Chapter 15
“A London gown cannot make me a duchess, Mama.”
“It can make you a woman whose dress does not apologise for her at the door. That is the most a gown is asked to do in London, and there are duchesses who manage less.”
Mrs Ashby’s workroom above the haberdasher’s in the county town was a small bright space in which two assistants were measuring across her mother’s old blue silk while Lady Carrow held a sleeve to the light and tried to decide which side of the cuff was the side that had not yet been turned.
The silk had been good once. It had been good twice, in fact, since this was its second season of being made over, and Melody stood on the low stool with her arms held out and watched her mother work the arithmetic of dignity against the bolt and the shilling and the time before they left for town.
“That sleeve will not bear another turning.”
“It will bear it because it must. Mrs Ashby has a length of trim that will hide the seam. We are not going to be defeated by a cuff.”
“Mama.”
“Do not say it, Melody. I shall not be told this morning that I am being foolish about a gown. I am being foolish about my daughter, which is permitted, and the gown is the form the foolishness has taken. Let me alone with it.”
The assistants went on measuring. Mrs Ashby herself was a stout cheerful woman who had dressed three generations of country wives without once complaining of any of them, and she had a length of cream trim laid across her arm now and was waiting for Lady Carrow to agree to it.
She caught Melody’s eye and gave the smallest tilt of her head that meant the trim was reasonable.
Melody, who had counted the family’s accounts at the kitchen table the night before, gave the smallest tilt back that meant whatever was reasonable was already a stretch.
“The cream, then,” Lady Carrow said, satisfied. “And the same on the other gown. We shall have two evening gowns out of one, Mrs Ashby, and no one shall be the wiser unless they sit in our laps and inspect the seam.”
“They will not, my lady. The Carrow ladies have always carried themselves so well no one has ever wished to sit in their laps.”
It was kindly meant and the laugh came up in Melody before she could stop it, and then her mother turned to look at her with a face that had become, over the past quarter of an hour, faintly pink at the eyelids in the way Lady Carrow’s face went when she was managing something, and the laugh dried in Melody’s throat.
“I only want you not to feel lesser.”
“Then we must pray no one asks the silk.”
“They will not ask the silk. They will ask each other afterwards what was wrong with it, and they will be careful to find an answer, because finding an answer is the chief pleasure of London. We shall make sure the answer takes them some time.”
Mrs Ashby pretended not to hear. The assistants pretended not to hear. Melody stepped down from the stool and went to her mother and put her hand on the sleeve and let it stay.
“You are not to do this for me alone, Mama. Tell me you are not.”
“I am doing it for the Carrows, which is the same thing. We are going to town and we are going to be looked at. I have made my peace with the looking. I should only like the silk to have made its peace with it too.”
The blue silk had not yet made its peace. Neither, in any honesty Melody could face, had she.
***
They drove home with a quarter of a yard of cream trim and a long list of small economies still to be reckoned, and when they came in at the hall Sir Marcus was standing by the side table with a paper in his hand and a face arranged for cheerfulness that had not quite finished arranging itself.
“Hewitt’s man brought it round.”
“Brought what, my dear?” Lady Carrow asked.
“Hewitt has written. There has been a fellow in town offering a fair price on the East Meadow. Nothing the family would not survive losing. I had thought to write back this evening and accept.”
“Papa.”
“It is only the east meadow, Melody. Half an acre of poor grazing and a great deal of bramble. Hewitt has done the figures and the figures will dress you twice over for the little season with something to spare, and your mother shall have a new gown of her own out of it for once.”
He was watching her with his hopeful face, which was the face Melody could not bear, because it had no defences against being argued with and was therefore the face by which he had lost the family three good fields in twenty years.
“Papa. Set the paper down.”
“It is a fair price, Melody,” he said. “Hewitt is a careful man and would not bring me an unfair one.”
“It is a fair price for a meadow we shall not see again. Set it down. I am not going to London on the back of a field that has been ours for a hundred years so that I may be seen at Almack’s in a new gown.
Mama can make the silk over. Mrs Ashby has trim.
We shall pass. Do you understand me, Papa?
We shall pass. I would rather arrive in the second-best blue with a turned cuff than walk into a room thinking you had sold the East Meadow to put me into a new one. ”
“Melody.”
“I am entirely in earnest. Write to Mr Hewitt without delay and convey your refusal.”
He stood with the paper between his fingers a moment longer, and then he laid it down on the side table, very gently, setting aside a thing he had not let himself want until someone asked him to choose.
Lady Carrow had said nothing through the whole of it.
She came up behind Melody now and her hand found Melody’s elbow and did not press.
“Then we shall pass, Marcus,” her mother said. “On the second-best blue and Mrs Ashby’s trim. The Carrows have passed on stranger arrangements.”
The sound of hoof beats echoed up the lane as a horse approached.
Sarah, who had been listening from the dining-room door, met it.
There were voices in the hall. Then the duke was at the drawing-room door with his hat in his hand and an expression Melody had not seen on him before, the careful one of a man who knows he has come at an inconvenient hour and wishes he had come at any other.
“Forgive me. Hewitt told me you would be home. I would not have called this morning had I known you were not.”
“Then you would not have called at all today, Your Grace, which would have been a great loss to all of us. Sit down. Mama is going to ring for tea, because Mama rings for tea when she does not know what else to do, and I shall let her, because it is the kindest part of receiving anyone.”
He sat, and waited for the tea, and let Lady Carrow ask about the road and the weather and the road again. He answered each question gravely, and did not, Melody noticed, look at the side table where the paper still lay.
“I came,” he said at last, “to ask a question of your father, if you will both permit me.”
“Of me, sir?”
“Of you, sir. Concerning the estate, and only with your leave. I am informed that Hewitt has been writing to you about some small matters of management. I have it in mind, if you would let me, to look at the accounts with you. Not as a duke. As a neighbour who has been at the figures with Hewitt himself and has found some uses for an extra eye. I would not propose it without your asking me. I find myself compelled to examine the nature of your inquiry.”
Sir Marcus looked at his wife. Lady Carrow looked at Melody. Melody looked at the duke.
“So now you ask before rescuing us, Your Grace?”
“Yes.”
“That is inconveniently improved of you,” she said.
“I am attempting to become less offensive by stages. It is a slow programme, and the early returns discourage me, though I am told there are gains to be had if one persists.”
“I will not suffer you to adjust our accounts by stealth, while my father remains in ignorance.”
“I would not propose it. I have only proposed to look at them with him. The settling, if any settling is wanted, is his to do or to refuse, and I shall be governed by the answer.”
She did not quite know how to refuse the request, because the request was already a half-step better than she had expected, and the half-step was the form his apology had taken without his calling it one. She turned to her father.
“It is your house, Papa, and your meadow.”
“It is the family’s meadow.” Sir Marcus drew himself up.
He was not a man often given the chance to draw himself up in his own drawing room, and he took the chance.
“Your Grace. I am obliged for the offer and I do not say no to it. I shall send to Hewitt this evening. You and I shall sit down to the books when there is daylight enough to read by. I shall not be insulted by it. I am too old for the pretence.”
“Thank you, Sir Marcus.”
“Do not thank me. You have not yet seen the books.”
A small laugh got out of the duke before he could prevent it, and Sir Marcus looked surprised at himself for having made it.
Lady Carrow looked at her teacup and pressed her lips together against a smile.
The side table with its unanswered paper sat between them all in the morning light, and the East Meadow, for the moment, was not sold.
Cole left in good time. There were the prepared apologies and the prepared compliments and the prepared retreats of a man who had spent four years in the army learning how to leave a room without making a meal of his departure, and he was gone before any of them had to ask him to be.
Melody walked to the hall with him, because her mother had decided not to, which was its own diplomacy.
“Thank you, Your Grace.”
“For what, Miss Carrow?”
“For asking. For asking and not assuming, and for asking my father instead of going behind him. And for not making it a speech.”
“I am attempting to mend several years’ habit. The early returns, as I have already said this morning, are not encouraging. Any encouragement you offer will be very gratefully received.”
“You are dangerously easy to encourage,” she said.
“I am dangerously easy in your hands, Miss Carrow. I have given up pretending otherwise. Good morning.”
He went out into the lane, and the hall closed behind him with the small click of a latch that had been listening.
***
In the afternoon she walked into the county town for a small errand at the apothecary’s and was caught by the rain that always seemed to wait for her on the high street, and she went into the bookshop next door because the bookshop was nearer than the carriage yard.
It was a narrow long room with shelves to the ceiling, and Mr Reade who kept it had been there since Melody was a child and knew her tastes and disliked them politely, on the principle that a man who sold books had a duty to recommend better ones than the customer asked for.
Three other customers were already inside, shaking water from their hats, and the rain was coming down on the bow window in a way that meant no one was going anywhere for half an hour.
She drifted to the back, where the travels stood ranked, and the histories lined up by general, and the new shelf of novels Reade kept reluctantly because the wives of his customers required them. She was reaching for a volume on a top shelf when another hand reached for it from the other side.
It was a slim worn copy of Mansfield Park, the one everyone in the county was reading and pretending not to. Her fingers closed on the spine, and so did his.
“Your Grace.”
“Miss Carrow. We seem to have a difficulty.”
“You did not strike me as a man who would read it,” she said.
“I have made a practice this autumn of doing things that do not strike you as in my character. It is the most reliable way of making any progress with you that I have yet discovered.”
“You may have it.”
“You may have it. I have already spoiled the last page of one novel for you this season. I must not trespass upon your generosity.”
“It is not for me,” she said. “It is for Mama.”
“Then it is certainly for you, and you mean to read it first and pass it on with the cover slightly bent so she will not suspect.”
“That is a great deal of confidence about a stranger’s reading habits, Your Grace.”
“You are not a stranger.”
She let the book go. He took it without looking triumphant, which was the small mercy she had asked of him before, and went to the counter and paid for it, and exchanged a quiet word with Mr Reade that she could not hear from where she stood, and came back to her with his hands empty.
“I have asked Reade to send it round to Carrow House this afternoon. Uncut. I leave the last page to your conscience.”
She had nothing to say to that. The rain went on at the bow window.
The other customers, who had been pretending not to listen, went on pretending.
Cole bowed and stepped back to a respectable distance and stood looking out at the street, and for the space of three minutes neither of them spoke, and the silence between them was the silence of two people who had said the thing they meant without having said anything that could be reported afterwards.
When the rain slackened the carriages were brought up. He saw her into hers without touching her elbow, which she noted, and went to his own, and the bookshop watched them go with the satisfied attention of a small establishment that had just been included in a county story.
The book came to Carrow House before supper. Uncut, as he had said. The note was folded inside the wrapping.
I leave the last page to your conscience.
She kept it, and made no pretence to herself of having done otherwise. The drawer where she put it was the one where the wine merchant’s reminder had once been, in the slot that had been empty since the spring, and she shut the drawer.
The Dowager’s invitation arrived on the morning post the next day.
It was on paper thick enough to stand up by itself, and the wording was perfectly correct, and it offered the Carrow family the honour of being received at Greenstone House in Brook Street upon their arrival in town.
It was an invitation, and it was also a stage being built.
Reading it twice and folding it once, Melody understood that she was being asked to walk onto that stage in a borrowed gown, with a duke whose mother had spent four years burying her under paper.
The invitation was both the opportunity she had refused to hope for and the trap she had spent a year and a half teaching herself to expect.
She put the invitation with the note in the drawer, and shut it again.