Chapter 12
“Henry would have wedded Lady Cassandra.”
The Dowager said it from the doorway of Henry’s rooms, which Cole had been standing in for the better part of an hour without yet finding the courage to open the wardrobe.
The rooms had been kept the way the deceased keep them, which was to say not at all the way the deceased would have kept them.
Henry’s bed had been made, his good coat brushed and hung where he had hung it the morning before he caught the chill that became the lung-fever that cut short his earthly days in a fortnight.
A book sat on the chair by the window with a ribbon between the pages at the place where he had stopped reading, eighteen months ago.
The household had laid the room to rest the way the household laid everything to rest, with care and with method and without once asking whether the man whose room it was would have wished to be kept on a shelf.
“He would not,” Cole said.
“He would not have entered into matrimony with her?”
“He would not have wished the room kept. He loathed a fuss. You will recall.”
“I do recall.” The Dowager came in a step further and stopped, because she had not come further than that step in eighteen months, and they both knew it. “I asked Mrs Holloway to leave the bed made. The rest of it she has done as she thought best.”
“She has done it well.”
“I am pleased to hear it.”
She had not come to discuss Mrs Holloway. They both knew that as well. She had heard him go up the stairs, and she had given him an hour to be alone with it, and the hour was finished, and the next part of the afternoon belonged to her.
“He would have wedded her,” she said again.
“You know nothing of the sort. You decided it after he passed away when there was no Henry to disappoint you by forming an attachment to the wrong woman. You have made him into the son who would have done everything you wished, because the departed are the only people who cannot prove you wrong about them.”
“That is unworthy of you, Cole.”
“It may be. It does not make it untrue.”
She came in another step. It was a great concession, and Cole understood that and gave her the credit of it without saying so, because to remark on her crossing the threshold would have been to make it harder for her to cross it the next time.
“Henry understood the dignity of the title.”
“Henry passed away before dignity asked anything difficult of him.” He had said it before he had measured it, and he saw the small flinch she gave and could not call the words back, and they sat between them on the made bed in the way the worst true sentences always sat, refusing to be moved.
“I am sorry. That was cruel. I will not take it back, because it is what I believe. I am sorry, only, to have set it down in this room.”
“You will say a great many cruel things to me in the next year, I expect. I shall have to grow accustomed to it.”
“You did not grieve him alone, madam,” he said.
“I did not say I grieved him alone. I said I grew accustomed to bearing his absence in a house full of staff who had cherished him and a county that had held him in the highest of its esteem and a son who was four hundred miles away receiving the news by letter. There are different kinds of alone, Cole. The one I learned about was the one where you are surrounded by people who are kind to you and not one of them is the person you have lost.”
“That is honest. I would rather you spoke to me like that than the other way.”
“The other way is easier. I shall not always manage the honest.”
“I shall try to say fewer of the cruel things in here.”
She inclined her head, the closest thing to a truce they had managed since he had come home, and it had cost both of them in different denominations.
“She will be devoured in London,” the Dowager said.
“Melody.”
“She will be received because you require it, and noted because she is your gesture, and dissected at every breakfast table from Cavendish Square to Brook Street. The first season is a wolfish business, Cole. A girl unprepared for it is a girl unprotected. I do not say this to spare myself. I say it because the woman who is devoured is not the one a man chooses. She is the one his choice exposes.”
“She has been devoured in this county for four years without a title to protect her, madam, and she walked into the parish room a week ago and came out of it with her dignity in better order than the people who set on her. London will not eat her. London will discover, with some inconvenience to itself, which it has met a person it cannot quite swallow.”
“You overestimate her.”
“I underestimated her once. I shall not make the same arithmetical error twice in one life.” He moved to the window, which gave on the south lawn and the long slope down to the lake, the view Henry had liked best. “You will write the line to the Linwoods this evening, madam. The Carrows must be in town by November or none of this will serve. I shall not press you again on the point.”
“I have already written it.”
He turned from the window at that, because it was not at all what he had braced for.
“This morning,” she said. “After breakfast. I yield seldom, and when I yield I do not waste a day about it. The Linwoods will have the Carrows in Brook Street for the little season. Lady Linwood is the wife of a third son and is glad of any company that does not eat much, and the connection through Marcus Carrow’s sister is enough to make the office a kindness rather than a charity.
The thing is done. I would rather not be asked to enjoy it, if you can spare me that. ”
“I can. Thank you, madam.”
She gave no answer, only turned, and went to the door, and stopped with her hand on the jamb.
“He would not have liked you keeping his coat on the peg, either,” she said. “Have Mrs Holloway take it away. Send it to the Hatcher boy. Henry would have approved. He always did say a coat was a coat.”
She went out, and the corridor took the sound of her steps a long way before they faded.
Cole stood at the window for some time after, looking at the lake.
He did not weep, because he had spent the available stock of his weeping in Spain, and a man did not get a fresh allowance for the same brother twice.
But he stood there a long while, and when at last he went down the stairs and rang for the housekeeper and gave the order about the coat, his voice came out steadier than he had supposed it would.
His steward was waiting in the estate office, and had plainly been waiting longer than was comfortable.
“Hewitt.”
“Your Grace. I should not have detained you. It is the Carrow matter, and I judged it would not keep.”
“The Carrows.”
“You had asked me to look into the wartime accounts. The discreet help, Your Grace. I have the figures now.”
Cole sat down across the desk. Hewitt did not sit until invited, and then took the chair with the careful composure of a man delivering a fact he had not been asked to deliver.
“You authorised three separate payments through this office, Your Grace, in the years between ’12 and ’15.
A note to the butcher in Bawley. A settled account with the draper at Norton.
A small sum to the apothecary the winter Lady Carrow had the influenza.
The figures are not large. I shall give you the exact sum if you wish. ”
Cole did not look up from the figures. “How were they made?”
“Through a third party, as you had instructed. The accounts were settled in the name of a Mr Marsh, who exists on the paper of this estate and nowhere else. The Carrows would have understood, if they understood anything, that a creditor had written off a debt, or that an obliging tradesman had decided to be patient. They were not informed.”
“And no inquiry came back. No one asked who this Mr Marsh was.”
“Sir Marcus inquired once, of the apothecary. He was told a benefactor in town had settled the account and had asked his name be kept private. Sir Marcus pressed no further, Your Grace. He had a sick wife and a daughter waiting on letters, and a man in that condition does not look very hard at a gift that asks nothing of him.”
“He thought it might have been you. Originally. Before the war went on long enough that he stopped thinking about it.”
“He thought, I believe, that he had a friend somewhere whose name he had not yet earned the right to ask for. He may yet think so.”
Cole turned a page he did not read. “And the rest of it. The mortgages, the south field, the wine merchant’s bill.”
“None of those was within reach of the sums you authorised. The Carrow estate has been declining for the better part of a decade, Your Grace, and three settled tradesmen’s accounts will not undo a decade of declining rents.
I thought you should know the proportion.
Your help kept the family in butcher’s meat for one winter and out of the apothecary’s books for another.
It did not save them, because it could not.
I did not wish you to learn otherwise from a worse source. ”
“You think I might have done.”
“I think Sir Marcus has a long memory, and Miss Carrow has a sharper one, and a duke who has paid a butcher behind a baronet’s back is in some danger of being mistaken for a man who has been managing a family without their leave.
I should not like Your Grace to learn that the lady had drawn that conclusion before you had a chance to correct it. ”
“You think she would draw it,” Cole said.
“I think she has been pitied by a great many people for four years, Your Grace, and the difference between charity and affection is a finer line for a woman in that condition than for either you or me. A small kindness offered openly is a kindness. The same kindness done behind her back, however generous in intent, can look like the work of a man who did not trust her to receive it standing up.”
Cole sat with it for a long moment. Hewitt was right in a way that Hewitt was almost always right, which was to say plainly, without flourish, and with the small dry pleasure of a man who had been doing his work properly for thirty years and did not need any duke to pat him on the head for it.
“I shall not pay another shilling of theirs without her knowledge,” Cole said.
“That is a sound resolution, Your Grace.”
“And the existing matter,” Cole said. “The three accounts.”
“It is done, Your Grace. There are no further sums in train. There is nothing requiring concealment going forward, only the past three to be answered for when the moment comes for answering.”
“It will come.”
“It will. I should not advise raising it in advance of the moment. A man does not earn credit by ringing a bell about the good he has done. The lady will discover it in time, in her own time, and your standing in her eyes will be the better for the discovery having been hers and not your announcement of it.”
Cole sat back in his chair. “You are a good man, Hewitt.”
“I am a steward, Your Grace, which is not always the same thing.” He rose to take his leave. “Will that be all?”
“One further matter. I would like a recipe.”
“A recipe, Your Grace.”
“The Stilton tart Mrs Holloway used to make when Lady Carrow dined here, years ago. Before the war. Lady Carrow admired it. She asked Mrs Holloway for the receipt, and Mrs Holloway gave her some part of it but not the whole, because cooks do not give up the whole of anything they consider their own. I should like the whole of it, copied in a fair hand, and sent to Carrow House this evening with my compliments. Not to Miss Carrow. To Lady Carrow.”
Hewitt regarded him steadily, and the flicker at the corner of his mouth was so small that only a man who had served three dukes would have known it for a smile.
“I shall see it done, Your Grace.” Hewitt inclined his head and went out, and Cole sat a moment longer with the figures still in front of him before he got up and crossed the corridor to the secretary’s office.
Finch was at his ledgers, and held out an envelope without looking up.
“From Carrow House, Your Grace. By the second post.”
Cole took the envelope and recognised Melody’s hand at once. He had not seen it in five years, and his fingers for a moment did not behave as he had asked them to, and he opened the envelope all the same and read the single line standing where he was.
I will walk with you tomorrow, provided Sarah is present, and provided you do not look triumphant. M.C.
He read it twice. He stood with it in his hand and read it twice. Finch, who had served three masters and developed an excellent sense of when to keep his quill on the ledger, proceeded to do so.
He put his head in at the secretary’s door. “Finch.”
“Your Grace.”
“I shall endeavour to look defeated tomorrow.”
“Very well, Your Grace.”
“It will be a stretch,” Cole said. “You may need to coach me.”
“I have every confidence Your Grace will find the appropriate expression on his own.”
“You are far more help than you suppose, Finch. I shall mention it in my next report on the household staff.”
“Your Grace is too kind.”
“I have run out of ways to be kind to my mother today. The supply must go somewhere.”
Cole folded the note carefully, and put it inside his coat where it sat against his ribs in a place he had not used for anything in a very long while.
He went out, and the corridor sounded different on the way to the front of the house than it had sounded on the way in, and the light coming through the long windows at the head of the stairs felt warmer than the October afternoon had any business making it.
He did not, he was certain, walk down those stairs looking defeated. He would have to practise.