting out.”
“I say it as it deserves to be said.”
“You did not used to be hard, Melody. I have watched it come over you these four years like a frost over a window, and I have said nothing, because what was there to say. But I will tell you what frightens me, since we are speaking plainly over the toast. It is not that you are unhappy. It is that you have grown so very skilled at it. You have made a competence of expecting the worst, and a competence is a hard thing to give up, because it is the one thing a person is sure they can still do.”
“Expecting the worst has spared me a good deal of practice at being surprised by it.”
“And spared you a good deal else besides.” Her mother did not raise her voice, which was how Melody understood the words had cost her.
“I only wish you would leave the door unbolted. That is all. Not flung wide, I am not so great a fool as to demand that of you. Only unfastened, so that if some happiness should finally come up the path, it need not break itself against the wood to reach you.”
Melody had no answer to that, which was rare enough to be its own kind of confession.
Her father lowered his newspaper. He did not often enter these conversations, preferring the safer countries of weather and fallow fields, but he entered this one, and he did it gently, the way he did everything that mattered.
“I will say this much for the man,” Sir Marcus said.
“I believed Lord Cole honourable, once. I am not blind to what passes before me, whatever else I have been mistaken about, and I watched him in this house for the better part of a year, and I did not think him a man who would say a thing he did not mean.”
“You also did not foresee the south field,” Melody said, more gently than the words deserved. “You are a hopeful judge of character, Papa. It is one of the loveliest things about you and it has cost us a great deal of money.”
“It has,” he agreed, unoffended. “I would rather be poor and wrong about people in the kind direction than rich and wrong about them in the other. Your mother wedded a sentimental man. She has had four thousand opportunities to regret it and has taken, to my knowledge, only three.”
Lady Carrow’s mouth twitched despite herself, and for a moment the table was almost what it had been, before the war and the bills and the long quiet had taught them all to manage their faces.
“Lord Cole may have been honourable,” Melody said, and the lightness went out of it.
“His Grace is another creature entirely. They share a face and very little else. One was a younger son with nothing to forfeit by showing me a little kindness. The other has a dukedom that requires a great deal more of him than kindness, and a mother who will tell him so at every meal, and you may depend upon it that the mother will win, because the mother always wins, and the only question is whether he discovers it before or after he has made me ridiculous again.”
The word again sat in the room. None of them touched it.
A knock came at the front of the house. There were voices in the hall, the maid’s and a man’s, and then Sarah came in pink with the importance of it, carrying a great armful of flowers wrapped in damp paper, and the scent of them reached the table before she had got them properly through the door.
They were roses, yellow roses, two dozen of them at least, the deep gold kind with the heavy heads.
A man who wished to be understood to be courting sent red, the fashionable tragic red that means precisely what everyone agrees it means.
These were the wrong roses, the unfashionable ones, the roses nobody sent a woman they were trying to impress.
They were also the only roses in the world that could have stopped Melody’s breath in her throat.
“There is a card, miss,” Sarah said, and held it out.
Melody did not take it at once. She looked at the roses, gold and absurd and heaped in the maid’s arms like an armful of caught light, and something moved in her chest that she had spent four years teaching not to move, and she pressed her thumb hard into the seam of her glove and made it stop.
“Read it, then,” she said. “Since we are all attending.”
Sarah, who could read but went carefully, read it out. “It says, miss, I remembered these before I remembered what to say.”
Lady Carrow made a small sound and pressed her fingers to her mouth.
“That is ridiculous,” Melody said.
“It is very,” her mother agreed, and her eyes were bright. “Ridiculous things are so often the most sincere, my darling. A sensible man sends red roses, because red roses are correct, and a man who sends the wrong flowers has generally stopped being sensible about the woman he is sending them to.”
Melody was not listening, or was listening only with the front of her mind, because the back of it had gone five years down and out a garden door into a July afternoon she had locked away so thoroughly that she had half persuaded herself it belonged to someone else.
***
They had been walking the long border at the Abbey, she and Lord Cole, with Henry somewhere ahead with the dogs.
There had been a great showy bank of red roses, and Cole had said something gallant and expected about them, and she, two-and-twenty and incapable of letting a gallant remark stand, had told him that red roses were vain.
He had laughed and asked whether she truly believed a flower could have a moral failing.
She had said red roses certainly could, that they spent their whole lives being told they were the most beautiful thing in any garden and had grown insufferable on the strength of it, that they pretended at tragedy and passion and meant only that someone had paid dearly for them.
And the yellow ones, he had asked. What of the yellow ones?
And she had said that yellow roses looked like captured sunlight, and were the only honest roses in the whole garden, because they did not pretend to be tragic.
They simply tried to be warm, and mostly succeeded, and asked nothing of anyone for the trouble.
He had said nothing at the time. She had thought he was not attending, for men so rarely attended to a girl’s theory of roses.
But he had attended after all. He had carried it across an ocean and four years and a war and a brother’s demise and a coronet, and set it down on her mother’s breakfast table this morning in two dozen gold heads and nine plain words.
The unfairness of it undid her, the sheer unfairness of being remembered so exactly by the one person she had given up the right to be remembered by, and it closed her throat entirely.
She reached out, before she had decided to, and touched one petal. It was cool and faintly damp and impossibly soft, the way only a thing freshly cut is soft, and for the length of one breath she let her finger rest against it.
Then she took her hand back as though the petal had been a coal.
“Put them in water, Sarah,” she said. “They will only spoil, sitting there. There is no sense letting good flowers spoil over a sentiment.”
Sarah carried them out, and the room kept the scent of them. Lady Carrow observed her daughter with a tenderness that was very hard to be in the same room as, and said nothing, which was wiser than anything she could have said.
“He has asked to call again,” Melody said at last. “And to walk out, in company. Papa, he has written you a separate line, very proper, asking your leave.”
“He has,” Sir Marcus said. “It is on the table under my hand. I have not answered it.”
“You may answer it. You may say yes.” She heard herself say it and was almost as surprised as her mother plainly was.
“I would rather receive him in the open, where I can see what he intends, than have him sending gold roses into the house behind my back where they can do their work unobserved. If he means to court me, he may do it in front of me, like an honest man, and I shall know precisely what I am refusing.”
“And if you find you do not wish to refuse it?” her mother said, very gently.
Melody stood, and gathered the note and the household ledger and the book of sermons with the wine merchant’s reminder still folded inside it, the whole small weight of the morning held against her like a portfolio.
“Then I shall have a great deal of work to do,” she said. “If he means to be romantic, Mama, I shall simply have to be twice as sensible. One of us will have to keep a clear head, and it is plainly not going to be the man who sends a woman the wrong roses and signs the card with the truth.”
She went up to her room with the books, and put the wine merchant’s reminder in the drawer where the other one was.
Beside it lay the small dark blue book Cole had pressed into her hand the morning before he sailed, which had sat in the drawer untouched for five summers.
She did not, this afternoon, take it out, and she did not, for some time, do anything sensible at all.
She stood at the window that overlooked the lane, the way she had stood at it for four years out of a habit she would have perished before naming.
Below her in the yard Sarah was filling a jug at the pump, and the great gold heads of the roses nodded over the rim of it in the morning light, warm and absurd and asking nothing, exactly as she had once said they did.